A content analysis of the conversational behavior of accepted and rejected children

The present study was designed to assess whether the conversational behavior of children separated into accepted, rejected, and mixed-status dyads differed along the dimensions of listening to, paying attention to, and indicating interest in their dyadic partner. Conversations of 40 third-grade dyads were analyzed as they occurred in a 2- min waiting period and a 4- min conversation period. Seventeen categories of verbal behaviors that indexed these dimensions were used as content codes. Multivariate analyses of variance performed on the observational data yielded significant main effects for status, sex, and experimental condition. Results are interpreted in terms of previous social skills research, and suggestions for future research are offered.     

Regional cerebral glucose metabolism in aphemia: A case report

Local cerebral metabolism was determined in a patient suffering aphemia following cerebral infarction using the 18FDG-PET technique. The syndrome was characterized by profound ictal nonfluency with sparing of other language functions. Speech subsequently improved so that content and grammar were appropriate but mild dysprosody persisted. Conventional CT showed no lesion of the left hemisphere while PET revealed a discrete focus of hypometabolism on the left which partially resolved on serial studies. The metabolic lesion could be localized to the region of the inferior precentral gyrus and the adjacent subcortical space.     

Information processing abilities in twins reared apart

A battery of information processing measures and psychometric tests of specific and general cognitive abilities was administered to a sample of 105 individuals which included 34 monozygotic and 13 dizygotic reared apart twin pairs or triplets. Correlations between information processing parameters and psychometric abilities as well as twin resemblances for the information processing parameters were examined. In a principal components analysis of the information processing parameters, three components were identified which accounted for 67% of the total variation; Overall Speed of Response (OSR), Speed of Information Processing (SIP), and Speed of Spatial Processing (SSP). OSR was significantly correlated with WAIS IQ, and psychometric measures of verbal reasoning, spatial ability, and perceptual speed and accuracy. SIP was significantly correlated with WAIS IQ, measures of verbal reasoning, and one of the perceptual speed and accuracy measures. SSP was significantly correlated with measures of both spatial ability and perceptual speed and accuracy. Due to the small size of the dizygotic twin sample, no strong conclusions could be drawn regarding the magnitude of their resemblance. The correlation between component scores of reared apart monozygotic twins was significant for OSR, but not for SIP or SSP.     

A rich palette of Bible use: A theoretical and empirical contribution from the context of Protestant Christian primary schools in the Netherlands

The aim of this study is to gain empirical knowledge about how the Bible functions in the context of Protestant Christian primary schools in the Netherlands. It presents the results of an empirical explorative and qualitative study on the perceptions of teachers and school administrators (directors and internal supervisors) on the goals of Bible use in Protestant primary education, as well as the roles of teachers and pupils, and how these can be understood in terms of religious pedagogical models and theories. Five small focus group interviews with teachers and six interviews with school administrators revealed a variety of goals teachers hold regarding Bible use in education and a variety of divisions of teacher–learner roles in this regard. The findings also show some particular characteristics when compared with secondary schools.     

Proactive interference plays a role in the word-length effect

The word-length effect is the advantage that lists of short words show over lists of long words in immediate recall. Typically, the word-length effect is used as strong support for decay-based theories of immediate retention. However, the present two experiments show that the traditional word-length effect emerges only after several trials in an experimental session, a result reminiscent of earlier findings in distractor-based short-term forgetting experiments. These results suggest that any complete account of the word-length effect will need to consider a role for proactive interference.     

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.     

Lower region: a new cue for figure-ground assignment

Figure-ground assignment is an important visual process; humans recognize, attend to, and act on figures, not backgrounds. There are many visual cues for figure-ground assignment. A new cue to figure-ground assignment, called lower region, is presented: Regions in the lower portion of a stimulus array appear more figurelike than regions in the upper portion of the display. This phenomenon was explored, and it was demonstrated that the lower-region preference is not influenced by contrast, eye movements, or voluntary spatial attention. It was found that the lower region is defined relative to the stimulus display, linking the lower-region preference to pictorial depth perception cues. The results are discussed in terms of the environmental regularities that this new figure-ground cue may reflect.