Personality factors in relation to violent crimes

The personalities of a group of 54 persons (51 men and 3 women), imprisoned for the perpetration of violent crimes, were evaluated. The results were then compared to a normative group. This study considers personality factors and dimensions on three levels: (a) Basic factors: the "Big Five", (b) Personality disorders and clinical syndromes, (c) Personality dimensions related to personal wellbeing and social adaptation said to define a psychologically healthy individual. The results of the study show that it is not possible to define a basic personality profile for this group of violent delinquents based on the "Big Five" factors. It is, however, possible to find two habitual patterns of behaviour if the Millon Model (1990) is applied. These two behaviour patterns and attitudes towards life situations will be named "Dependent with compulsive traits" and "Psychopath tendencies". Both relate to indicators of mental health.     

Pretend play: an application of an intervention program in autism

Methodologically and theoretically based on metarrepresentational deficit hypothesis, we design an intervention to teach the mental state of pretense to an autistic boy. The production and comprehension of symbolic play by means of the use of two specific strategies founded on pictorial analogy of the mental representation and process, was the focus of the learning. The efficiency and efectiveness of the program is reflected in the results that indicated the subject's competence to generate and comprehend the pretense as well as to generalize the acquired knowledge into other areas of mentalistic functioning. We discuss the possibility to develop a metarrepresentational knowledge based on the internalizing of the strategies of conceptual support.     

Evaluation of school-based child sexual abuse prevention program

The aim of the present work is to evaluate the efficacy of a program entitled "Prevention of child sexual abuse" the first structured program in Spain designed to prevent such risks. With this purpose, we carried out a study of 382 minors with ages ranging between 8 and 12 years. The result s show that the program has a very positive impact, increasing the awareness of the minors about this type of risk and improving their skills for coping with a possible event of sexual abuse. The efficacy of the program is also apparent, at the level of secondary prevention, in that it increased the likelihood that the children would reveal such events. Finally, exploration of the possible adverse effects of the program showed that the negative effects observed by parents and educators are negligible.     

Spoonish spanerisms: A lexical bias effect in Spanish

Lexical bias is the tendency for phonological errors to form existing words at a rate above chance. This effect has been observed in experiments and corpus analyses in Germanic languages, but S. del Viso, J. M. Igoa, and J. E. García-Albea (1991) found no effect in a Spanish corpus study. Because lexical bias plays an important role in the debate on interactivity in language production, the authors reconsidered its absence in Spanish. A corpus analysis, which considered relatively many errors and which used a method of estimating chance rate that is relatively independent of total error number, and a speech-error elicitation experiment provided converging evidence for lexical bias in Spanish. The authors conclude that the processing mechanisms underlying this effect hold cross-linguistically.     

The accuracy of memory for faces of personally known individuals

The present study was aimed at evaluating whether the very high accuracy of memory for familiar faces, demonstrated by Ge et al (2003, Perception 32 601-614) with a very familiar famous person, generalises to faces of personally known individuals. The accuracy of participants' perceptual memory for a close colleague's face and for their own face was evaluated by presenting original and manipulated pictures of these two targets. The manipulation consisted of increasing or decreasing the interocular distance. As in Ge et al's study, results indicated that proportions of correct recognition of the original faces, and just noticeable differences for the detection of alterations in the recognition task, were not significantly different from the corresponding measures in a perceptual discrimination task performed by a sample of participants who did not know the target persons at all. High accuracy of memory generalises to faces of personally known individuals.     

Learning the moves: the effect of familiarity and facial motion on person recognition across large changes in viewing format

Familiarity with a face or person can support recognition in tasks that require generalization to novel viewing contexts. Using naturalistic viewing conditions requiring recognition of people from face or whole body gait stimuli, we investigated the effects of familiarity, facial motion, and direction of learning/test transfer on person recognition. Participants were familiarized with previously unknown people from gait videos and were tested on faces (experiment 1a) or were familiarized with faces and were tested with gait videos (experiment 1b). Recognition was more accurate when learning from the face and testing with the gait videos, than when learning from the gait videos and testing with the face. The repetition of a single stimulus, either the face or gait, produced strong recognition gains across transfer conditions. Also, the presentation of moving faces resulted in better performance than that of static faces. In experiment 2, we investigated the role of facial motion further by testing recognition with static profile images. Motion provided no benefit for recognition, indicating that structure-from-motion is an unlikely source of the motion advantage found in the first set of experiments.     

Remembering the orientation of newly learned characters depends on the associated writing knowledge: a comparison between handwriting and typing

Recent data support the idea that movements play a crucial role in letter representation and suggest that handwriting knowledge contributes to visual recognition of letters. If so, using different motor activities while subjects are learning to write should affect their subsequent recognition performances. In order to test this hypothesis, we trained adult participants to write new characters either by copying them or by typing them on a keyboard. After three weeks of training we ran a series of tests requiring visual processing of the characters' orientation. Tests were ran immediately, one week after, and three weeks after the end of the training period. Results showed that when the characters had been learned by typing, they were more frequently confused with their mirror images than when they had been written by hand. This handwriting advantage did not appear immediately, but mostly three weeks after the end of the training. Our results therefore suggest that the stability of the characters' representation in memory depends on the nature of the motor activity produced during learning.     

A multi-level representation paradigm for handwriting stroke generation

The study of rapid strokes is a direct or indirect prerequisite in many fundamental research projects, as well as in the design of many practical applications dealing with handwriting. This paper outlines a family of models, derived from the Kinematic Theory of Human Movements. It explains how the nested models in this family can be used coherently, in the context of a multi-level representation paradigm, to analyze both the trajectory and the velocity of strokes with a progressive amount of detail. In the context of a comprehensive survey of previously published work, this paper highlights many new features of stroke production, when the vectorial version of the theory is fully exploited. In this perspective, the Kinematic Theory is depicted as a potential tool to facilitate communications among researchers working in the multi-disciplinary field of Graphonomics.