Age trends in early behavioral predictors of serious antisocial behaviors

A risk group of disruptive boys (N=65) identified in kindergarten was assessed using the same procedures at ages 6–7, 8–9, and 10–11. Criteria used to define the predictors and criterion variable were the same at all assessment times. Severity was addressed by comparing different forms of behaviors, considering the extent of harmful consequences to others (aggressiveness was considered as most harmful, whereas inattention was considered as least harmful), manifestation in multiple settings, and extreme scores (manipulation of cutoff scores). Different assessment strategies (direct observations, ratings) and different informants (trained observers, mothers and teachers) were used. Aggressiveness as rated by mothers was highly stable from age 6 to age 11. Inattention as rated by teachers was stable only from age 6 to age 9, whereas no stability was found for observations of task inappropriate behaviors. Taskinappropriate behaviors observed in mother-child interactions and in multiple settings at age 6–7 were significant predictors of self-reported antisocial behaviors at age 12, but this prediction was not repeated at ages 8–9 and 10–11. Teacher ratings of inattention at ages 6–7 and 8–9 were also significant predictors of self-reported antisocial behaviors at age 12. The predictive power was much lower when mothers' ratings of aggressiveness were used. Findings from the present study support the hypothesis that some antisocial behavior precursors are age dependent, in that they are more characteristic of certain age groups than of others. Implications for the selection of assessment screening procedures are discussed.     

Can we Build on Social Movement Theories to Develop and Improve Community‐Based Participatory Research? A Framework Synthesis Review

A long‐standing challenge in community‐based participatory research (CBPR) has been to anchor practice and evaluation in a relevant and comprehensive theoretical framework of community change. This study describes the development of a multidimensional conceptual framework that builds on social movement theories to identify key components of CBPR processes. Framework synthesis was used as a general literature search and analysis strategy. An initial conceptual framework was developed from the theoretical literature on social movement. A literature search performed to identify illustrative CBPR projects yielded 635 potentially relevant documents, from which eight projects (corresponding to 58 publications) were retained after record and full‐text screening. Framework synthesis was used to code and organize data from these projects, ultimately providing a refined framework. The final conceptual framework maps key concepts of CBPR mobilization processes, such as the pivotal role of the partnership; resources and opportunities as necessary components feeding the partnership's development; the importance of framing processes; and a tight alignment between the cause (partnership's goal), the collective action strategy, and the system changes targeted. The revised framework provides a context‐specific model to generate a new, innovative understanding of CBPR mobilization processes, drawing on existing theoretical foundations.     

Differential impact of emotional task relevance on three indices of prioritised processing for fearful and angry facial expressions

It is commonly assumed that threatening expressions are perceptually prioritised, possessing the ability to automatically capture and hold attention. Recent evidence suggests that this prioritisation depends on the task relevance of emotion in the case of attention holding and for fearful expressions. Using a hybrid attentional blink (AB) and repetition blindness (RB) paradigm we investigated whether task relevance also impacts on prioritisation through attention capture and perceptual salience, and if these effects generalise to angry expressions. Participants judged either the emotion (relevant condition) or gender (irrelevant condition) of two target facial stimuli (fearful, angry or neutral) imbedded in a stream of distractors. Attention holding and capturing was operationalised as modulation of AB deficits by first target (T1) and second target (T2) expression. Perceptual salience was operationalised as RB modulation. When emotion was task-relevant (Experiment 1; N?=?29) fearful expressions captured and held attention, and were more perceptually salient than neutral expressions. Angry expressions captured attention, but were less perceptually salient and capable of holding attention than fearful and neutral expressions. When emotion was task-irrelevant (Experiment 2; N?=?30), only fearful attention capture and perceptual salience effects remained significant. Our findings highlight the importance for threat-prioritisation research to heed both the type of threat and prioritisation investigated.     

Heterogeneity of Neuropsychological Impairment in HIV Infection: Contributions from Mild Cognitive Impairment

Despite longstanding acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND), existing HAND diagnostic methods classify according to the degree of impairment, without regard to the pattern of neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses. Research in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has demonstrated that classifying individuals into subtypes by both their level and pattern of impairment, using either conventional or statistical methods, has etiologic and prognostic utility. Methods for characterizing the heterogeneity of MCI provide a framework that can be applied to other disorders and may be useful in clarifying some of the current challenges in the study of HAND. A small number of studies have applied these methods to examine the heterogeneity of neurocognitive function among individuals with HIV. Most have supported the existence of multiple subtypes of neurocognitive impairment, with some evidence for distinct clinicodemographic features of these subtypes, but a number of gaps exist. Following a review of diagnostic methods and challenges in the study of HAND, we summarize the literature regarding conventional and empirical subtypes of MCI and HAND and identify directions for future research regarding neurocognitive heterogeneity in HIV infection.     

