Does retrieval strategy disruption cause general and specific collaborative inhibition?

The purpose of the experiment on collaborative memory was to investigate if the collaborative inhibition is due to collaborating pair's disruption of each others' retrieval strategies (the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis, RSD). The participants' (N = 36) task was to recall a list of 60 words individually and collaboratively. Retrieval strategies were manipulated by presenting word lists organised either by categories or by country of origin and adoption of retrieval strategies were examined by the adjusted ratio of clustering score. Half of the dyads received word lists organised by the same strategy and half of the dyads received word lists organised by different strategies. The results revealed a main effect of collaboration, i.e., collaborative recalled items were significantly fewer than the sum of the non-redundant individually recalled items. Both conditions (same strategies vs different strategies) suffered to the same extent from collaboration, which did not support the RSD hypothesis. However, focusing on words recalled individually but not collaboratively, dyads with different strategies, as predicted by the RSD, forgot more items during collaboration than did dyads with the same strategy. Additional results suggest that collaborative forgetting is mainly manifested by forgetting of non-overlapping items (as measured by individual recalls).     

Who Voted for Whom? Comparing Supporters of Obama and McCain on Value Types and Personality Traits

This study investigates the personalities and values of Obama and McCain supporters in the 2008 election. A total of 278 American participants completed the Big Five Inventory and the Portrait Values Questionnaire along with demographic items. For value types, Obama supporters were more likely to endorse universalism values and less likely to endorse tradition, conformity, and security values compared with McCain supporters. With regard to personality traits, Obama supporters scored higher on agreeableness and lower on conscientiousness than did McCain supporters. As predicted, logistic regression revealed that values were better predictors of voting preference than were personality traits. These findings demonstrate the importance of individual differences in political preferences and are discussed with regard to findings in other cultures.     

Community implementation of PMTO™: Impacts on referrals to specialist services and schools

Sigmarsdóttir, M. & Björnsdóttir, A. (2012). Community implementation of PMTO?: Impacts on referrals to specialist services and schools. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 506–511. In 2000, the city of Hafnarfjörður, Iceland, implemented Parent Management Training – Oregon Model (PMTO^?) to prevent and treat behavioral problems among children. This paper describes the implementation and findings regarding impacts in the community. As hypothesized, findings showed that the number of referrals to specialist services decreased in Hafnarfjörður following PMTO implementation and increased in two comparison communities not implementing the method. Within the Hafnarfjörður community, recorded instances of behavior problems reduced in elementary schools working in line with PMTO. The results presented are the first such findings in Iceland and suggest the kinds of systematic changes communities may experience following the implementation of an evidence‐based program.     

A Systematic Investigation of Gesture Kinematics in Evolving Manual Languages in the Lab

Silent gestures consist of complex multi-articulatory movements but are now primarily studied through categorical coding of the referential gesture content. The relation of categorical linguistic content with continuous kinematics is therefore poorly understood. Here, we reanalyzed the video data from a gestural evolution experiment (Motamedi, Schouwstra, Smith, Culbertson, & Kirby, 2019), which showed increases in the systematicity of gesture content over time. We applied computer vision techniques to quantify the kinematics of the original data. Our kinematic analyses demonstrated that gestures become more efficient and less complex in their kinematics over generations of learners. We further detect the systematicity of gesture form on the level of thegesture kinematic interrelations, which directly scales with the systematicity obtained on semantic coding of the gestures. Thus, from continuous kinematics alone, we can tap into linguistic aspects that were previously only approachable through categorical coding of meaning. Finally, going beyond issues of systematicity, we show how unique gesture kinematic dialects emerged over generations as isolated chains of participants gradually diverged over iterations from other chains. We, thereby, conclude that gestures can come to embody the linguistic system at the level of interrelationships between communicative tokens, which should calibrate our theories about form and linguistic content.