Cognitive and emotional empathy in typically developing children: The influence of age,gender, and intelligence

In the current study, the influence of age, gender and IQ on cognitive and emotional empathy in school-aged children and adolescents was examined adopting two behavioural paradigms: participants were shown film clips with different scenes of social interaction to which they were asked to respond. Thus, 134 children aged seven to 17 years (mean age = 138.4 months, sd = 31.66 months) were tested for emotion recognition, perspective taking and emotional empathy. Age strongly influenced components of cognitive empathy and explained 33.5% to 39.1% of the variance. Gender and IQ also were significant predictors, yet only explained 3% to 5%, respectively 8% to 9% of the variance. In contrast, neither age, gender nor IQ were related to emotional empathy. Results suggest developmental maturation of cognitive, but not emotional empathy throughout childhood and adolescence. To explain variability in emotional empathy, additional biological and psychosocial factors need to be studied.     

The effect of neutral and negative colour photographs on children's item directed forgetting

Intentional forgetting is an active process relying on cognitive mechanisms (e.g., rehearsal strategies and inhibition) developing during the elementary school years. Colour photographs might be rehearsed differently in memory than words, and therefore result in a different developmental pattern of intentional forgetting than previously acknowledged. Moreover, negative material is thought to be particularly reliant upon inhibitory mechanisms in order not to be encoded in memory. Thus, children's item-directed forgetting (DF) might develop differently both in relation to colour photographs in general and for negative pictorial stimuli in particular. The aim of the present study was to investigate item DF for colour photographs of neutral and negative valence in sixty-five school-aged children (8–12 years of age). In the present study, a DF effect was revealed irrespective of age for neutral images as well as negative images. Results are discussed in relation to potential mechanisms underlying item DF for colour photographs and how these affect development of intentional forgetting.     

A cluster-analytic approach to identity style classification: Four seems to be better than three

Abstract

In their previous study Crocetti, Berzonsky, and Meeus evaluated the usefulness of empirically-based methods of classification in the process of distinguishing subgroups characterized by different identity styles. They suggested that the four-cluster solution best reflected intra-individual differentiation. One of these groups had not been predicted in Berzonsky’s identity style theory – the group of individuals high in both the normative and the informational style. The aim of this study was to replicate this observation and to expand the perspective of Crocetti et al. to include the emotional functioning of individuals from the different clusters. We were interested in the differences between individuals who predominately used particular identity styles with respect to the personal identity processes (exploration and commitment), the proneness to experience the negative emotions of shame and guilt, and the more general difficulty in regulation of negative emotional states. The participants of the study were 202 Polish university students between the age of 19 and 27. The obtained results showed that the four-cluster solution was the most optimal one. The differences between individuals with different identity styles are presented and discussed.     

Assessing the effect of sound complexity on the audiotactile cross-modal dynamic capture task

Recent studies have provided evidence that dual-task interference is typically caused by a single-channel bottleneck, but the processing locus of the bottleneck has yet to be pinned down. A bottleneck locus at the response-selection stage is widely advocated, but an earlier locus would be consistent with most previous evidence. Four new experiments used the “locus of slack” method to investigate whether the stages postponed by the central bottleneck include stimulus classification, a very late stage of perceptual processing. The experiments varied stimulus classification difficulty for two different analogueue perceptual judgements. Experiment 1 found only modest absorption into slack for the difficulty of a spatial position judgement. Experiments 2–4 found virtually no absorption into slack for the difficulty of a box-width judgement. These results support a bottleneck locus beginning at or before the stage of stimulus classification and hence prior to the stage of response selection. Other evidence, however, leaves no doubt that response selection is also subject to bottleneck postponement. Two architectures are discussed that can account parsimoniously for both old and new results. One posits a single bottleneck resulting from a unified CPU-like central processor; the other posits multiple bottlenecks resulting from multiple processors accomplishing different substages of central processing.     

Fear selectively modulates visual mental imagery and visual perception

Preferences for faces are thought to be the result of either general adaptations for mate selection, and thus influenced by sexual dimorphism, or mechanisms of general information processing and thus nonspecific to faces. If mate choice determines face preference then it should follow that the sex of a face should affect attractiveness judgements. To test this idea we used image morphing to generate three versions of face images: original, opposite sex, and antiface. First we established that the sex of the face was identifiable in our images. We then collected attractiveness ratings for the three face types. We found that attractiveness ratings to the original faces were correlated with, and did not differ significantly between, ratings to the opposite-sex faces. However, ratings for either the original or opposite face types were not correlated with and were significantly lower than ratings to the antifaces. Our findings failed to support the idea that attractiveness is related to sexual dimorphism in faces alone but suggest instead that other more generic factors influence preferences for all faces.     

