Hypermaturity and Immaturity of Personality Profiles in Adolescents

Five‐year longitudinal data on a cohort of early to middle adolescents (N = 923) and a cohort of middle to late adolescents (N = 390) were used to examine the correlates of hypermaturity (i.e. 12‐year‐olds with a personality profile resembling the profile of an average 20‐year‐old) and immaturity (i.e. 20‐year‐olds with a personality profile resembling the profile of an average 12‐year‐old) of personality. Analyses revealed that girls with high levels of hypermaturity exhibited high levels of internalizing problem behaviour and conflict with parents, while hypermaturity in boys was only associated with internalizing problems. Immature girls had low levels of anxiety and high levels of minor delinquency, whereas immature boys reported low levels of anxiety and high levels of physical maturity. These findings suggest that off‐time personality development is an interesting concept deserving further exploration. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Identity configurations across love and work in emerging adults in romantic relationships

Love and work constitute two life-defining identity domains for emerging adults. The present study utilized a five-dimensional identity model and examined identity configurations across these two domains, capturing the degree to which identity statuses correspond across domains. A sample of German 18–30-year-olds who were either working or studying and engaged in a romantic relationship was assessed at baseline and three years later. Six identity clusters emerged in each domain. Combining identity clusters across love and work domains, 7 identity configurations were distinguished. Whereas some configurations were characterized by strong commitments in one or both domains, other configurations consisted of individuals scoring low on commitment and high on exploration and rumination. These configurations were differentially related to psychological symptoms, work stress and satisfaction, and family–work conflict, both concurrently and longitudinally. Individuals characterized by high commitments in love and work provided the most favorable responses on all outcomes.     

In Defense of Relational Direct Realism

Abstract: According to proponents of relational direct realism, veridical perceptual experiences are irreducibly relational mental states that include as constituents perceived physical objects or intrinsic aspects of them. One consequence of the theory is the rejection of the causal theory of perception. This paper defends the relational theory against several objections recently developed by Paul Coates. He argues that the required experiential relation is incoherent and unmotivated. The argument that it is incoherent commits a fallacy. In reply to the argument that it is unmotivated, I suggest that the relational theorist's appeal to transparency provides sufficient motive and, when properly clarified, defeasibly justifies the theory as well. Coates also argues that rejection of the causal theory leaves relational theorists without any way of determining which object is perceived or of accommodating our scientific understanding of perceptual experiences as causally dependent on physical objects. I reply that relational theorists are able to provide the required explanations and discuss how the relational theory is consistent with this scientific understanding of perceptual experience.     

Intrinsic and extrinsic contributions to heavy tails in visual foraging

Eyes move over visual scenes to gather visual information. Studies have found heavy-tailed distributions in measures of eye movements during visual search, which raises questions about whether these distributions are pervasive to eye movements, and whether they arise from intrinsic or extrinsic factors. Three different measures of eye movement trajectories were examined during visual foraging of complex images, and all three were found to exhibit heavy tails: Spatial clustering of eye movements followed a power law distribution, saccade length distributions were lognormally distributed, and the speeds of slow, small amplitude movements occurring during fixations followed a 1/f spectral power law relation. Images were varied to test whether the spatial clustering of visual scene information is responsible for heavy tails in eye movements. Spatial clustering of eye movements and saccade length distributions were found to vary with image type and task demands, but no such effects were found for eye movement speeds during fixations. Results showed that heavy-tailed distributions are general and intrinsic to visual foraging, but some of them become aligned with visual stimuli when required by task demands. The potentially adaptive value of heavy-tailed distributions in visual foraging is discussed.     

A computational-level explanation of the speed of goal inference

The ability to understand the goals that drive another person’s actions is an important social and cognitive skill. This is no trivial task, because any given action may in principle be explained by different possible goals (e.g., one may wave ones arm to hail a cab or to swat a mosquito). To select which goal best explains an observed action is a form of abduction. To explain how people perform such abductive inferences, Baker, Tenenbaum, and Saxe (2007) proposed a computational-level theory that formalizes goal inference as Bayesian inverse planning (BIP). It is known that general Bayesian inference–be it exact or approximate–is computationally intractable (NP-hard). As the time required for computationally intractable computations grows excessively fast when scaled from toy domains to the real world, it seems that such models cannot explain how humans can perform Bayesian inferences quickly in real world situations. In this paper we investigate how the BIP model can nevertheless explain how people are able to make goal inferences quickly. The approach that we propose builds on taking situational constraints explicitly into account in the computational-level model. We present a methodology for identifying situational constraints that render the model tractable. We discuss the implications of our findings and reflect on how the methodology can be applied to alternative models of goal inference and Bayesian models in general.     

