Earliest Memories and Recent Memories of Highly Salient Events—Are They Similar?

Four- to 11-year-old children were interviewed about 2 different sorts of memories in the same home visit: recent memories of highly salient and stressful events—namely, injuries serious enough to require hospital emergency room treatment—and their earliest memories. Injury memories were scored for amount of unique information, completeness vis-à-vis a standardized injury prototype, and accuracy. Earliest memories were scored for amount of unique information, how old children had been at the time of their earliest memory, and time between their earliest memory and current age. Correlational and regression analyses showed that the 2 types of memory reports demonstrated considerable similarity in terms of unique information and completeness. Specifically, children with the most informative earliest memories had more informative as well as more complete free recalls of injury events. Such relationships between both sorts of memories suggest similar underlying processes at work when children produce memory reports, even when the length, structure, coherence, and content of those memories is about as divergent as one can imagine.     

Language use depending on news frame and immigrant origin

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of the media on individuals’ specific language use in relation to a news story on immigration: the influence of the news frame and group cue. Abstraction, complexity of language use, and negative affective language were evaluated. The 523 participants were randomly distributed to each of the four experimental conditions: news frame (crime versus economic contribution) by group cue (geographical origin of the immigrants involved: Moroccans versus Latin Americans). Through content analysis of the ideas and reflections that arose after the participants read the different news stories, using the Linguistic Category Model (LCM; Semin & Fiedler, 1991) to measure abstract language and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007) to analyze complex language and negative affective language, it emerged that abstract language and negative affective language were more frequent in the participants assigned to the news frame on crime. Complex language was more commonly used when the news frame referred to the economic contribution of immigrants. Regression analyses showed the mediating role of attitude to immigration in the effects of news frame on negative affective language. The bootstrap method was used to assess the magnitude of the indirect effect. A significant mediator effect was also found through structural equation modeling. Analyses of covariance showed one interaction between news frame and group cue: Among those who read the news story in a frame linking immigration to crime and Moroccan origin, abstract language was more characteristic. The results are discussed from the theoretical perspective of framing.     

Satisfaction of Health Science teachers with the convergence process of the European Higher Education Area

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has implied a major transformation of university studies in European countries. The aim of this study was to assess the satisfaction of university teachers in the area of Health Sciences with the convergence process to determine positive and negative aspects in their practices. The sample was composed of 1,361 teachers of Spanish public universities. They all participated in an ad hoc survey that included questions pertaining to the following issues: a) personal and professional information, b) general and institutional aspects, c) aspects related to teaching, research, and administrative work, d) methodology and the teaching-learning process, e) assessment of students, f) training of teachers, and g) coordination, organization, and resources at the school. Results reveal that teachers are not totally satisfied with the way the EHEA is being established. In conclusion, certain changes would be necessary to achieve real convergence between countries.     

The Virtual Kitchen Challenge: preliminary data from a novel virtual reality test of mild difficulties in everyday functioning

ABSTRACT

Background: Efficient, objective measures of mild functional difficulties are lacking. Preliminary data from a novel, non-immersive virtual reality, performance-based task (Virtual Kitchen Challenge; VKC) were obtained to address this gap.

Methods: 14 older and 21 younger adults completed cognitive tests and two everyday tasks (breakfast, lunch) in the VKC with virtual objects and a touch-screen and in the Real Kitchen with real objects (order counterbalanced). Automated performance measures were obtained from the VKC program and human coders scored VKC and Real Kitchen videos for errors.

Results: Older adults made more errors than younger adults on the VKC and Real Kitchen, with similar error patterns across measures. VKC automated measures were significantly related to measures from human coders, performance on the Real Kitchen, and cognitive test scores.

Conclusion: The VKC is a valid and highly efficient performance-based measure of subtle functional difficulties with great potential for future clinical and research applications.     

