The effects of exposure to political and domestic violence on preschool children and their mothers

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of exposure to political violence on preschool children and their mothers. We explored whether these dyads are different from dyads with no known history of exposure to violence and from mother–child dyads with known exposure to domestic violence. Specifically, we explored differences in mothers' psychological status (depression and anxiety), dyadic emotional availability (EA), children's social information processing, and children's social behaviour, in a sample of 216 dyads divided into three groups (exposure to political violence, no exposure to violence, and exposure to domestic violence). We found evidence to support our hypotheses that children exposed to domestic violence exhibit the highest levels of social maladjustment with smaller but still significant differences between children exposed to political violence and children in the comparison group. As expected, the lowest EA scores were found in the exposure to domestic violence group, followed by dyads in the exposure to political violence group. Dyads belonging to the comparison group (no exposure) exhibited the highest levels of EA. These findings contribute to our understanding of the meaning of exposure to political violence, as well as sharpen the difference between exposure to political and domestic violence.     

Modeling Asymmetry in the Time–Distance Relation of Ordinal Personality Items

In analyzing responses and response times to personality questionnaire items, models have been proposed which include the so-called “inverted-U effect.” These models predict that response times to personality test items decrease as the latent trait value of a given person gets closer to the attractiveness of an item. Initial studies into these models have focused on dichotomous personality items, and more recently, models for Likert-type scale items have been proposed. In all these models, it is assumed that the inverted-U effect is symmetrical around 0, while, as will be explained in this article, there are substantive and statistical reasons to study this assumption. Therefore, in this article, a general inverted-U model is proposed which accommodates two sources of asymmetry between the response times and the attractiveness of the items. The viability of this model is demonstrated in a simulation study, and the model is applied to the responses and response times of the Temperament and Character Inventory–Revised, covering a broad range of personality dimensions.     

Personal Contact with Refugees is Key to Welcoming Them: An Analysis of Politicians' and Citizens' Attitudes Towards Refugee Integration

Politicians are influential both in directing policies about refugees and in framing public discourse about them. However, unlike other host country residents, politicians' attitudes towards refugees and integration are remarkably understudied. We therefore examine similarities and differences between politicians' attitudes towards refugee integration and those held by citizens. Based on the stereotype content model, we expect that political ideology informs stereotypes about refugees, which subsequently shape attitudes towards refugee integration. Based on the Contact Hypothesis, we further argue that personal contact with refugees reduces negative stereotypes about them—in particular for those endorsing a right-wing ideology. We draw on data collected via two surveys with 905 politicians and 8013 citizens in the Netherlands to show that (1) unlike those with a left-wing orientation, residents (i.e., both politicians and citizens) with a right-wing orientation hold more negative stereotypes about refugees, which in turn relate to more negative attitudes towards refugee integration; (2) personal contact with refugees is associated with less negative stereotypes among residents; and (3) politicians, compared to citizens, report less negative stereotypes and more positive attitudes towards refugee integration. The practical implication of fostering residents' contact with refugees as well as the implications for future research are discussed.     

概念内隐记忆中的注意促进效应

Swallow和Jiang (2010)最早发现, 编码时的目标探测会促进同时呈现的背景信息在随后记忆测验中的表现, 并将这一现象称为注意促进效应(Attentional Boost Effect, ABE)。随后研究发现这一现象并不会出现在概念内隐测验中, 由此提出目标探测主要促进的是背景信息的知觉加工, 而非语义加工。本研究通过3个实验, 操纵了对背景信息的编码加工类型(知觉加工或概念加工)。结果发现, 当与目标探测同时进行的是对背景信息的概念加工任务, 则ABE会出现在随后的概念内隐测验中。反之, 当对背景信息进行的是知觉加工任务时, 则ABE会出现在随后的知觉内隐测验而不是概念内隐测验中。这些结果表明, 目标探测既可能促进背景信息的知觉加工, 也可能促进背景信息的语义加工, 但只有在目标探测下背景信息的编码加工与随后内隐测验中所依赖的提取加工具有一致性, 才会产生ABE。     

汉语发展性阅读障碍儿童视觉同时性加工技能子成分的发展及其与阅读的关系

通过分别以高频汉字(实验1)和图形非言语材料(实验2)为刺激的两个联合视觉注意任务, 并采用基于Budensen视觉注意理论的参数估计方法, 系统地探查小学三~六年级汉语发展性阅读障碍儿童的视觉同时性加工技能缺陷的内在机制。以43名汉语发展性阅读障碍儿童和46名生理年龄匹配典型发展儿童为被试, 每类被试均被分为小学中年级组(三、四年级)和高年级组(五、六年级)。两个实验均发现不同年级组的阅读障碍儿童在知觉加工速度参数上显著小于控制组儿童。在空间注意分布权重参数上, 实验1的结果显示, 不同于控制组儿童向左侧化发展的注意分布模式, 两个年级组的阅读障碍儿童均表现为无偏的注意分布; 而实验2未发现显著组别差异。且这两种同时性加工子技能分别与不同水平的汉语阅读技能密切相关。结果表明, 汉语阅读障碍儿童在同时加工多个视觉刺激时存在持续的知觉加工速度缓慢的问题, 在同时加工言语类刺激时还表现出异常的空间注意分布模式。本研究有助于从基础认知层面揭示汉语发展性阅读障碍儿童的缺陷机理, 为进一步设计相关的提高阅读效率的干预方案提供理论依据。     

Single-Stage Prediction Models Do Not Explain the Magnitude of Syntactic Disambiguation Difficulty

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require time-consuming reanalysis to reconstruct a discarded parse. A more recent proposal argues that the garden-path effect can be reduced to surprisal arising in a fully parallel parser: words consistent with the initially dispreferred but ultimately correct parse are simply less predictable than those consistent with the incorrect parse. Since predictability has pervasive effects in reading far beyond garden-path sentences, this account, which dispenses with reanalysis mechanisms, is more parsimonious. Crucially, it predicts a linear effect of surprisal: the garden-path effect is expected to be proportional to the difference in word surprisal between the ultimately correct and ultimately incorrect interpretations. To test this prediction, we used recurrent neural network language models to estimate word-by-word surprisal for three temporarily ambiguous constructions. We then estimated the slowdown attributed to each bit of surprisal from human self-paced reading times, and used that quantity to predict syntactic disambiguation difficulty. Surprisal successfully predicted the existence of garden-path effects, but drastically underpredicted their magnitude, and failed to predict their relative severity across constructions. We conclude that a full explanation of syntactic disambiguation difficulty may require recovery mechanisms beyond predictability.     

Linguistic Distributional Knowledge and Sensorimotor Grounding both Contribute to Semantic Category Production

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre-registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based on an 11-dimensional representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co-occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow-up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/ .