Implications of Family Cohesion and Conflict for Adolescent Mood and Well-Being: Examining Within- and Between-Family Processes on a Daily Timescale

Family-level conflict and cohesion are well-established predictors of adolescent mental health. However, traditional approaches focusing on between-family differences in cohesion and conflict may overlook daily intrafamily variability that might provide important new information. We used data from a 21-day daily diary protocol in a sample of 151 caregivers (95.3% female) and their adolescent child (61.5% female) in two-caregiver families to test whether daily changes in family functioning are associated with daily changes in adolescent well-being and whether adolescent well-being depends on average levels of family functioning. We examined family cohesion and conflict in relation to adolescent angry, depressed, and anxious mood, as well as happiness, life satisfaction, and meaning and purpose in life in multilevel models. Both cohesion and conflict exhibited meaningful daily variation. Adolescent-reported cohesion and conflict had unique within-family associations with all six adolescent outcomes. Models using parent reports of family functioning yielded fewer associations than models with adolescent reports; however, several findings remained. Cross-level interactions indicated that within-family variations in cohesion were only associated with adolescent depression in families with lower average levels of cohesion across days. In sum, this study provides compelling evidence that families exhibit meaningful variability from day to day and that daily variation has important implications for adolescent well-being.     

Episodic feeling-of-knowing accuracy and cued recall in the elderly: evidence for double dissociation involving executive functioning and processing speed

This research investigated adult age differences in a metamemory monitoring task-episodic feeling-of-knowing (FOK) and in an episodic memory task-cued recall. Executive functioning and processing speed were examined as mediators of these age differences. Young and elderly adults were administered an episodic FOK task, a cued recall task, executive tests and speed tests. Age-related decline was observed on all the measures. Correlation analyses revealed a pattern of double dissociation which indicates a specific relationship between executive score and FOK accuracy, and between speed score and cued recall. When executive functioning and processing speed were evaluated concurrently on FOK and cued recall variables, hierarchical regression analyses showed that executive score was a better mediator of age-related variance in FOK, and that speed score was the better mediator of age-related variance in cued recall.     

Development of letter-specific processing: the effect of reading ability

During development, perceptual processing is tuned to inputs in the environment such that certain frequently encountered classes of stimuli are processed more effectively than similar comparison stimuli. Letters represent a class of stimuli that are encountered frequently in the environment, at least in literate cultures. Thus, the present study examined the development of letter-specific processing in children 6-19 years old by comparing the difference between performance on a letter-matching task and an unfamiliar non-letter-matching task in different subject groups. Results revealed an increase in letter-specific processing with development. Moreover, comparisons of letter-specific processing in groups of subjects matched either in age or reading ability indicate that the emergence of letter-specific processing is linked to increased reading skill, rather than increased age per se. Findings support theories of perceptual expertise, which suggest that skilled processing drives the specialization of perceptual mechanisms for certain classes of stimuli.     

Estimating the quantitative relation between incongruent information and response time

In Eriksen's flanker paradigm, participants' responses are slower and more error-prone when task-relevant and simultaneously available task-irrelevant cues are incongruent. The influence of task-irrelevant information decreases as its distance from the task-relevant information increases. Here, we manipulated the quantity of task-irrelevant information while keeping the distance constant. We asked whether when the impact on response selection processes was stronger the more incongruent information was available, or whether the impact on response selection depended only on its presence or absence. We conducted an experiment, in which subjects had to discriminate the direction of motion of a central point-light-walker that was flanked by two, four, or eight point-light-walkers at an equal distance from the center. The experiment showed that reaction times increased with the number of incongruent walkers. This effect was modulated by the total number of walkers, showing that the effect of incongruent information saturates when the display is cluttered.     

Impact of decision goal on escalation

This research investigates the sunk-cost effect or escalation defined as the irrational tendency to choose to continue to invest money, time, or effort following unsuccessful investments. Building on previous research demonstrating a loss-sensitivity principle in sequential decision making, the hypothesis was proposed that a loss-minimization goal would lead to stronger effects of sunk outcomes (prior gains and losses) than would a gain-maximizing goal. The hypothesis was investigated in three experiments with undergraduates responding to investment decision scenarios. Although the tendency to continue investments was always larger for gain-maximizing than for loss-minimizing goal instructions, the sunk-outcome effect was stronger in the former case. However, when the decisions were personal and concerned lower stakes rather than business investments involving large amounts of money, the expected stronger effect of sunk outcomes was found for loss-minimizing goal instructions. Another finding was that the expected value was never ignored, thus suggesting that future research should focus on the joint effects of the expected value and sunk outcomes.     

