Social inhibition and overfriendliness: two-year follow-up and observational validation

Studied socioemotional functioning in 3 groups (n = 15) of high-inhibited, low-inhibited-overfriendly, and low-inhibited-low-overfriendly children at age 9, who were identified by parental ratings in a sample (N = 392) at age 7. Ratings of social inhibition and overfriendliness were stable over the 2-year period from age 7 to age 9. Validity of rated social inhibition and overfriendliness is established with behavioral observations, both predictively and concurrently. The groups are contrasted along the dimensions of social inhibition and overfriendliness with respect to socioemotional distress, social problem solving, empathic ability, and the disinhibitory phenomena of thrill seeking and hyperactivity. The high-inhibited group shows heightened socioemotional distress. The overfriendly group shows heightened levels of thrill seeking and hyperactivity. Social problem solving and empathy are less well developed in the inhibited and in the overfriendly group as contrasted to the low-inhibited-low-overfriendly group. The results are interpreted in terms of risks for socioemotional problems at both ends of the dimension of social inhibition.     

Conceptualization of perceptual attributes: a special case for color?

Young children experience difficulties establishing conceptual representations of color compared with everyday objects. We argue that comparing the development of color cognition to that of familiar objects is inappropriate since color is a perceptual attribute that can be abstracted from an object and by itself lacks functional significance. Instead, we compared the recognition, perceptual saliency, and naming of color to that of three other perceptual object attributes (motion, form, and size) in 47 children aged 2 to 5 years as a function of language age. Results revealed that, although color was perceptually salient relative to the other visual attributes, no selective impairment to color cognition (recognition and naming) was found relative to the three other visual attributes tested. Thus, when the appropriate comparisons are made, we find no special delay in the development of color conceptualization. Furthermore, the striking disparity between perceptual saliency and cognition of color in our youngest age groups suggests that perceptual saliency has little influence on the conceptual development of color.     

When the central executive lets us down: schemas, attention, and load in a generative working memory task

Participants were asked to generate a single sequence of numbers in between two bounds. By varying the requested sequence length and way in which the question is posed, this paradigm enables assessment of the contributions to central executive functioning of schema, focus of attention, and load. With sequences of three or four numbers, a quarter of the sample failed fully to comply with the instructions. They generated an incorrect number of numbers or went outside the specified bounds. With sequences of six numbers, more than half of the sample infringed one or more of the constraints. Participants consistently generated sequences with particular generic properties. The overall frequency and patterns of infringements suggest that a substantial proportion of participants focused their conceptual attention on sequence content and often neglected the problem of how thelength and boundary constraints were going to be evaluated either before or during response delivery.     

Effects of retention intervals on the magnitude of optokinetic rotation-induced taste aversions.

This study investigated the effects of different retention intervals on the magnitude of optokinetic rotation-induced conditioned taste aversions in humans. Two experiments were conducted. In Exp. 1, 20 subjects were divided into two groups, a CS-UCS group in which drinking soybean milk was paired with optokinetic rotation-induced gastric illness and a CS-Only group in which drinking soybean milk was not paired with optokinetic rotation. Analysis indicated that two days after pairing soybean milk drinking with optokinetic rotation, the subjects in the CS-UCS group had significantly reduced palatability ratings of soybean milk and lower consumption of soybean milk than those in the CS-Only group. In Exp. 2, 40 subjects were divided into four CS-UCS groups with 1-day, 3-day, 5 day, and 10-day retention intervals between the session of pairing soybean milk with optokinetic rotation and the session of retasting soybean milk. Analysis yielded no significant differences among four groups on palatability of soybean milk and consumption of soybean milk in the retasting session. It is concluded that optokinetic rotation is an effective unconditioned stimulus for conditioned taste aversions formation and that the aversion has a retention period of at least 10 days.     

Precuneus-prefrontal activity during awareness of visual verbal stimuli.

Awareness is a personal experience, which is only accessible to the rest of world through interpretation. We set out to identify a neural correlate of visual awareness, using brief subliminal and supraliminal verbal stimuli while measuring cerebral blood flow distribution with H(2)(15)O PET. Awareness of visual verbal stimuli differentially activated medial parietal association cortex (precuneus), which is a polymodal sensory cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be primarily executive. Our results suggest participation of these higher order perceptual and executive cortical structures in visual verbal awareness.     

Interviewing preschoolers from low- and middle-SES communities: a test of the narrative elaboration recall improvement technique.

Tested the effectiveness of Narrative Elaboration (NE), a memory enhancement and interview preparation technique, with 99 preschool children from middle- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) communities. Half were trained with the NE intervention to utilize generic visual cue cards to provide forensically relevant details within four information categories: participants, settings, actions, conversation. One day after the NE training, interviewers asked participants to recount an event staged 1 week earlier. Analyses revealed that NE-trained children from both SES levels recalled significantly more about the event than control children, without producing more errors, particularly when given an opportunity to elaborate on initial free recall using the visual cue cards. No such difference in free recall alone was found. Additionally, preschoolers from low-SES communities generated more errors than their middle-SES counterparts, regardless of treatment condition.     

Cultural influences on cognitive representations of conflict: interpretations of conflict episodes in the United States and Japan.

This article integrates theory from the cognitive tradition in negotiation with theory on culture and examines cultural influences on cognitive representations of conflict. The authors predicted that although there may be universal (etic) dimensions of conflict construals, there also may be culture-specific (emic) representations of conflict in the United States and Japan. Results of multidimensional scaling analyses of U.S. and Japanese conflict episodes supported this view. Japanese and Americans construed conflicts through a compromise versus win frame (R. L. Pinkley, 1990), providing evidence of a universal dimension of conflict construal. As the authors predicted, Japanese perceived conflicts to be more compromise-focused, as compared with Americans. There were also unique dimensions of construal among Americans and Japanese (infringements to self and giri violations, respectively), suggesting that identical conflict episodes are perceived differently across cultures.     

Cognitive subprocesses of mental rotation: why is a good rotator better than a poor one?

The Vanderberg-Kuse Mental Rotation Test is a standard test of mental rotation ability. Recent experiments have demonstrated that mental rotation is a complex cognitive process wherein different subprocesses (focused attention, visual scanning, perceptual decision, visual memory) play important roles in performance. We classified the population as good and poor rotators by performance of mental rotation (ns = 47: 22 men and 25 women, respectively; mean age: 20.7 yr.). To examine differences cognitive subprocesses of mental rotation of these two groups were compared. There were significant differences between poor and good rotators in performance on Raven's test and the Pieron Focused Attention test scores. The good rotators scored better because their perceptual decision-analytical intelligence (Raven) and focused attention scores were higher.     

A critical review of the validity of ego development theory and its measurement.

Loevinger's (1976) theory of ego development represents an important and original approach to understanding personality development. More than 20 years have elapsed since the last substantial critical review of the validity of the theory and its measurement (Loevinger, 1979). Our article provides an updated critical review of the theory by reviewing the considerable body of research that has accumulated over the past 20 years. This review addresses the construct, predictive, and discriminant validity of ego development theory and the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT; Loevinger & Wessler, 1970; Loevinger, Wessler, & Redmore, 1970) as its measurement. We conclude that there is substantial empirical support for the conceptual soundness of ego development theory and the WUSCT.