Fatherhood and Delinquency: An Examination of Risk Factors and Offending Patterns Associated with Fatherhood Status among Serious Juvenile Offenders

Despite a large body of literature across multiple disciplines on adolescent motherhood, adolescent fathers have been largely absent from empirical research. Previous findings suggest that young men who experience multiple risk factors across a range of life domains have a high likelihood of becoming fathers at an early age, which can negatively impact their developmental trajectories and age-normative transitions (e.g. from school to work). However, little is known about the risk factors for fatherhood among high-risk juvenile offenders; nor is it well understood how fatherhood is related to criminal behavior in this population. The current study investigated risk factors and offending patterns associated with adolescent fatherhood status in a sample of serious juvenile offenders (N?=?1170). Consistent with previous studies, fatherhood status was associated with greater risk exposure among serious juvenile offenders. Furthermore, change in fatherhood status was associated with higher levels of overall offending, aggressive offending, income-related offending, and non-drug-related income offending. In light of these findings, we propose that supports and resources are needed to facilitate juvenile offenders in their role as fathers during this time.     

Contextual utility affects the perceived quality of explanations

Are explanations of different kinds (formal, mechanistic, teleological) judged differently depending on their contextual utility, defined as the extent to which they support the kinds of inferences required for a given task? We report three studies demonstrating that the perceived “goodness” of an explanation depends on the evaluator’s current task: Explanations receive a relative boost when they support task-relevant inferences, even when all three explanation types are warranted. For example, mechanistic explanations receive higher ratings when participants anticipate making further inferences on the basis of proximate causes than when they anticipate making further inferences on the basis of category membership or functions. These findings shed light on the functions of explanation and support pragmatic and pluralist approaches to explanation.     

Implicit and explicit false belief development in preschool children

The ability to represent the mental states of other agents is referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). A developmental breakthrough in ToM consists of understanding that others can have false beliefs about the world. Recently, infants younger than 2 years of age have been shown to pass novel implicit false belief tasks. However, the processes underlying these tasks and their relation to later‐developing explicit false belief understanding, as well as to other cognitive abilities, are not yet understood. Here, we study a battery of implicit and explicit false belief tasks in 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children, relating their performance to linguistic abilities and executive functions. The present data show a significant developmental change from failing explicit false belief tasks at 3 years of age to passing them at the age of 4, while both age groups pass implicit false belief tasks. This differential developmental trajectory is reflected by the finding that explicit and implicit false belief tasks do not correlate. Further, we demonstrate that explicit false belief tasks correlate with syntactic and executive functions, whereas implicit false belief tasks do not. The study thus indicates that the processes underlying implicit false belief tasks are different from later‐developing explicit false belief understanding. Moreover, our results speak for a critical role of syntactic and executive functions for passing standard explicit false belief tasks in contrast to implicit tasks.     

An isolation effect in serial memory for spatial information

This paper reports the first demonstration of an isolation effect or von Restorff effect (von Restorff, 1933) in the context of a spatial-memory task: Short-term serial recall was enhanced for both the location and the serial position of one red dot presented amongst a sequence of otherwise black dots. When the serial position of the isolate was fixed, the spatial isolation effect only emerged when participants received a control block of trials before the block of isolation trials (Experiment 1). However, when the serial position of the isolate was varied across isolation trials, an isolation effect was still produced regardless of condition order (Experiment 2). It is suggested that both temporal grouping strategies and greater item-specific processing may have contributed to the enhanced retention of the isolate.     

Visual similarity in short-term recall for where and when

Two experiments examined the effects of visual similarity on short-term recall for where and when in the visual spatial domain. A series of squares of similar or dissimilar colours were serially presented at various locations on the screen. At recall, all coloured squares were simultaneously presented in a random order at the bottom of the screen, and the locations used for presentation were indicated by white squares. Participants were asked to place the colours at their appropriate location in their presentation order. Performance for location (where) and order (when) was assessed separately. Results revealed that similarity severely hinders both memory for what was where and memory for what was when, under quiet and articulatory suppression conditions. These results provide further evidence that similarity has a major impact on processing relational information in memory.     

Fixation identification in centroid versus start-point modes using eye-tracking data

Fixation-identification algorithms, needed for analyses of eye movements, may typically be separated into three categories, viz. (i) velocity-based algorithms, (ii) area-based algorithms, and (iii) dispersion-based algorithms. Dispersion-based algorithms are commonly used but this application introduces some difficulties, one being optimization. Basically, there are two modes to reach this goal of optimization, viz., the start-point mode and the centroid mode. The aim of the present study was to compare and evaluate these two dispersion-based algorithms. Manual inspections were made of 1,400 fixations in each mode. Odds ratios showed that by using the centroid mode for fixation detection, a valid fixation is 2.86 times more likely to be identified than by using the start-point mode. Moreover, the algorithm based on centroid mode dispersion showed a good interpretation speed, accuracy, robustness, and ease of implementation, as well as adequate parameter settings.