Institute of Psychology,Chinese Academy Of Sciences
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Perceived importance of prospective memory failures in adults with traumatic brain injury
Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to carry out an intended action in the future. Failures in PM are often observed as more frequent in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) than controls. However, it remains unknown how individuals with TBI and their significant others perceive the importance of these PM problems. In the current study, four groups (38 TBI, 34 TBI-other, 34 controls, 31 control-other) were recruited to report on the perceived importance of PM failures using Part B of the Comprehensive Assessments of Prospective Memory (CAPM). Individuals with TBI perceived PM failures as being more important than did their significant others. Controls' ratings did not differ from their significant others. There were no statistically significant differences in rated importance for PM problems involving the basic activities of daily living (BADL) component and those involving the instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) component. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of the motivation of people with TBI
Developmental Changes in the Role of Different Metalinguistic Awareness Skills in Chinese Reading Acquisition from Preschool to Third Grade
The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account for the current data, a three-stage model of reading acquisition in Chinese is discussed
PERMEABILITY THEORY IN A SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT: COMMENT ON STAMPS (2013)
Stamps (2013) reported that the visual permeability of a boundary strongly influenced perceived enclosure, while boundary depth had almost no effect. Specifically, Stamps found that perceived enclosure demonstrates a highly negative correlation with distal permeability, a moderately negative correlation with proximate permeability, and a very low positive correlation with distal distance. The present comment suggests that environmental properties may affect physical perception, mental processes, and human behavior -not only in a physical but also in a social environment
Do Preschool Children Learn to Read Words from Environmental Prints?
Parents and teachers worldwide believe that a visual environment rich with print can contribute to young children's literacy. Children seem to recognize words in familiar logos at an early age. However, most of previous studies were carried out with alphabetic scripts. Alphabetic letters regularly correspond to phonological segments in a word and provide strong cues about the identity of the whole word. Thus it was not clear whether children can learn to read words by extracting visual word form information from environmental prints. To exclude the phonological-cue confound, this study tested children's knowledge of Chinese words embedded in familiar logos. The four environmental logos were employed and transformed into four versions with the contextual cues (i.e., something apart from the presentation of the words themselves in logo format like the color, logo and font type cues) gradually minimized. Children aged from 3 to 5 were tested. We observed that children of different ages all performed better when words were presented in highly familiar logos compared to when they were presented in a plain fashion, devoid of context. This advantage for familiar logos was also present when the contextual information was only partial. However, the role of various cues in learning words changed with age. The color and logo cues had a larger effect in 3- and 4-year-olds than in 5-year-olds, while the font type cue played a greater role in 5-year-olds than in the other two groups. Our findings demonstrated that young children did not easily learn words by extracting their visual form information even from familiar environmental prints. However, children aged 5 begin to pay more attention to the visual form information of words in highly familiar logos than those aged 3 and 4
Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of Excess Mortality in Depression in the General Community Versus Patients With Specific Illnesses
Objective: Several hundred studies have shown that depression is associated with an elevated risk of dying at follow-up. It is not clear, however, whether the mechanisms for this association are disease specific, leading to higher mortality in specific patient groups, or generic, resulting in comparable mortality rates in all patient groups as well as in community samples. The authors conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of prospective studies of community as well as patient samples associating depression at baseline with excess mortality at follow-up
Controlled versus Automatic Processes: Which Is Dominant to Safety? The Moderating Effect of Inhibitory Control
This study explores the precursors of employees' safety behaviors based on a dual-process model, which suggests that human behaviors are determined by both controlled and automatic cognitive processes. Employees' responses to a self-reported survey on safety attitudes capture their controlled cognitive process, while the automatic association concerning safety measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT) reflects employees' automatic cognitive processes about safety. In addition, this study investigates the moderating effects of inhibition on the relationship between self-reported safety attitude and safety behavior, and that between automatic associations towards safety and safety behavior. The results suggest significant main effects of self-reported safety attitude and automatic association on safety behaviors. Further, the interaction between self-reported safety attitude and inhibition and that between automatic association and inhibition each predict unique variances in safety behavior. Specifically, the safety behaviors of employees with lower level of inhibitory control are influenced more by automatic association, whereas those of employees with higher level of inhibitory control are guided more by self-reported safety attitudes. These results suggest that safety behavior is the joint outcome of both controlled and automatic cognitive processes, and the relative importance of these cognitive processes depends on employees' individual differences in inhibitory control. The implications of these findings for theoretical and practical issues are discussed at the end
