The semantics of grammatical gender: A cross-cultural study

Although most present-day scholars claim that grammatical gender has no meaning correlates, anecdotal evidence dating back to the Greeks suggests that grammatical gender carries connotative meanings of femininity and masculinity. In the present study native German speakers (tested in Germany) and native Spanish speakers (tested in Mexico) judged 54 high-frequency translation equivalents on semantic differential scales chosen to reflect dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activity. Half the words were of feminine gender in German but of masculine gender in Spanish (Type I words), and half were of masculine gender in German and of feminine gender in Spanish (Type II words). As predicted, German speakers judged Type II words higher in potency than Type I words, whereas Spanish speakers judged Type I words higher in potency than Type II words. The conclusion was that grammatical gender does affect meaning.     

Application of the bootstrap methods in factor analysis

A Monte Carlo experiment is conducted to investigate the performance of the bootstrap methods in normal theory maximum likelihood factor analysis both when the distributional assumption is satisfied and unsatisfied. The parameters and their functions of interest include unrotated loadings, analytically rotated loadings, and unique variances. The results reveal that (a) bootstrap bias estimation performs sometimes poorly for factor loadings and nonstandardized unique variances; (b) bootstrap variance estimation performs well even when the distributional assumption is violated; (c) bootstrap confidence intervals based on the Studentized statistics are recommended; (d) if structural hypothesis about the population covariance matrix is taken into account then the bootstrap distribution of the normal theory likelihood ratio test statistic is close to the corresponding sampling distribution with slightly heavier right tail.This study was carried out in part under the ISM cooperative research program (91-ISM · CRP-85, 92-ISM · CRP-102). The authors would like to thank the editor and three reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions which improved the quality of this paper considerably.     

Visual feature binding in early infancy

How does the developing brain of the human infant solve the feature-binding problem when visual stimuli consisting of multiple colored objects are presented? A habituation--dishabituation procedure revealed that 1-month-old infants have the ability to discriminate changes in the conjunction of a familiar shape and color in two objects. However, this good earlier performance was followed by poorer performance at 2 months of age. The performance improved again at 3 months of age. Detailed analysis of the oculomotor behaviors revealed that the age of 2 months was a period of drastic transition when the tendency to stay with the fixated objects disappeared and repetitive saccades between the two objects emerged. Our findings suggest that the ability to perceive conjunctions of features is available to infants very early, that the perceptual/neural basis at 1 and at 3 months of age may be fundamentally different, and that feature integration by vigorous eye movements or selective attention may be the key functional difference between the age groups.     

Eye tracking, strategies, and sex differences in virtual navigation

Reports of sex differences in wayfinding have typically used paradigms sensitive to the female advantage (navigation by landmarks) or sensitive to the male advantage (navigation by cardinal directions, Euclidian coordinates, environmental geometry, and absolute distances). The current virtual navigation paradigm allowed both men and women an equal advantage. We studied sex differences by systematically varying the number of landmarks. Eye tracking was used to quantify sex differences in landmark utilisation as participants solved an eight-arm radial maze task within different virtual environments. To solve the task, participants were required to remember the locations of target objects within environments containing 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8 landmarks. We found that, as the number of landmarks available in the environment increases, the proportion of time men and women spend looking at landmarks and the number of landmarks they use to find their way increases. Eye tracking confirmed that women rely more on landmarks to navigate, although landmark fixations were also associated with an increase in task completion time. Sex differences in navigational behaviour occurred only in environments devoid of landmarks and disappeared in environments containing multiple landmarks. Moreover, women showed sustained landmark-oriented gaze, while men's decreased over time. Finally, we found that men and women use spatial and response strategies to the same extent. Together, these results shed new light on the discrepancy in landmark utilisation between men and women and help explain the differences in navigational behaviour previously reported.     

Paradoxical Effects of Warning in the Production of Children's False Memories

The effects of warning on false recognition and associated subjective experience of false recollection and familiarity were investigated in 7- to 13-year-old children and young adults (N = 259) using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Two warning conditions (warning with an example of a critical lure and warning without an example of a critical lure) were compared to a control condition, in which no warning was received. We found that 7- to 8-year-olds exhibited higher false recognition in the warning-with-example condition compared with the control condition; in contrast, 12- to 13-year-olds and young adults exhibited reduced false recognition in the warning-with-example condition. No effect of warning was observed in 10- to 11-year-olds. The subjective experience associated with false memories was similar across ages. In contrast, age-related increases in subjective recollection were found for true memories. The processes that enhance or suppress false memories during development are discussed.     

