Persuasion in school-aged children: How does it change if the persuadee is the mother or the peer?

The present study was designed to verify how school-aged children’s persuasive tactics changed if the persuadee was the mother or the peer. One hundred and forty-nine children at two grade levels (4th and 5th) were enrolled in the study. Persuasive strategies were investigated using pictures representing two common situations in which each child had to convince his/her playmate and his/her mother to obtain a toy. As predicted, with mothers children engaged more frequently in strategies aimed at encouraging cognitive reappraisal of the situation and offering guarantees. Conversely, with the peers, children adopted a greater variety of persuasive strategies, engaging in lower-order tactics. Implications and limitations of the study were discussed.     

Sleep as a mediator of the relationship between social class and health in higher education students

A substantial body of research indicates that higher education students from lower social class backgrounds tend to have poorer health than those from higher social class backgrounds. To investigate sleep as a potential mediator of this relationship, online survey responses of students from five large Australian universities, one Irish university and one large Australian technical college were analysed in three studies (Study 1 N = 628; Study 2 N = 376; Study 3 N = 446). The results revealed that sleep quality, sleep duration, sleep disturbances, pre-sleep worries and sleep schedule variability mediated the relationship between social class and physical and mental health. Sleep remained a significant mediator when controlling for related variables and other mediators. Thus, the findings suggest that sleep partly explains social class differences in health. We discuss the importance of addressing sleep issues among students from lower social class backgrounds.     

Effects of direct and indirect cross-group friendships on judgments of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: the mediating role of an anxiety-reduction mechanism

Recent evidence suggests that both direct and indirect friendship with outgroup members (knowledge of ingroup members' friendship with outgroup members) can reduce prejudice toward the outgroup. Two surveys of cross-community relationships in Northern Ireland, using a student sample (N = 341) and a representative sample of the general population (N = 735), tested whether (a) direct and indirect friendships had generalized effects on both prejudice and perceived outgroup variability and (b) reduced anxiety about future encounters with outgroup members mediated such relationships. Structural equation modeling confirmed that, in both samples, direct and indirect cross-group friendships between Catholics and Protestants were associated with reduced prejudice toward the religious outgroup and increased perceived outgroup variability, via an anxiety-reduction mechanism. It is argued that emerging generalization hypotheses help to integrate both cognition and affect and interpersonal and intergroup approaches to contact.     

Exploring mechanisms that affect retrograde memory for public events in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: A longitudinal update

Here, we examined mechanisms that affect retrograde memory in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (a-MCI) as a function of longitudinal clinical outcome. 8 a-MCI who converted to Alzheimer's dementia (AD) during the subsequent 3-year follow-up (converter a-MCI) and 10 a-MCI who remained clinically stable during the same period (stable a-MCI) were compared at the baseline evaluation (i.e., when they were diagnosed as a-MCI) using a remote memory questionnaire for public events that allows disentangling the differential contribution of storage and retrieval mechanisms to performance accuracy. Results suggest that deficits in remote memory are primarily explained by impaired retrieval abilities in stable a-MCI and by impaired storage in converter-to-AD a-MCI. This distinction between retrograde amnesia due to defective trace utilisation in stable a-MCI and trace storage in converter a-MCI is consistent with the temporal unfolding of declining anterograde memory over the course of disease progression to AD.     

Psychological maladjustment mediates the link between remembrances of parental rejection in childhood and loneliness in adulthood: A cross-cultural comparative study

Drawing stimulus from interpersonal acceptance-rejection theory, this multicultural study examined relations between men's versus women's remembrances of maternal and paternal acceptance-rejection in childhood and their current level of loneliness, as mediated by adults' self-reported psychological maladjustment. Adults (N = 899) from five nations (Iraq, Italy, the Netherlands, Pakistan, and the United States) responded to the Adult version of the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire-short form for mothers and fathers, the Adult version of the Personality Assessment Questionnaire-short form, and the Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection Loneliness Scale. Adults' remembrances of maternal and paternal rejection in childhood significantly and independently predicted feelings of loneliness but remembered paternal rejection was more strongly related to these feelings than were remembrances of maternal rejection. Psychological maladjustment fully mediated the effect of remembered maternal rejection but only partially mediated the effect of remembered paternal rejection on loneliness. There were no significant differences in these results across the five countries or genders. Overall, the results suggest that adults' remembrances of parental rejection in childhood—along with the theoretically expected development of psychological maladjustment—are likely to be associated panculturally with the experience of loneliness in adulthood.     

Attribution of beliefs by 13-month-old infants

In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way that is consistent with information to which they have been exposed. Infants watched animations in which an animal was either provided information or prevented from gathering information about the actual location of an object. The animal then searched successfully or failed to retrieve the object. Infants' looking times suggest that they expected searches to be effective when--and only when--the agent had had access to the relevant information. This result supports the view that infants possess an incipient metarepresentational ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents. We discuss the viability of more conservative explanations and the relation between this early ability and later forms of theory of mind that appear only after children have become experienced verbal communicators.     

Scrutinizing visual images: The role of gaze in mental imagery and memory

Gaze was monitored by use of an infrared remote eye-tracker during perception and imagery of geometric forms and figures of animals. Based on the idea that gaze prioritizes locations where features with high information content are visible, we hypothesized that eye fixations should focus on regions that contain one or more local features that are relevant for object recognition. Most importantly, we predicted that when observers looked at an empty screen and at the same time generated a detailed visual image of what they had previously seen, their gaze would probabilistically dwell within regions corresponding to the original positions of salient features or parts. Correlation analyses showed positive relations between gaze’s dwell time within locations visited during perception and those in which gaze dwelled during the imagery generation task. Moreover, the more faithful an observer’s gaze enactment, the more accurate was the observer’s memory, in a separate test, of the dimension or size in which the forms had been perceived. In another experiment, observers saw a series of pictures of animals and were requested to memorize them. They were then asked later, in a recall phase, to answer a question about a property of one of the encoded forms; it was found that, when retrieving from long-term memory a previously seen picture, gaze returned to the location of the part probed by the question. In another experimental condition, the observers were asked to maintain fixation away from the original location of the shape while thinking about the answer, so as to interfere with the gaze enactment process; such a manipulation resulted in measurable costs in the quality of memory. We conclude that the generation of mental images relies upon a process of enactment of gaze that can be beneficial to visual memory.     

Conscious and unconscious processing of facial expressions: Evidence from two split‐brain patients

We investigated how the brain's hemispheres process explicit and implicit facial expressions in two ‘split‐brain’ patients (one with a complete and one with a partial anterior resection). Photographs of faces expressing positive, negative or neutral emotions were shown either centrally or bilaterally. The task consisted in judging the friendliness of each person in the photographs. Half of the photograph stimuli were ‘hybrid faces’, that is an amalgamation of filtered images which contained emotional information only in the low range of spatial frequency, blended to a neutral expression of the same individual in the rest of the spatial frequencies. The other half of the images contained unfiltered faces. With the hybrid faces the patients and a matched control group were more influenced in their social judgements by the emotional expression of the face shown in the left visual field (LVF). When the expressions were shown explicitly, that is without filtering, the control group and the partially callosotomized patient based their judgement on the face shown in the LVF, whereas the complete split‐brain patient based his ratings mainly on the face presented in the right visual field. We conclude that the processing of implicit emotions does not require the integrity of callosal fibres and can take place within subcortical routes lateralized in the right hemisphere.