The relation of maternal emotional and cognitive support during problem solving to pre‐academic skills in preschoolers

Using a sample of 263 mother–child dyads, we examined the extent to which maternal emotional and cognitive support during a joint problem‐solving task when children were 3‐years‐old predicted children's academic skills 1 year later independent of each other, the quality of the home learning environment, and maternal emotional responsiveness. When all parenting measures were examined simultaneously, only maternal emotional support during problem solving and the quality of the home learning environment predicted unique variation in gains in pre‐academic skills from 3 to 4 years of age. The positive effect of emotional support during problem solving was especially apparent for children whose pre‐academic skills were low at the age of 3 years. These findings are discussed in light of the changing demands placed on young children and their parents as they prepare for entry to the formal school system. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘It's not really us discriminating against immigrants,it's more telling people how to fit in’: Constructing the nation in immigration talk in New Zealand

Previous research has demonstrated that talk about immigration can function to produce, reproduce and stabilize racism (Capdevila & Callaghan, 2008 ). In New Zealand (NZ), changes in immigration policy have seen a rapid increase in diverse groups of migrants with varied cultural backgrounds entering the country in the past two decades. Given its unique colonial history and ‘settler nationality in a bicultural nation’ (Bell, 2009 ), we explored how young NZ adults talk about and produce meanings and understandings of immigration, immigrants and cultural diversity. Appealing to notions of NZ as ‘one society’, as English speaking, and as English looking participants constructed NZ, NZ national identity and the NZ economy in particular ways. This constituted a nationalist rhetoric that was taken up in common‐sense ways by participants to legitimize racist talk whilst simultaneously acting to locate participants themselves as reasonable and moral individuals. It is concluded that nationalist discourses function to reinforce patterns of social dominance and perpetuate the notion of New Zealanders as largely white, European‐looking and English‐speaking. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mismatch negativity and P300 to behaviorally perceptible and imperceptible frequency and intensity contrasts

Mismatch negativity and the P300 have been investigated as electrophysiological indices of behavioral auditory discrimination of duration. Using an oddball paradigm, responses were evoked to stimuli that had been behaviorally demonstrated to be either perceptible or imperceptible. The results indicated P300 events were present with the perceptible contrast but absent for the imperceptible contrast with all participants, while mismatch negativities were present in approximately 80 and 20% of participants to the perceptible and imperceptible contrasts, respectively. The present study extended the findings by applying the same paradigm to the discrimination of spectral and amplitude contrasts. 10 young adults with normal hearing were participants. Assuming that auditory assessment should involve representation and processing in all acoustic domains (i.e., temporal/duration, spectral/frequency, and amplitude/intensity), the effects seen with temporal contrasts were predicted to be similar for spectral and amplitude contrasts. The findings generally illustrated that the P300 was more accurate than the mismatch negativity in reflecting behavioral discrimination. Together, these studies challenge the use of mismatch negativity as an electrophysiological correlate for behavioral discrimination of auditory perceptible contrasts.     

Biases in children's and adults' moral judgments

Two experiments examined biases in children's (5/6- and 7/8-year-olds) and adults' moral judgments. Participants at all ages judged that it was worse to produce harm when harm occurred (a) through action rather than inaction (omission bias), (b) when physical contact with the victim was involved (physical contact principle), and (c) when the harm was produced as a direct means to an end rather than as an unintended but foreseeable side effect of the action (intention principle). The youngest participants, however, did not incorporate benefit when making judgments about situations in which harm to one individual resulted in benefit to five individuals. Older participants showed some preference for benefit resulting from action (commission) as opposed to inaction (omission). The findings are discussed in the context of the theory that moral judgments result, in part, from the operation of an inherent, intuitive moral faculty compared with the theory that moral judgments require development of necessary cognitive abilities.     