Gender, Ethnicity, Religiosity, and Same-sex Sexual Attraction and the Acceptance of Same-sex Sexuality and Gender Non-conformity

This study explored the role of gender, ethnicity, religiosity, and sexual attraction in adolescents’ acceptance of same-sex sexuality and gender non-conformity. Using an intersectionality perspective, we also tested whether the effects of gender, ethnicity, and religiosity on adolescents’ attitudes would function differently in adolescents with and without same-sex attractions. Data for this study were collected by means of a paper questionnaire completed by 1,518 secondary school students (mean age?=?14.56 years, SD?=?1.05) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The sample was 48.1% female and 51.9% male. Approximately one third of adolescents in the sample were of a non-Western ethnic background (32.3%, n?=?491) and 7.5% of the participants (n?=?114) reported experiencing same-sex attractions. Results of our analyses showed that adolescents in our sample who were male, of non-Western ethnicity, and who were more religious (as indicated by frequency of religious service attendance), were less accepting of same-sex sexuality and gender non-conformity in comparison to female, Western and less religious peers. We also found a significant interaction effect between religiosity and sexual attractions, but only in relation to evaluation of same-sex attracted, gender non-conforming females. The negative effect of religiosity on acceptance of same-sex attracted, gender non-conforming females was stronger among those adolescents who reported same-sex attractions.     

Sleep and the time course of motor skill learning

Growing evidence suggests that sleep plays an important role in the process of procedural learning. Most recently, sleep has been implicated in the continued development of motor-skill learning following initial acquisition. However, the temporal evolution of motor learning before and after sleep, the effects of different training regimens, and the long-term development of motor learning across multiple nights of sleep remain unknown. Here, we report data for subjects trained and retested on a sequential finger-tapping task across multiple days. The findings demonstrate firstly that following initial training, small practice-dependent improvements are possible before, but not following the large practice-independent gains that develop across a night of sleep. Secondly, doubling the quantity of initial training does not alter the amount of subsequent sleep-dependent learning that develops overnight. Thirdly, the amount of sleep-dependent learning does not correlate with the amount of practice-dependent learning achieved during training, suggesting the existence of two discrete motor-learning processes. Finally, whereas the majority of sleep-dependent motor-skill learning develops during the first night of sleep following training, additional nights of sleep still offer continued improvements.     

Design research programs and the logic of their development

Design research programs attempt to bring together the properties of available materials and the demands derived from intended applications. The logic of problem states and state transitions in such programs, including assessment criteria and heuristic principles, is described in settheoretic terms, starting with a naive model comprising an intended profile and the operational profile of a prototype. In a first concretization the useful distinction between structural and functional properties is built into the model. In two further concretizations the inclusion of potential applications is motivated and described for the case of drug research as well as the inclusion of potential realizations for the case of complex products. Next, another line of concretization of the naive model, the incorporation of potentially relevant properties, is sketched. Then the partial analogy between product- and truth-approximation is indicated. We conclude with some remarks about the usefulness of our models for products reaching the market in comparison to the the so-called social construction of technology approach.     

On acquiring knowledge about people and the capacity to pretend: response to Leslie (1987)

Leslie (1987) has proposed a cognitivist model for the young child's "theory of mind" and capacity to pretend. Serious shortcomings in Leslie's nondevelopmental, nonsocial, and restrictively cognitive account are noted, and an alternative thesis is proposed: A young child's knowledge about people is grounded in the experience of affectively charged interpersonal relations, and the child's capacity for pretend play develops on the basis of prior abilities to perceive the nature of other people's relatedness to the world. Clinical phenomena associated with autism and congenital blindness provide evidence for this thesis.