Early detection and avoidance of threatening faces during passive viewing

To evaluate whether there is an early attentional bias towards negative stimuli, we tracked participants' eyes while they passively viewed displays composed of four Ekman faces. In Experiment 1 each display consisted of three neutral faces and one face depicting fear or happiness. In half of the trials, all faces were inverted. Although the passive viewing task should have been very sensitive to attentional biases, we found no evidence that overt attention was biased towards fearful faces. Instead, people tended to actively avoid looking at the fearful face. This avoidance was evident very early in scene viewing, suggesting that the threat associated with the faces was evaluated rapidly. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and extended it to angry faces. In sum, our data suggest that negative facial expressions are rapidly analysed and influence visual scanning, but, rather than attract attention, such faces are actively avoided.     

Emotional target cues eliminate age differences in prospective memory

Cue saliency is known to influence prospective memory performance, whereby perceptually or conceptually distinct cues facilitate remembering and attenuate adult age-related deficits. The present study investigated whether similar benefits for older adults are also seen for emotional valence. A total of 41 older and 41 younger adults performed a prospective memory task in which the emotional valence of the prospective memory cues was manipulated. Emotionally valenced cues increased prospective memory performance across both groups. Age deficits were only observed when neutral (but not positive or negative) prospective cues were presented. Findings are consistent with predictions that salient cues facilitate participants' prospective memory performance and reduce age-related differences, while extending the concept of saliency to include emotional valence.     

It's not what you play,it's how you play it: Timbre affects perception of emotion in music

Salient sensory experiences often have a strong emotional tone, but the neuropsychological relations between perceptual characteristics of sensory objects and the affective information they convey remain poorly defined. Here we addressed the relationship between sound identity and emotional information using music. In two experiments, we investigated whether perception of emotions is influenced by altering the musical instrument on which the music is played, independently of other musical features. In the first experiment, 40 novel melodies each representing one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, or anger) were each recorded on four different instruments (an electronic synthesizer, a piano, a violin, and a trumpet), controlling for melody, tempo, and loudness between instruments. Healthy participants (23 young adults aged 18–30 years, 24 older adults aged 58–75 years) were asked to select which emotion they thought each musical stimulus represented in a four-alternative forced-choice task. Using a generalized linear mixed model we found a significant interaction between instrument and emotion judgement with a similar pattern in young and older adults (p < .0001 for each age group). The effect was not attributable to musical expertise. In the second experiment using the same melodies and experimental design, the interaction between timbre and perceived emotion was replicated (p < .05) in another group of young adults for novel synthetic timbres designed to incorporate timbral cues to particular emotions. Our findings show that timbre (instrument identity) independently affects the perception of emotions in music after controlling for other acoustic, cognitive, and performance factors.     

Developing number–space associations: SNARC effects using a color discrimination task in 5-year-olds

Human adults’ numerical representation is spatially oriented; consequently, participants are faster to respond to small/large numerals with their left/right hand, respectively, when doing a binary classification judgment on numbers, known as the SNARC (spatial–numerical association of response codes) effect. Studies on the emergence and development of the SNARC effect remain scarce. The current study introduces an innovative new paradigm based on a simple color judgment of Arabic digits. Using this task, we found a SNARC effect in children as young as 5.5 years. In contrast, when preschool children needed to perform a magnitude judgment task necessitating exact number knowledge, the SNARC effect started to emerge only at 5.8 years. Moreover, the emergence of a magnitude SNARC but not a color SNARC was linked to proficiency with Arabic digits. Our results suggest that access to a spatially oriented approximate magnitude representation from symbolic digits emerges early in ontogenetic development. Exact magnitude judgments, on the other hand, rely on experience with Arabic digits and, thus, necessitate formal or informal schooling to give access to a spatially oriented numerical representation.     

Advantages of Rhythmic Movements at Resonance: Minimal Active Degrees of Freedom,Minimal Noise,and Maximal Predictability

Using time delay embedding, the authors applied phase space reconstruction to the time series of rhythmic movements of a hand-held pendulum. Subjects (N = 6) produced the manual oscillations about the wrist at the pendulum's resonant frequency and at a higher and a lower frequency. The number of active degrees of freedom required to capture the dynamics of the rhythmic behavior was 3 for the resonant frequency and 4 for each of the nonresonant frequencies. The residual high-dimensional noise was similarly lowest for the resonant frequency. Whereas 33% and 20%, respectively, of the vectors in the phase spaces of the dynamics higher and lower than resonance were unpredictable, only 12% were unpredictable at resonance. Finally, the predictability of the evolving dynamics extended farther into the future for oscillations at the resonant frequency. At resonance, the prediction horizon was 5 times farther than the prediction horizon for the higher than resonance behavior and 2.5 times farther than that for the lower than resonance behavior. The results suggest that, in pendular oscillations of a limb or limb segment, attunement of the central nervous system to the resonant frequency minimizes the variables to be controlled and maximizes the predictability of the rhythmic movement's chaotic dynamics.