Narcissism and romantic attraction: Evidence from a collectivistic culture

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between narcissism and romantic attraction in a collectivistic culture (i.e., Thailand). In Study 1, participants completed a measure of narcissism and rated their attraction to four potential romantic partners. There was an overall preference across participants for caring targets. Additionally, high narcissists were more attracted to admiring and high status targets than were low narcissists. A similar pattern of results was found in Study 2 with targets that were either high caring/low status or high status/low caring. Overall, caring in a partner was highly valued in a collectivistic culture, but narcissism still predicted attraction to targets who offered the potential for self-enhancement. These findings suggest that classically Western self-enhancement can be found in Eastern samples; however, to uncover these self-enhancement processes, researchers might need to use a personality variable such as narcissism.     

Early maladaptive schemas of personality disorder subtypes.

This investigation attempted to examine the cognitive schemas of five distinct clusters that emerged from a cluster analysis of the personality disorder scales of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-II (Millon, 1987). Specifically, the degree to which early maladaptive schemas, as measured by the Cognitive Schema Questionnaire-Short Form (Young, 1994), could correctly identify empirically derived patterns of personality disorders was examined. Between-cluster differences centered on five personality components and five schemas. Discriminant analyses revealed two significant functions composed of cognitive schemas, which correctly identified 61.2% of the entire sample in terms of cluster group membership. The total proportion of variance in the two significant functions associated with cluster group differences was 76.8%. Findings are discussed in relation to the domain theory of personality disorders posited by Millon and Davis (1996).     

Persons and Substances

I have argued elsewhere that the psychological criterion of personalidentity entails that a person is not an object, but a series ofpsychological events. As this is somewhat counter-intuitive,I consider whether the psychological theorist can argue that a person, while not a substance, exists in a way that is akin to theway that substances exist. I develop ten criteria that such a`quasi-substance' should meet, and I argue that a reasonablecase can be made to show that the psychological theorist's conception of a person meets these criteria.     

Conceptualizing ‘social capital’ for health promotion in small local communities: a micro‐qualitative study

This paper reports on a micro‐qualitative case study of peoples' experiences of local community life in a south‐east English town. This material is used as the basis for a critical discussion of the suitability of Putnam's notion of social capital as a conceptual tool for the design and evaluation of ‘community strengthening’ policies and interventions. The study was motivated by a concern that too much debate about social capital has been conducted by academics and policy‐makers in a top‐down manner, with inadequate attention to the realities of life in the local communities that they refer to. Three‐hour semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 37 residents in two less affluent wards in our town of interest. Informants—half men and half women, and spread across the 15–75 age group—were encouraged to talk about their personal experiences of local community life. Interview findings are presented within the ‘norm’ categories of trust, neighbourliness and reciprocal help and support, and the ‘network’ categories of participation in informal networks, voluntary groupings and community activist groupings. Our case study points to a number of ways in which Putnam's concept needs to be refined if it is to inform ‘community strengthening’ policies and interventions in England. Far more notice needs to be taken of the role played by informal networks of friends and neighbours in the construction of local community life. Attention also needs to be given to the complex and shifting geographical spread of peoples' significant social networks. Putnam's conceptualization of cohesive local communities and his unitary notions of trust and local identity may also be unduly essentialist. In our particular communities of interest, they failed to capture the fluidity of local community norms and networks in a rapidly changing society. They also failed to do justice to the extent to which social distinctions—such as age, gender, ethnicity and housing tenure—shape and constrain the way in which people create, sustain and access social capital. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attributing “Third World Poverty” in Australia and Malawi: A Case of Donor Bias?1

Causal attributions for poverty in the developing world were examined from the perspectives of “actors” living in a “developing country” (Malawi) and “observers” living in a “developed country” (Australia). Ninety‐eight Malawian and 100 Australian weekend shoppers responded to the Causes of Third World Poverty Questionnaire (CTWPQ) and the Just World Scale (JWS), with Australian participants also providing information about their frequency of donating to foreign‐aid charities. Consistent with the actor–observer bias, Australians were more likely than were Malawians to attribute poverty to dispositional characteristics of the poor, rather than to situational factors. Among the Australians, situational attributions were in turn associated with frequency of donation behavior. The finding of a donor bias in this sample has important implications for the social marketing of foreign aid to Western donor publics.     

Cognitive arithmetic across cultures.

Canadian university students either of Chinese origin (CC) or non-Asian origin (NAC) and Chinese university students educated in Asia (AC) solved simple-arithmetic problems in the 4 basic operations (e.g., 3 + 4, 7 - 3, 3 x 4, 12 divided by 3) and reported their solution strategies. They also completed a standardized test of more complex multistep arithmetic. For complex arithmetic, ACs outperformed both CCs and NACs. For simple arithmetic, however, ACs and CCs were equal and both performed better than NACs. The superior simple-arithmetic skills of CCs relative to NACs implies that extracurricular culture-specific factors rather than differences in formal education explain the simple-arithmetic advantage for Chinese relative to non-Asian North American adults. NAC's relatively poor simple-arithmetic performance resulted both from less efficient retrieval skills and greater use of procedural strategies. Nonetheless, all 3 groups reported using procedures for the larger simple subtraction and division problems, confirming the importance of procedural knowledge in skilled adults' performance of elementary mathematics.     

