Empathic accuracy and cognitions during conflict: An in‐depth analysis of understanding scores

Empathic accuracy research indicates that partners achieve only moderate success at reading each other's thoughts. The current study identifies specific patterns of online thought that contribute to empathic inaccuracy during conflict interactions. Married/cohabiting partners completed a conflict interaction and reported their own thoughts during video‐assisted recall of the interaction, also inferring the thoughts of the other partner. Content analysis of these online thoughts demonstrated a high degree of mindfulness about the process of communication, along with a perspective bias, in which partners tended to construe their own communication as constructive and the other partner's communication as avoidant and confrontational. Specific mind‐reading errors linked to both the thematic content and affective tone of online thought predicted lower overall empathic accuracy.     

The effects of secondary tasks that involve listening and speaking on young adult drivers with traits associated with autism spectrum disorders: A pilot study with driving simulation

A driver’s license is key to independence for many young adults, including those with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). However, individuals with ASDs may face special challenges when learning to drive. If effective driver training is to be devised for this demographic, it is important to determine the nature of these challenges. Driving inherently requires multitasking (e.g. steering, speed maintenance, navigation, hazard detection) and drivers are routinely obligated to combine driving with the demands of listening and responding to others, as occurs during driving lessons. Given that individuals who display traits associated with ASDs may have special difficulties with secondary tasks and especially those that involve socialization, we examined the effects of secondary tasks that involve listening and responding to questions while driving. We compared performance when simply driving (the control condition), driving while listening (the audiobook condition), and driving while listening and speaking (the prompt: answer condition). The autism spectrum quotient (AQ:Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001), a commonly used self-report questionnaire intended to measure traits associated with ASDs in research, was used to identify young drivers with more and fewer traits related to ASDs in a community sample, (None had a clinical diagnosis of ASD.) Consistent with studies of drivers clinically diagnosed with ASDs, we found that high AQ scorers reported greater mental and physical demand, effort, and frustration when driving, and showed more moment-to-moment variability in lane position and hazard reaction compared to low AQ scorers as measured in a driving simulator. Differences between the low and high scorers were typically largest when secondary tasks were imposed, but the predicted interaction between drive condition and AQ group only emerged in terms of steering variability.     

The effect of the emotional state on driving performance in a simulated car-following task

Emotion is an important factor that influences driving behavior, but the mechanism is unclear. This research explored the effect of the emotional state on simulated driving behavior. Thirty-five licensed drivers participated in this study and completed a car-following task. The angry, happy and neutral states were manipulated during the task. The participants’ driving performance and risk perception were recorded under each emotional state. Trait anger and driving experience were also measured to explore the possible mediating effect. The results showed that the drivers in an angry or happy emotional state tended to maintain less time to collision and take a longer time to brake while following a lead vehicle than the drivers under the neutral condition, suggesting that drivers in emotional states are more dangerous those in neutral states. Moreover, the happy state rendered the drivers more dangerous, which manifested as a lower perceived accident risk than that among the drivers in the angry and neutral states. More specifically, experienced drivers in happy states performed worse with respect to vehicle lateral position control. Recommendations and implications for safety education and further research are discussed.     

Factors related to the use of pedestrian bridges in university students of Honduras

Considering that deaths and injuries due to run overs near pedestrian bridges (PB) are preventable events, this research aims to analyze the factors related to the use of pedestrian bridges in students of a public university of Honduras. This was made through a quantitative methodology; 330 questionnaires were applied to a sample of university students. Results suggest that 17.27% of the respondents don’t use the bridge. Most respondents (62.42%) believe it’s faster to cross the street and that using the bridge is tiresome (79.90%). Pedestrian bridges are also considered to be unsafe places, prone to robberies. Pearson’s r coefficient determined that this belief is significantly associated with the perception of cleanliness, quality of the infrastructure and illumination. There is a correlation between stress and considering the use of the bridge as a tiresome activity. A logistic regression model determined that significant variables explained the use of the PB included: being in a hurry, believing it’s faster to cross the street, thinking that PBs have a bad infrastructure, laziness and thinking that using the PB is tiresome, all of them reducing the chance that someone will use the bridge. On the other hand, non-significant variables in the model included: age, considering that using the PB is stressful, thinking that crossing the street is stressful, thinking PBs have good illumination. Safety related variables were not able to discriminate between users and non-users. These results are discussed in the light of previous research and their implication for public policy and future research.     