Remembering faces with emotional expressions
It is known that happy faces create more robust identity recognition memory than faces with some other expressions. However, this advantage was not verified against all basic expressions. Moreover, no research has assessed whether similar differences also exist among other expressions. To tackle these questions, we compared the effects of six basic emotional expressions on recognition memory using a standard old/new recognition task. The experiment also examined whether exposure to different emotional expressions at training creates variable effects on transfer of the trained faces to a new/neutral expression. Our results suggest that happy faces produced better identity recognition relative to disgusted faces, regardless of whether they were tested in the same image or a new image displaying a neutral expression. None of the other emotional expressions created measurable advantage for recognition memory. Overall, our data lend further support for the happy face advantage for long-term recognition memory. However, our detailed analyses also show that the advantage of happy expression on identity recognition may not be equally discernible from all other emotional expressions
Revisiting the therapeutic effect of rTMS on negative symptoms in schizophrenia: A meta-analysis
This study sought to determine the moderators in the treatment effect of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on negative symptoms in schizophrenia. We performed a meta-analysis of prospective studies on the therapeutic application of rTMS in schizophrenia assessing the effects of both low-frequency and high-frequency rTMS on negative symptoms. Results indicate that rTMS is effective in alleviating negative symptoms in schizophrenia. The effect size was moderate (0.63 and 0.53, respectively). The effect size of rTMS on negative symptoms in sham-controlled trials was 0.80 as measured by the SANS and 0.41 as measured by the PANSS. A longer duration of illness was associated with poorer efficacy of rTMS on negative symptoms. A 10 Hz setting, at least 3 consecutive weeks of treatment, treatment site at the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and a 110% motor threshold (MT) were found to be the best rTMS parameters for the treatment of negative symptoms. The results of our meta-analysis suggest that rTMS is an effective treatment option for negative symptoms in schizophrenia. The moderators of rTMS on negative symptoms included duration of illness, stimulus frequency, duration of illness, position and intensity of treatment as well as the type of outcome measures used. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved
NONBELIEVERS' BELIEFS ABOUT RELIGION IN CHINA
In China nonbelievers are showing an increasing interest in religion whereas believers in the rest of the world are being less influenced by religion. I investigated what nonbelievers know about religion within Chinese society. Data collection was via random sampling among university students across 16 provinces in China. I evaluated data from 638 respondents about their self-reported beliefs using the religiosity subscale of the Social Axiom Survey. The results indicated that Chinese nonbelievers take a neutral stance as to the existence of a Supreme Being or the positive consequences of having religious beliefs. The neutrality of nonbelievers' beliefs about religion may be affected by the coincidence of the development of religion and Chinese religious culture. The findings in this study will enrich understanding of nonbelievers' views regarding religion in the Chinese culture and help to generate more, and more meaningful, dialogue between believers and nonbelievers
Cerebellum engages in automation of verb-generation skill
Numerous studies have shown cerebellar involvement in item-specific association, a form of explicit learning. However, very few have demonstrated cerebellar participation in automation of non-motor cognitive tasks. Applying fMRI to a repeated verb-generation task, we sought to distinguish cerebellar involvement in learning of item-specific noun-verb association and automation of verb generation skill. The same set of nouns was repeated in six verb-generation blocks so that subjects practiced generating verbs for the nouns. The practice was followed by a novel block with a different set of nouns. The cerebellar vermis (IV/ V) and the right cerebellar lobule VI showed decreased activation following practice; activation in the right cerebellar Crus I was significantly lower in the novel challenge than in the initial verb-generation task. Furthermore, activation in this region during well-practiced blocks strongly correlated with improvement of behavioral performance in both the well-practiced and the novel blocks, suggesting its role in the learning of general mental skills not specific to the practiced noun-verb pairs. Therefore, the cerebellum processes both explicit verbal associative learning and automation of cognitive tasks. Different cerebellar regions predominate in this processing: lobule VI during the acquisition of item-specific association, and Crus I during automation of verb-generation skills through practice