THE WORLDWIDE BURDEN OF INFANT MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL DISORDER: REPORT OF THE TASK FORCE OF THE WORLD ASSOCIATION FOR INFANT MENTAL HEALTH

Children worldwide experience mental and emotional disorders. Mental disorders occurring among young children, especially infants (birth –3 years), often go unrecognized. Prevalence rates are difficult to determine because of lack of awareness and difficulty assessing and diagnosing young children. Existing data, however, suggest that rates of disorders in young children are comparable to those of older children and adolescents (von Klitzing, Dohnert, Kroll, & Grube, 2015 ). The lack of widespread recognition of disorders of infancy is particularly concerning due to the unique positioning of infancy as foundational in the developmental process. Both the brain and behavior are in vulnerable states of development across the first 3 years of life, with potential for enduring deviations to occur in response to early trauma and deprivation. Intervention approaches for young children require sensitivity to their developmental needs within their families. The primacy of infancy as a time of unique foundational risks for disorder, the impact of trauma and violence on young children's development, the impact of family disruption on children's attachment, and existing literature on prevalence rates of early disorders are discussed. Finally, global priorities for addressing these disorders of infancy are highlighted to support prevention and intervention actions that may alleviate suffering among our youngest world citizens.     

Aging impacts memory for perceptual,but not narrative,event details

Memory is well known to decline over the course of healthy aging. However, memory is not a monolith and draws from different kinds of representations. Historically, much of our understanding of age-related memory decline stems from recognition of isolated studied items. In contrast, real-life events are often remembered as narratives, and this kind of information is generally missed in typical recognition memory studies. Here, we designed a task to tax mnemonic discrimination of event details, directly contrasting perceptual and narrative memory. Older and younger adults watched an episode of a television show and later completed an old/new recognition test featuring targets, novel foils, and similar lures in narrative and perceptual domains. While we observed no age-related differences on basic recognition of repeated targets and novel foils, older adults showed a deficit in correctly rejecting perceptual, but not narrative, lures. These findings provide insight into the vulnerability of different memory domains in aging and may be useful in characterizing individuals at risk for pathological cognitive decline.