Differential effects of physical and psychological stressors on immune functions of rats

To study the effects of different types or durations of stressors on immune functions, male Fischer rats were exposed to chronic physical (electric foot shock) or psychological (non-foot shock) stress induced in the communication box. Superoxide production by alveolar macrophages (AMs), mitogen-induced splenic lymphocyte proliferation, and splenic natural killer (NK) cell cytolysis were examined in vitro. Repeated exposure to physical stress suppressed superoxide production by AMs (-58%, p<0.05 for opsonized zymosan (OZ) and -51%, p<0.05 for phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA)), although psychological stress suppressed superoxide production after 24 h of repeated exposures (-40%, p<0.05 for OZ and -47%, p<0.05 for PMA). Acute suppression of the blastic response of splenic lymphocytes was only found in the physical stress group (p<0.05), although the chronic effects were only found in the psychological stress group (p<0.05). NK cell activity was suppressed immediately after the acute physical stress (-30%, p<0.05), but no effects were found in the psychological stress group. These results underline the importance of distinguishing between physical versus psychological stressors when examining the effects of stress on immune functions.     

Hypertension differentially impacts cognition in men and women in early midlife

The current study aimed to understand how sex differences in the timing of hypertension onset contribute to early midlife risk for cognitive decline that may differ by sex and whether sex-dependent advantages in normotensive populations are influenced by the presence of hypertension. One hundred and ninety-five adults aged 45–55 from the New England Family Study underwent neuropsychological testing to assess attention, executive function, and memory. Physician-diagnosed hypertension status was self-reported via questionnaire. Mid-adulthood hypertension was associated with worse performance on measures of attention and memory, but the cognitive domains impacted varied by sex. Hypertension was associated with only attention in men, whereas in women it was associated with attention and associative and working memory. Sex differences in midlife cognitive performance found in normotensive adults were attenuated in those with hypertension. Our results underscore the importance of accounting for sex when assessing the impact of hypertension on midlife cognition that could be indicative of later decline and risk for cognitive impairment and dementia, given hypertension is an independent risk factor.     

Validation of the Adolescent Attachment Anxiety and Avoidance Inventory among Canadian Secondary School Students

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The present study evaluated the factor structure and concurrent validity of the Adolescent Attachment Anxiety and Avoidance Inventory (AAAAI) towards mothers...     

From central pattern generator to sensory template in the evolution of birdsong

Central nervous networks, be they a part of the human brain or a group of neurons in a snail, may be designed to produce distinct patterns of movement. Central pattern generators can account for the development and production of normal vocal signals without auditory feedback in non-songbirds. Songbirds need auditory feedback to develop and maintain the normal song of their species. The prerequisite for the use of auditory feedback for the control of song is a set of acoustic criteria or a template to which voice must match. The template method perhaps evolved to free birds from fixed central pattern generators, resulting in the evolution of diverse and complex songs among oscine songbirds. The evolution of human speech may have followed a similar course.     

Constructing second‐order accurate confidence intervals for communalities in factor analysis

In an effort to find accurate alternatives to the usual confidence intervals based on normal approximations, this paper compares four methods of generating second‐order accurate confidence intervals for non‐standardized and standardized communalities in exploratory factor analysis under the normality assumption. The methods to generate the intervals employ, respectively, the Cornish–Fisher expansion and the approximate bootstrap confidence (ABC), and the bootstrap‐t and the bias‐corrected and accelerated bootstrap (BC_a). The former two are analytical and the latter two are numerical. Explicit expressions of the asymptotic bias and skewness of the communality estimators, used in the analytical methods, are derived. A Monte Carlo experiment reveals that the performance of central intervals based on normal approximations is a consequence of imbalance of miscoverage on the left‐ and right‐hand sides. The second‐order accurate intervals do not require symmetry around the point estimates of the usual intervals and achieve better balance, even when the sample size is not large. The behaviours of the second‐order accurate intervals were similar to each other, particularly for large sample sizes, and no method performed consistently better than the others.