Inhibition and blindness to response-compatible stimuli: a reappraisal

Recent studies show that the preparation of an action can interfere with the concurrent detection and identification of objects that share features with this action, a phenomenon termed blindness to response-compatible stimuli. In order to account for the blindness effect, an integration mechanism for response features similar to the one suggested for object features has been proposed. In the present article, we propose an alternative explanation, namely an action-effect inhibition mechanism. This mechanism was demonstrated in two versions of a dual-task experiment using a primary stop-signal task. The results showed that when the primary response was withheld (signal-inhibit trials), this resulted in lower identification rates for compatible secondary task stimuli. On the other hand, we did not find any evidence for a blindness effect when the primary response was executed (no-signal trials). Additionally we found that identification rates depended on the time course of the inhibition process as estimated from our data. Consequently, the blindness effect seems to result from the requirement to inhibit the response, perhaps even if only temporary.     

Effect of face familiarity on age decision

The present experiment was planned to check whether the extraction of apparent age is affected by face identity (familiarity) or not. According to the traditional view, age estimation should be carried out independently of face identity, because it is one of the visually derived semantic codes (like gender and ethnicity). However, little is known about its underlying mechanisms. Moreover, some recent studies have cast doubt on the parallel thesis regarding facial expression, facial speech, ethnicity, and gender. Given the promising results of a pilot experiment (n=24), 16 Caucasian participants were enrolled in an "age decision" task on morphed faces derived from one old and one young source-face, in the proportion 70:30. The respondents had previously been familiarised with half the source faces by a learning procedure (associating the face, surname, occupation and city of residence of the person displayed), while the remaining half were unfamiliar. The results showed that age decision was affected by face familiarity, at least when the task was perceptually difficult enough. This adds support to the thesis that the identification of identity and the extraction of visually derived semantic codes are not made independently from each other. The status of age, within the visually derived semantic codes, is also discussed.     

Inhibition of return for expected and unexpected targets

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slower reaction times (RTs) to targets that occur in the same, rather than in a different, location as a preceding onset cue. The present study examined IOR for expected (likely) and unexpected (unlikely) targets under conditions in which stimulus-response (S-R) expectancies were generated on a trial-by-trial basis or maintained across a block of trials. Three boxes were aligned along the vertical midline. In Experiments 1 and 2, the appearance of a cue in the upper or lower box was a signal to generate an expectancy about the most likely color of an impending discrimination target. In Experiment 3, one target color was more likely than another across a block of trials. In all cases, cue location did not predict target location. When S-R expectancies were generated on a trial-by-trial basis, IOR occurred for Unlikely targets but not for Likely targets; this was true across a range of cue-target stimulus onset asynchronies. In contrast, when S-R expectancies were maintained over a block of trials, IOR was larger for Likely than for Unlikely targets. These findings reveal a critical interaction of S-R expectancies with IOR. This interaction not only demonstrates the modulation of IOR by cognitive expectancies, but in doing so also provides evidence that is consistent with the view that IOR reflects a conservative response bias.     

Nonverbal representation of time and number in adults

A wealth of human and animal research supports common neural processing of numerical and temporal information. Here we test whether adult humans spontaneously encode number and time in a paradigm similar to those previously used to test the mode-control model in animals. Subjects were trained to classify visual stimuli that varied in both number and duration as few/short or many/long. Subsequently subjects were tested with novel stimuli that varied time and held number constant (eight flashes in 0.8-3.2s) or varied number and held time constant (4-16 flashes in 1.6s). Adult humans classified novel stimuli as many/long as monotonic functions of both number and duration, consistent with simultaneous, nonverbal, analog encoding. Numerical sensitivity, however, was finer than temporal sensitivity, suggesting differential salience of time and number. These results support the notion that adults simultaneously represent the number and duration of stimuli but suggest a possible asymmetry in their representations.     

I saw it for longer than you: the relationship between perceived encoding duration and memory conformity

The memory conformity effect is when people's memories become similar to one another's following a discussion. The present study examined whether an individual's beliefs in the quality of their memory, relative to another person's, mediates susceptibility to memory conformity. Perceived encoding duration was manipulated by telling dyad members that one person had encoded a set of pictures for either half or twice as long as their partner. In fact, actual encoding duration was the same for all participants. Dyad members each encoded slightly different versions of otherwise identical pictures and discussed them prior to an individual free recall test. Participants who believed that they had encoded the pictures for half as long as their partner were more susceptible to memory conformity, as indicated by their increased tendency to report errant items at test that had been encountered from their partner rather than items that they had actually seen. This effect of perceived encoding duration on memory conformity was mediated through response order. A source monitoring test found that these unseen items were errantly attributed to the pictures approximately 50% of the time. The findings are discussed in relation to the role of metamemory in susceptibility to memory conformity.