Female and male soccer players recruited different cognitive processes when generating creative soccer moves

Previous research has indicated that in several domains, women and men may use different cognitive processes along with different neurophysiological activation to achieve similar behavioral performance. The present study extended this line of research to the novel field of soccer playing. In female and male active soccer players, we investigated patterns of brain activation and functional connectivity of brain networks during imagination of creative soccer moves, using EEG methods that are well established in creativity research. Participants were presented with scenarios taken from real soccer games. Female and male soccer players showed comparable creative performance in their imagined moves to score a goal, which was rated by top qualified experts (UEFA A licensed soccer coaches). Notwithstanding, they differed with respect to their brain activation and functional connectivity of brain networks. While men exhibited relatively higher parietal/occipital task-related EEG alpha power, women showed significantly higher within-hemisphere functional coupling in the upper alpha band. The findings add important new evidence to the field of cognitive gender research in an applied, sports-related domain of creative cognition.     

Intruders of differing reproductive status alter aggression differentially in early and late pregnant mice

Independent groups of early and late pregnant mice, housed individually, were observed with an intruder in their home cage. The intruders were either males, virgin, early, or late pregnant females. Male intruders were sniffed less, but more frequently and more severely attacked, than any type of female intruder, both by early and by late pregnant residents. While early pregnant females behaved similarly with the three types of female intruders, late pregnant animals treated them differently: they showed practically no aggression to late pregnant intruders, more to early pregnant ones and were most aggressive towards virgin female intruders. The possible relation of these findings to reproductive behaviour is discussed.     

A comparison of multiple reinforcer assessments to identify the function of maladaptive behavior

Functional analysis results indicated that maladaptive behaviors displayed by a 25-year-old man with profound mental retardation were maintained by attention from caregivers and possibly, to a lesser degree, by access to tangible items. A concurrent-schedules procedure was then used to study the relative reinforcing value for maladaptive behavior of attention versus tangible items. Results of the concurrent-schedules assessment and subsequent functional communication training indicated that preference for attention versus access to a tangible object varied.     

What did mummy say? Dyadic interactions between young "hard to manage" children and their mothers

Thirty preschoolers rated as hard to manage on Goodman's (R. Goodman, 1997) Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), and a group of matched control children were observed and recorded on audiotape at home, interacting with their mothers (Time 1). At the 18-month follow-up home visits (Time 2), the children and mothers were filmed across 4 observation settings. Mother–child interactions were rated on affect, control, responsiveness and connectedness of communication. At Time 1, mothers of the hard to manage group used more negative control and engaged in fewer connected conversations than did mothers in the control group. At Time 2, mothers of the hard to manage group displayed higher levels of negative control and lower levels of positive control. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of examining connected communication and different observation contexts when examining dyadic mother–child interactions.     

One Frog, Two Frog, Red Frog, Blue Frog: Factors Affecting Children's Syntactic Choices in Production and Comprehension

Two experiments are reported which examine children's ability to use referential context when making syntactic choices in language production and comprehension. In a recent on-line study of auditory comprehension, Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, and Logrip (1999) examined children's and adults' abilities to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities involving prepositional phrases (e.g., “Put the frog on the napkin into ¨”). Although adults and older children used the referential context to guide their initial analysis (pursuing a destination interpretation in a one-frog context and a modifier interpretation in a two-frog context), 4 to 5-year olds' initial and ultimate analysis was one of destination, regardless of context. The present studies examined whether these differences were attributable to the comprehension process itself or to other sources, such as possible differences in how children perceive the scene and referential situation. In both experiments, children were given a language generation task designed to elicit and test children's ability to refer to a member of a set through restrictive modification. This task was immediately followed by the “put” comprehension task. The findings showed that, in response to a question about a member of a set (e.g., “Which frog went to Mrs. Squid's house?”), 4- to 5-year-olds frequently produced a definite NP with a restrictive prepositional modifier (e.g., “The one on the napkin”). These same children, however, continued to misanalyze put instructions, showing a strong avoidance of restrictive modification during comprehension. Experiment 2 showed that an increase in the salience of the platforms that distinguished the two referents increased overall performance, but still showed the strong asymmetry between production and comprehension. Eye movements were also recorded in Experiment 2, revealing on-line parsing patterns similar to Trueswell et al.: an initial preference for a destination analysis and a failure to revise early referential commitments. These experiments indicate that child–adult differences in parsing preferences arise, in part, from developmental changes in the comprehension process itself and not from a general insensitivity to referential properties of the scene. The findings are consistent with a probabilistic model for uncovering the structure of the input during comprehension, in which more reliable linguistic and discourse-related cues are learned first, followed by a gradually developing ability to take into account other more uncertain (or more difficult to learn) cues to structure.