A longitudinal study of pain sensitivity and blood pressure in adolescent boys: results from a 5-year follow-up.

A growing literature has observed a significant reduction in pain sensitivity among hypertensive animals and humans. It is uncertain whether a reduced sensitivity to pain can be observed in nonnotensive individuals who go on to develop high blood pressure. Blood pressure (BP) was reassessed in one hundred fifteen 19-year-old boys initially tested at age 14, when they were also presented with a pain stimulus (mechanical finger pressure). Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that information regarding pain tolerance improved prediction of changes in systolic and diastolic blood pressure beyond that afforded by differences in BP at age 14, parental history of hypertension, and body mass index. These analyses suggest that pain sensitivity may be associated with physiological processes involved in the development of sustained high blood pressure.     

Educational level and the word frequency effect: a lexical decision investigation.

It is known that speed and accuracy in recognizing words are constrained by the frequency of occurrence of these words ("frequency effect"). This study examines the relationship between educational level and the word frequency effect. We postulated that individual exposure to words that are rated lower in frequency tables should be greater among subjects with higher education and therefore hypothesized that the magnitude of the frequency effect should not be as marked within such a population as among subjects with a lesser educational level. A total of 40 neurologically healthy adults, half with an average of 18 years of formal education and the other half with an average of 11 years, participated in a lexical decision experiment. Results confirmed our hypothesis; that is, significant frequency effects on reaction times were obtained in both groups but this effect was of greater magnitude for the less educated as opposed to the more educated subgroup. The significance of this finding is discussed by reference to current models of word recognition.     

STRATÉGIES COGNITIVES ET PROCESSUS D'AUTORÉGULATION CHEZ DES FAMILLES EN SITUATION DE RÉSOLUTION DE PROBLÈMES LOGIQUES*

The family is a fundamental learning environment for many basic skills such as the ability to solve everyday domestic problems. A lack of competence in this type of problem solving would expose the individual to more frustration and possibly create the conditions for greater aggression. Forty-two low SES families, each including an aggressive boy, were invited to the laboratory for a problem-solving session on two occasions, at an interval of two years. Subjects were asked to find four preset combinations of colours by systematic permutations of four colours using a computer. Three types of cognitive performance were examined: resolution strategies, autoregulation strategies and the success rate in finding the solution. Results showed that most of the families were consistent in their use of a non-systematic strategy. Although some improvement in planning is observed during the second testing, no other improvement in autoregulation strategies was observed. In general, families had a better rate of success in finding the solution in the second session. The low cognitive level of these families and its stability are discussed. Étant donné que la famille constitue un terrain privilégié d'apprentissage, l'aggressivité comportementale de certains enfants pourrait résider dans le peu d'opportunités offertes par leur famille d'apprendre à affronter les problèmes de la vie quotidienne d'une manière réfléchie. Quarante-deux familles de milieu socio-économique faible, dont un des enfants est à risque d'inadaptation sociale et dont les parents sont peu scolarisés, ont à résoudre un problème nécessitant l'intelligence logique et ce, à deux ans d'intervalle (T-1 et T-2). La tâche consite à résoudre un problème de permutations à quatre éléments et se présente sous la forme d'un jeu d'ordinateur. Le fonctionnement cognitif est examiné selon trois dimensions: les stratégies cognitivcs de résolution, les stratégies d'autorégulation exercées, sur la démarche cognitive et l'issue de la démarche cognitive. L'examen des stratégies cognitives révèle que la majorité des familles utilisent une approche non stratégique et que cette approche est maintenue aussi bien à l'intérieur d'une séance donnée que d'une séance à l'autre. Exception faite de l'amélioration relevée à la séance 2 quant au contrôle exercé par les familles sur le déroulement de leur démarche cognitive, aucun changement n'émerge sur les autres critères de l'autorégulation. Finalement, les familles obtiennent une meilleure performance à la deuxième séance. La discussion porte sur la relative stabilité du niveau de fonctionnement cognitif des familles ainsi que sur la pauvreté apparente de leur répertoire de schèmes.     