Comparing measures of attachment: "To whom one turns in times of stress", parental warmth, and partner satisfaction

The Attachment and Clinical Issues Questionnaire (ACIQ; M. A. Lindberg & S. W. Thomas, 2011), was developed over an 18-year period containing 29 scales. The purpose of the present study was to test (a) the validity of the attachment scales in terms of how they predict to whom one turns in times of stress and for affective sharing, and (b) how the attachment scales compared with the Experiences in Close Relationship Questionnaire (ECR) in terms of concurrent, convergent, and discriminant evidence. The relevant secure scales of the ACIQ predicted to whom one turned in study 1, and study 2 demonstrated good convergent evidence with the ECR, but superior concurrent evidence in predicting partner satisfaction, and superior discriminant evidence in differentially correlating with mother and father warmth. Thus, the ACIQ passed essential validity and psychometric tests and was a more robust measure than the ECR with these defining characteristics of attachment.     

The role of the magnocellular visual pathway in the attentional blink

Visual attention has temporal limitations. In the attentional blink (AB) a stream of stimuli such as letters or digits are presented to a participant on a computer monitor at a rapid rate. Embedded in the stream are two targets that the participant must try to identify. Identification of the second target is severely impaired if it is presented within approximately 500ms of the first target. This is the 'blink' in visual attention. In this study we examined the role of the magnocellular visual pathway in the AB. This fast conducting pathway has high temporal resolution and contrast sensitivity. It is also insensitive to the direction of chromatic contrast, and this attribute was exploited in order to isolate its contributions to temporal attention. Colour defined, luminance noise masked AB streams were compared to AB streams of varying achromatic contrast. The four observers, (2F and 2M) aged between 21 and 35years, had normal visual acuity and colour vision. The colour stimuli produced a similar blink to the moderate contrast achromatic stimuli. This indicates that the magnocellular pathway does not have a privileged role in the attentional blink. We provide an explanation of previous apparently contradictory findings in terms of the role of different types of visual masking in the attentional blink.     

An experimental study of behavioural coping strategies in free-ranging female Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus)

A fundamental goal of stress research is to understand how individuals cope with challenges. Studies on a range of vertebrate species suggest that three groups of behaviour-affiliative, aggressive and self-directed behaviours-serve as coping strategies. To date, experimental studies of coping behaviour have tended to be conducted in captive conditions; the limited number of studies in free-ranging or wild settings have been observational in nature. We investigated coping behaviours in free-ranging female Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) at Trentham Monkey Forest, UK, using an experimental playback approach to quantify subjects' responses to mildly aversive threat-grunts. Compared to silent control trials, playbacks of threat-grunts increased aggressive behaviours and one of the two self-directed behaviours examined (self-scratching). No such differences were seen for self-grooming, or for any affiliative behaviour. Elevations in the rate of one measure of aggression, lunging, were positively related to an average measure of adrenocortical activity (median faecal glucocorticoid metabolite levels over the study period). Evidence from females in a variety of Old World monkey species, including Barbary macaques, indicates that affiliative behaviours have an important role in coping with stressful events in the medium to longer term. Our results suggest that, in the short term, female Barbary macaques may use aggressive rather than affiliative behaviours in response to mild stress. These findings highlight the importance of considering how coping mechanisms may vary over time after a stressor, and how coping mechanisms relate to adrenocortical activity. Playback approaches like ours provide a powerful, flexible tool to explore issues such as this in free-ranging and wild animal populations.     

Colour inputs to random-dot stereopsis.

Recently it has been claimed by Livingstone and Hubel that, of three anatomically and functionally distinct visual channels (the magnocellular, parvocellular interblob, and blob channels), only the magnocellular channel is involved in the processing of stereoscopic depth. Since the magnocellular system shows little overt colour opponency, the reported loss of the ability to resolve random-dot stereograms defined only by colour contrast seems consistent with this view. However, Julesz observed that reversed-contrast stereograms could be fused if correlated colour information was added. In the present study, 'noise' (non-corresponding) pixels were injected into random-dot stereograms in order to increase fusion time. All six subjects tested were able to achieve stereopsis in less than three minutes when there was only correspondence in colour and not in luminance, and three when luminance contrast was completely reversed. This ability depends on information about the direction of colour contrast, not just the presence of chromatic borders. When luminance and chromatic contrast are defined in terms of signal-to-noise ratios at the photoreceptor mosaic, chromatic information plays at least as important a role in stereopsis as does luminance information, suggesting that the magnocellular channel is not uniquely involved.