Memory decline is among the most commonly reported cognitive changes with aging (Craik 1994; Bäckman et al. 2001; Salthouse 2003). In particular, older adults appear to show marked decline in the ability to support episodic memories for specific events and instances (Nilsson 2003; Salthouse 2003; Hedden and Gabrieli 2004). Older adults reliably show deficits when freely recalling studied information (Craik and McDowd 1987; Gutchess et al. 2006) or remembering specific item–context pairings (Old and Naveh-Benjamin 2008; Craik et al. 2010). In contrast, older adults do not consistently show deficiencies in old/new recognition memory. This and related evidence have led to the view that older adults have preserved memory for gist, but loss of specific details (Schacter et al. 1997; Abadie et al. 2021; Grilli and Sheldon 2022). That is, older adults tend to remember a general understanding of the overall experience but are disadvantaged at maintaining precise, high-fidelity details (Radvansky et al. 2001). However, it is not well understood whether such relative loss of detailed memory extends across information domains.The Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) is a recognition paradigm that is specifically designed to tax high-fidelity memory representations (Kirwan and Stark 2007; Stark et al. 2013, 2019). MST performance depends on maintaining similar representations in memory as distinct and nonoverlapping (Yassa and Stark 2011). This is thought to rely on pattern separation in the hippocampus (McClelland et al. 1995; Norman and O''Reilly 2003; Leutgeb et al. 2007; Bakker et al. 2008), a process that is strongly impacted in the aging brain (Wilson et al. 2006; Burke et al. 2010). Typical MST paradigms involve an incidental encoding task, such as making indoor or outdoor judgments for pictures of everyday objects, and then a surprise recognition memory test. In the memory test, participants are tasked to identify exact repetitions of previously encoded objects (targets), new objects (foils), and objects that are perceptually similar to images encountered during the encoding task (lures) as old or new. Older adults are more likely to endorse similar lures as previously studied items (Toner et al. 2009; Holden et al. 2013), which correlates with aberrant structural and functional properties of the human hippocampus and surrounding cortical regions (Yassa et al. 2011a; Reagh et al. 2018). The MST therefore offers mechanistic insights into high-fidelity recognition-based memory in the human brain.Nonetheless, studies using the MST have often limited their scope to detecting visual changes among isolated items. Other recognition studies that have incorporated discrimination of highly similar information in more complex formats, such as source memory discrimination, also report age-related deficits (Schacter et al. 1991; Chalfonte and Johnson 1996; Naveh-Benjamin et al. 2003; Dennis et al. 2008). For instance, older adults had difficulty assessing the source of a word when it originated from two female speakers compared with across gender speakers (Ferguson et al. 1992). These studies, however, largely assess recognition memory processes for isolated items—snapshots of perceptual experience in the context of a laboratory experiment. Moreover, there is growing evidence that aging does not equally impact all domains of information that are involved in constructing a memory. For instance, recent work suggests that aging distinctly influences medial temporal lobe circuits underlying memory for items versus contexts or space (Reagh et al. 2016, 2018; Berron et al. 2018).Real-world memories are not made of isolated pieces of information, but instead are structured and bridged together by meaning (Schank 1975; Conway and Rubin 2019; Cohn-Sheehy et al. 2022). Prior studies have shown that older adults are relatively impaired at detecting and remembering perceptual changes in everyday events, suggesting that basic findings from MST paradigms likely translate to real-world deficits (Wahlheim and Zacks 2019). However, a critical component of human memory is information about narratives, whether autobiographical or fictional (Radvansky et al. 2005; León 2016). Narratives tend to be organized to follow an ideal internal structure that can be relied on (Mandler and Johnson 1977; Thorndyke 1977). Studies that use narratives to test memory typically task participants with recalling information from a story or event. This has led to the idea that aging impacts recall more drastically than recognition (Danckert and Craik 2013). Interestingly, similar to studies of recognition memory, recall performance in aging has been characterized by loss of specific details and emphasis on information that capture the central idea of an experience (Addis et al. 2008). This may be due to the unconstrained nature of recall tasks or because self-initiated recall may be more taxing for older adults. Thus, the extent to which narrative details are truly lost versus not voluntarily retrieved in aging remains unclear. In line with this idea, tasks designed to drive participants to recall events in terms of specific details have shown enhancement effects in older adults (Madore et al. 2014). To our knowledge, however, there has not been an investigation into whether recognition of highly specific narrative details is affected in aging similarly to perceptual details.Testing of narrative and perceptual domains alongside one another in a controlled and highly similar way allows us to gain a better understanding into the processing of different types of information in memory. Memory is not a unitary phenomenon, and memory performance can often be based on multiple processes and types of representations. This approach offers unique insights into the aging brain, as it has been previously proposed that information about narratives and situations may be preferentially encoded differently in distinct cortical pathways to the hippocampus compared with more perceptually focused information (Ranganath and Ritchey 2012; Reagh and Ranganath 2018). Other emerging neural evidence suggests that specific networks specialize in cognitive processes that are relevant for gist and detailed memory (Robin and Moscovitch 2017; Sekeres et al. 2018). Given that these brain networks may be distinctly vulnerable to age-related pathologies (Jagust 2018; Maass et al. 2019), these insights may further offer us clues into pathological aging.Here, we designed a task to simultaneously tax mnemonic discrimination in perceptual and narrative domains. This task is analogous to traditional MST paradigms composed of an incidental encoding task followed by a recognition test. However, with the goal of tapping into mechanisms involved in encoding of the meaningful, continuous, and dynamic world that we live in, the incidental encoding task consists of watching a television sitcom (HBO''s Curb Your Enthusiasm, S01E07: “AAMCO”) (see Fig. 1A). Television shows offer a unique methodology that balances realistic scenarios while directing our attention to specific perceptual and narrative details. After encoding, participants completed an old/new recognition test featuring targets, foils, and similar lures in the perceptual domain, as well as a novel variant testing mnemonic discrimination of narrative details. This allowed us to test detailed memory for perceptual and narrative information using an ecologically valid yet constrained approach. That is, encoding involves an immersive stimulus that hinges on meaningful and nonarbitrary narrative organization. Additionally, although retrieval is akin to a standard recognition test, it assesses memory along two dimensions that may provide insight into how we process different memory representations for lifelike events. Unlike prior studies testing narrative understanding, here we critically tested narrative memory in terms of basic recognition (targets and foils) as well as high-fidelity narrative details (lures). Performance was compared across younger and older adults for both information domains.Open in a separate windowFigure 1.(A) Participants viewed a 26-min episode of a sitcom. (B) Old/new recognition task based on narrative or perceptual details, with order of test domain counterbalanced across participants. Each recognition task consisted of 30 targets (described or depicted moments from the video encoded), similar lures (moments described or depicted as being similar to the video encoded), and novel foils (described or depicted moments not from the video encoded).We predicted no differences in basic recognition of repeated targets and novel foils across age groups based on prior MST results (Stark et al. 2013, 2019; Toner et al. 2009; Holden et al. 2013). In line with prior work showing decreased performance in perceptual lures among older adults (Toner et al. 2009; Holden et al. 2013; Stark et al. 2013, 2019), we further predicted greater age-related deficits in perceptual lure discrimination than narrative lure discrimination. Relatively intact memory for narrative details may reflect being able to rely on narrative structure or the meaning of events.