The effects of bilingual language proficiency on recall accuracy and semantic clustering in free recall output: evidence for shared semantic associations across languages

Two experiments investigated how well bilinguals utilise long-standing semantic associations to encode and retrieve semantic clusters in verbal episodic memory. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals (N?=?128) studied and recalled word and picture sets. Word recall was equivalent in L1 and L2, picture recall was better in L1 than in L2, and the picture superiority effect was stronger in L1 than in L2. Semantic clustering in word and picture recall was equivalent in L1 and L2. In Experiment 2, Spanish-English bilinguals (N?=?128) and English-speaking monolinguals (N?=?128) studied and recalled word sequences that contained semantically related pairs. Data were analyzed using a multinomial processing tree approach, the pair-clustering model. Cluster formation was more likely for semantically organised than for randomly ordered word sequences. Probabilities of cluster formation, cluster retrieval, and retrieval of unclustered items did not differ across languages or language groups. Language proficiency has little if any impact on the utilisation of long-standing semantic associations, which are language-general.     

High Trait Cheerfulness Individuals are More Sensitive to the Emotional Environment

The aim of this paper was to study whether trait cheerfulness modulates changes in state cheerfulness as a result of exposing participants to affective stimuli. Two studies with a within-participant experimental design were carried out. Forty-eight (33 women) and sixty-four (45 women) undergraduate psychology students were selected as Sample 1 and Sample 2, respectively, for scoring high or low on the Trait Form of the State-Trait-Cheerfulness Inventory (STCI-T; Ruch et al. in Humor Int J Humor Res 9:303–339, 1996; Ruch et al. in Personal Individ Differ 22:477–491, 1997). Participants watched amusing, neutral, and sad film clips and reported their affective states before and after viewing them. In the second study, heart rate and skin conductance level were also recorded. Results showed that people with high trait cheerfulness reported greater changes in state cheerfulness when exposed to both amusing and sad film clips, showing larger increases and decreases in state cheerfulness, respectively, than participants with low trait cheerfulness. Effects were not mediated by social desirability. Furthermore, people with low trait cheerfulness showed a greater heart rate deceleration during the visioning of the clips compared to high trait cheerfulness participants, especially in an amusing scene with high emotional load. No modulation on trait cheerfulness was found for skin conductance level. Data with self-report and electrophysiological measures are discussed, highlighting that high trait cheerfulness people are more permeable to affective events, perhaps showing a better understanding and management of them.     

Identifying Students at Risk: An Examination of Computer-Adaptive Measures and Latent Class Growth Analysis

Multitiered systems of support depend on screening technology to identify students at risk. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of a computer-adaptive test and latent class growth analysis (LCGA) to identify students at risk in reading with focus on the use of this methodology to characterize student performance in screening. Participants included 3,699 students in Grades 3–5. Three time points of administration (fall, winter, and spring) of the computer-adaptive reading measure were selected. LCGA results indicated 6–7 classes, depending on grade, informed by level and growth in student performance that significantly predicted failure on the statewide test administered at the end of the year. The lowest-performing classes had failure rates above 90% across all grades. The results indicate that identifying homogeneous groups of learners through LCGA may be valuable as an approach to determining students who need additional instruction. Practical implications and future directions are discussed.     

Nonparametric tests for equality of psychometric functions

Many empirical studies measure psychometric functions (curves describing how observers’ performance varies with stimulus magnitude) because these functions capture the effects of experimental conditions. To assess these effects, parametric curves are often fitted to the data and comparisons are carried out by testing for equality of mean parameter estimates across conditions. This approach is parametric and, thus, vulnerable to violations of the implied assumptions. Furthermore, testing for equality of means of parameters may be misleading: Psychometric functions may vary meaningfully across conditions on an observer-by-observer basis with no effect on the mean values of the estimated parameters. Alternative approaches to assess equality of psychometric functions per se are thus needed. This paper compares three nonparametric tests that are applicable in all situations of interest: The existing generalized Mantel–Haenszel test, a generalization of the Berry–Mielke test that was developed here, and a split variant of the generalized Mantel–Haenszel test also developed here. Their statistical properties (accuracy and power) are studied via simulation and the results show that all tests are indistinguishable as to accuracy but they differ non-uniformly as to power. Empirical use of the tests is illustrated via analyses of published data sets and practical recommendations are given. The computer code in matlab and R to conduct these tests is available as Electronic Supplemental Material.     

Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese lexical database

In this article, we present Procura-PALavras (P-PAL), a Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese (EP) lexical database. Based on a contemporary printed corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL provides a broad range of word attributes and statistics, including several measures of word frequency (e.g., raw counts, per-million word frequency, logarithmic Zipf scale), morpho-syntactic information (e.g., parts of speech [PoSs], grammatical gender and number, dominant PoS, and frequency and relative frequency of the dominant PoS), as well as several lexical and sublexical orthographic (e.g., number of letters; consonant–vowel orthographic structure; density and frequency of orthographic neighbors; orthographic Levenshtein distance; orthographic uniqueness point; orthographic syllabification; and trigram, bigram, and letter type and token frequencies), and phonological measures (e.g., pronunciation, number of phonemes, stress, density and frequency of phonological neighbors, transposed and phonographic neighbors, syllabification, and biphone and phone type and token frequencies) for ~53,000 lemmatized and ~208,000 nonlemmatized EP word forms. To obtain these metrics, researchers can choose between two word queries in the application: (i) analyze words previously selected for specific attributes and/or lexical and sublexical characteristics, or (ii) generate word lists that meet word requirements defined by the user in the menu of analyses. For the measures it provides and the flexibility it allows, P-PAL will be a key resource to support research in all cognitive areas that use EP verbal stimuli. P-PAL is freely available at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools.     

The face-specific proportion congruency effect: social stimuli as contextual cues

Previous research shows that larger interference is observed in contexts associated with a high proportion of congruent trials than in those associated with a low proportion of congruent trials. Given that one of the most relevant contexts for human beings is social context, researchers have recently explored the possibility that social stimuli could also work as contextual cues for the allocation of attentional control. In fact, it has been shown that individuals use social categories (i.e., men and women) as cues to allocate attentional control. In this work, we go further by showing that individual faces (instead of the social categories they belong to) associated with a high proportion of congruent trials can also lead to larger interference effects compared to individual faces predicting a relatively low proportion of congruent trials. Furthermore, we show that faces associated with a high proportion of congruent trials are more positively evaluated than faces associated with a high proportion of incongruent trials. These results demonstrate that unique human faces are potential contextual cues than can be employed to apply cognitive control when performing an automatic task.     

Is the Ambivalence a Sign of the Multiple-Self Nature of the Human Being? Interdisciplinary Remarks

Ambivalence is a constituent feature of human beings. The aim of this article is to systematise the fundamental sources of ambivalence (neuropsychic, socio-cultural and situational) and highlight that ambivalence can be considered as an external sign or manifestation of a complex and multiple internal human nature; that is, a human being constituted by multiple selves. In this paper the self is viewed as a principle of organization and integration for action, that is, as a complex neurological process and not as a static entity. The purpose is to show how by assuming ambivalence and the multiple-self, social and anthropological theories can offer a more realistic view of human beings.     

Efficacy of an adaptation of the Best Possible Self intervention implemented through positive technology: a randomized control trial

Best possible Self (BPS) is a positive psychological intervention based on positive future thinking. It has been shown to be effective in improving well-being and depressive symptoms over short periods of time. Positive technology is a scientific approach designed to increase well-being through Information and Communication Technologies. To assess the efficacy of the BPS implemented through a positive technology application in improving optimistic thinking, affect and depressive symptoms, during a one-month period, with two follow-ups one and three months later. Randomized, single-blind control trial. Central randomization was performed by an independent researcher using computer software to generate lists allocating participants to treatments. Recruitment was carried out through advertisements at two universities. Randomized participants were 78 young adults who were assigned to the e-BPS condition (n = 38) or to a control group (n = 40). Participants were asked to visualize their BPS each day using a Positive Technology Application. The Control condition consisted of thinking and writing about daily activities, also through technologies. Affect, future expectations, and depressive symptoms were measured in different time frames. 78 participants were analyzed using intention-to-treat analyses. Results showed that BPS was effective in improving future expectations measures and reducing depressive symptoms until the post-training. However, these effects were not maintained in the three-month follow-up period. This study indicates that BPS can be effectively adapted for implementation through positive technologies. Factors such as the variety of exercises and the instructions can play a role in maintaining the changes in the long term. Trial registration clinicaltrails.gov Identifier: NCT02321605.     

The effect of variations of emotional expressions on mnemonic discrimination and traditional recognition memory

Face recognition occurs when a face is recognised despite changes between learning and test exposures. Yet there has been relatively little research on how variations in emotional expressions influence people’s ability to recognise these changes. We evaluated the ability to discriminate old and similar expressions of emotions (i.e. mnemonic discrimination) of the same face, as well as the discrimination ability between old and dissimilar (new) expressions of the same face, reflecting traditional discrimination. An emotional mnemonic discrimination task with morphed faces that were similar but not identical to the original face was used. Results showed greater mnemonic discrimination for learned neutral expressions that at test became slightly more fearful rather than happy. For traditional discrimination, there was greater accuracy for learned happy faces becoming fearful, rather than those changing from fearful-to-happy. These findings indicate that emotional expressions may have asymmetrical influences on mnemonic and traditional discrimination of the same face.