Impact of a prevention program on aggressive children's friendships and social adjustment

A group of 46 aggressive boys aged 8 to 9 years participated in a prevention program aimed at reducing their externalizing problems in the short term and at preventing delinquency in the long term. Outcome measures were collected during the 3-year period following the prevention program. At that time, the boys were 10, 11, and 12 years old. Outcome measures included teacher ratings of aggressiveness and self-reports of delinquent behaviors. The boys' friends were rated on disruptive behaviors by their classmates. The experimental boys' outcome measures were compared to the measures obtained from 58 aggressive boys in a control group. The disruptive ratings of the experimental and control subjects' best friends were also compared. Differences in teacher-rated aggressiveness between the two groups increased from one year to the next for the 3-year followup period. Similarly, the friends' disruptive scores differed increasingly between the two groups over the 3-year period. The effect of the prevention program on the subjects' friendships and the mediating impact of friends with regard to social adjustment were stressed.This study was funded by the following agencies: National Welfare Grants Program of the Canadian Ministry of Health and Welfare, Conseil Québécois de la Recherche Sociale, Conseil de la Santé et des Services Sociaux Régional du Montréal Métropolitain, Fondation Cité des Prairies, Fonds FCAR-Centre et Equipes, Institut de la Recherche en Psycho-Education de Montréal, Centre d'Accueil le Mainbourg. Lucie Bertrand, Rita Béland, Michel Bouillon, Raymond Labelle, Hélène O'Reilly, and Daniel Reclus-Prince supervised or administered the intervention.     

Teachers' and mothers' assessment of children's behaviors from kindergarten to grade two: Stability and change within and across informants

Consistency between teachers' and parents' ratings of 229 children's prosocial and problem behaviors was investigated from kindergarten through grade two. Intrarater stability was also analyzed. Results indicated moderate but decreasing interrater agreement from kindergarten to grade two for boys on externalizing behaviors. Interrater agreement for the same behavior dimension for girls was moderate and stable, whereas it was low on internalizing behavior problems and prosocial behaviors, for both genders throughout the 3-year period. Moreover, difference between teachers' and parents' ratings of externalizing behaviors increased from kindergarten to grade two. Decreasing level of agreement through time appeared to be related to a reduction of teacher-rated externalizing behaviors not paralleled by a reduction in parent ratings. Analyses were also performed at the item level of the externalization scale to identify which specific behaviors were responsible for the increasing divergence in interrater agreement from kindergarten through grade two. Alternative interpretations were considered in order to account for present and past results. Implications for screening and assessment purposes were discussed.This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from Québec's Health Research Fund (FRSQ). We wish to thank the authorities and directors of the schools from the Val d'Or School Board as well as the kindergarten, first and second grade teachers, children, and parents for their collaboration. We also thank Lyse Desmarais-Gervais, Daniel Corriveau, Jean Desrosiers and Hélène Boileau for their participation in the data collection or analysis.     

Curiosity Is Contagious: A Social Influence Intervention to Induce Curiosity

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: The social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on-line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up-votes as a social cue to popularity. Participants indicated their curiosity about the answers, and they were given an opportunity to reveal a subset of those answers. Participants reported greater curiosity about the answers to questions when the questions were presented with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes, and they were also more likely to choose to reveal the answers to questions with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes. These effects were partially mediated by surprise and by the inferred usefulness of knowledge, with a more dramatic effect of low up-votes in reducing curiosity than of high up-votes in boosting curiosity. Taken together, these results highlight the important role social information plays in shaping our curiosity.     

Review of Julie Chajes,Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019, xii + 215 p., Hardcover,ISBN 978-0-19-090913-0, £64

Studies in East European Thought - This is a review of Julie Chajes, Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019. The book,...     

Hippocampal damage and exploratory preferences in rats: memory for objects, places, and contexts

Rats have a natural tendency to spend more time exploring novel objects than familiar objects, and this preference can be used as an index of object recognition. Rats also show an exploratory preference for objects in locations where they have not previously encountered objects (an index of place memory) and for familiar objects in contexts different from those in which the objects were originally encountered (an index of context memory). In this experiment, rats with cytotoxic lesions of the hippocampal formation were tested on all three versions of the novelty-preference paradigm, with a 5-min retention interval between the familiarization and test phases. Rats with sham lesions displayed a novelty preference on all three trial types, whereas the rats with hippocampal lesions displayed a novelty preference on Object trials but did not discriminate between the objects on Place trials or Context trials. The findings indicate that hippocampal damage impairs memory for contextual or spatial aspects of an experience, whereas memory for objects that were part of the same experience are left relatively intact.