Infants track word forms in early word–object associations

A central component of language development is word learning. One characterization of this process is that language learners discover objects and then look for word forms to associate with these objects (Mcnamara, 1984 ; Smith, 2000 ). Another possibility is that word forms themselves are also important, such that once learned, hearing a familiar word form will lead young word learners to look for an object to associate with it (Juscyzk, 1997 ). This research investigates the relative weighing of word forms and objects in early word–object associations using the anticipatory eye‐movement paradigm (AEM; McMurray & Aslin, 2004 ). Eighteen‐month‐old infants and adults were taught novel word–object associations and then tested on ambiguous stimuli that pitted word forms and objects against each other. Results revealed a change in weighing of these components across development. For 18‐month‐old infants, word forms weighed more in early word–object associative learning, while for adults, objects were more salient. Our results suggest that infants preferentially use word forms to guide the process of word–object association.     

Norms on the gender perception of role nouns in Czech,English, French,German, Italian,Norwegian, and Slovak

We collected norms on the gender stereotypicality of an extensive list of role nouns in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak, to be used as a basis for the selection of stimulus materials in future studies. We present a Web-based tool (available at https://www.unifr.ch/lcg/) that we developed to collect these norms and that we expect to be useful for other researchers, as well. In essence, we provide (a) gender stereotypicality norms across a number of languages and (b) a tool to facilitate cross-language as well as cross-cultural comparisons when researchers are interested in the investigation of the impact of stereotypicality on the processing of role nouns.     

Hypoxia and Inflammation in Children with Sickle Cell Disease: Implications for Hippocampal Functioning and Episodic Memory

Children with sickle cell disease (SCD) suffer from systemic processes (e.g., chronic anemia, recurrent hypoxic-ischemic events, chronic inflammation) that have been associated with neurocognitive impairment in a range of clinical populations, but which have been largely understudied in relation to specific domains of cognitive functioning in children with SCD. This review focuses on episodic memory, as the hippocampus may be especially vulnerable to the systemic processes associated with SCD. The first part of the paper outlines the pathophysiology of SCD and briefly reviews the extant literature on academic and cognitive functioning in children with SCD, emphasizing the dearth of research on episodic memory. Next, the complex systemic processes of hypoxia and inflammation associated with SCD are reviewed, along with research that has associated these processes with hippocampal damage and memory impairment. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research that are informed, in part, by the literature on developmental amnesia.     

„Bluttaten“ und „schizophrene Politik“

Background

The role of printed media in the maintenance of stigmatization has been a subject of debate for several years now. As for stigmatization of schizophrenia, previous research has frequently focused on stereotypes in newspaper articles and the metaphoric use of the word “schizophrenic” for something contradictory, aloof or ridiculous.

Aim

The objective of this study was to quantify the frequency of stigmatizing articles with regard to the specific type of stigmatizing content in German broadsheets and tabloids.

Material and methods

A total of 391 articles extracted from the entirety of all issues of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the tabloid BILD from 2011 were content-analyzed for stereotypes, false statements and metaphoric use of schizophrenia.

Results

Stigmatizing elements were prevalent in each newspaper (40.4–66.7?%). Among broadsheets the metaphoric use constituted the predominant form of stigmatization, whereas depictions of persons with schizophrenia as dangerous and unpredictable prevailed in the tabloid BILD.

Conclusion

Metaphoric use and blatant discrimination are still highly prevalent in German newspapers. While metaphoric use may be stopped by renaming the disorder schizophrenia, further efforts are needed to raise awareness for and ultimately prevent the reification of stereotypes in printed media.     

Predicting substance use behavior among South African adolescents: The role of leisure experiences across time

Using seven waves of data, collected twice a year from the 8th through the 11th grades in a low-resource community in Cape Town, South Africa, we aimed to describe the developmental trends in three specific leisure experiences (leisure boredom, new leisure interests, and healthy leisure) and substance use (cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana) behaviors and to investigate the ways in which changes in leisure experiences predict changes in substance use behaviors over time. Results indicated that adolescents' substance use increased significantly across adolescence, but that leisure experiences remained fairly stable over time. We also found that adolescent leisure experiences predicted baseline substance use and that changes in leisure experiences predicted changes in substance use behaviors over time, with leisure boredom emerging as the most consistent and strongest predictor of alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use. Implications for interventions that target time use and leisure experiences are discussed.