British journal of psychology最新文献

Multiple factors have been proposed to contribute to the other-race effect in face recognition, including perceptual expertise and social-cognitive accounts. Here, we propose to understand the effect and its contributing factors from the perspectives of learning mechanisms that involve joint learning of visual attention strategies and internal representations for faces, which can be modulated by quality of contact with other-race individuals including emotional and motivational factors. Computational simulations of this process will enhance our understanding of interactions among factors and help resolve inconsistent results in the literature. In particular, since learning is driven by task demands, visual attention effects observed in different face-processing tasks, such as passive viewing or recognition, are likely to be task specific (although may be associated) and should be examined and compared separately. When examining visual attention strategies, the use of more data-driven and comprehensive eye movement measures, taking both spatial–temporal pattern and consistency of eye movements into account, can lead to novel discoveries in other-race face processing. The proposed framework and analysis methods may be applied to other tasks of real-life significance such as face emotion recognition, further enhancing our understanding of the relationship between learning and visual cognition.

Imitation development was studied in a cross-sectional design involving 174 primary-school children (aged 6–10), focusing on the effect of actions' complexity and error analysis to infer the underlying cognitive processes. Participants had to imitate the model's actions as if they were in front of a mirror (‘specularly’). Complexity varied across three levels: movements of a single limb; arm and leg of the same body side; or arm and leg of opposite body sides. While the overall error rate decreased with age, this was not true of all error categories. The rate of ‘side’ errors (using a limb of the wrong body side) paradoxically increased with age (from 9 years). However, with increasing age, the error rate also became less sensitive to the complexity of the action. This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that older children have the working memory (WM) resources and the body knowledge necessary to imitate ‘anatomically’, which leads to additional side errors. Younger children might be paradoxically free from such interference because their WM and/or body knowledge are insufficient for anatomical imitation. Yet, their limited WM resources would prevent them from successfully managing the conflict between spatial codes involved in complex actions (e.g. moving the left arm and the right leg). We also found evidence that action side and content might be stored in separate short-term memory (STM) systems: increasing the number of sides to be encoded only affected side retrieval, but not content retrieval; symmetrically, increasing the content (number of movements) of the action only affected content retrieval, but not side retrieval. In conclusion, results suggest that anatomical imitation might interfere with specular imitation at age 9 and that STM storages for side and content of actions are separate.

A substantial body of research indicates that higher education students from lower social class backgrounds tend to have poorer health than those from higher social class backgrounds. To investigate sleep as a potential mediator of this relationship, online survey responses of students from five large Australian universities, one Irish university and one large Australian technical college were analysed in three studies (Study 1 N = 628; Study 2 N = 376; Study 3 N = 446). The results revealed that sleep quality, sleep duration, sleep disturbances, pre-sleep worries and sleep schedule variability mediated the relationship between social class and physical and mental health. Sleep remained a significant mediator when controlling for related variables and other mediators. Thus, the findings suggest that sleep partly explains social class differences in health. We discuss the importance of addressing sleep issues among students from lower social class backgrounds.

Poverty impedes children's executive function (EF). Therefore, it is necessary to mitigate the negative effect of poverty by developing efficient interventions to improve poor children's cognitive function. In three studies, we examined whether high-level construals can improve EF among poor children in China. In Study 1, we observed a positive relationship between family socioeconomic status and children's EF, which was moderated by construal level (n = 206; M_age = 9.71; 45.6% girls). In Study 2a, we experimentally induced high- versus low-level construals and found that poor children with high-level construals exhibited better EF than those with low-level construals (n = 65; M_age = 11.32; 47.7% girls). However, the same intervention did not affect the performance of affluent children in Study 2b (n = 63; M_age = 10.54; 54% girls). Moreover, we found that the interventional effects of high-level construals improved the ability of children living in poverty to make healthy decisions and delayed gratification in Study 3 (n = 74; M_age = 11.10; 45.9% girls). These findings may have implications for using high-level construals as an effective intervention to improve poor children's EF and cognitive capacity.

Pain experienced by Black individuals is systematically underestimated, and recent studies have shown that part of this bias is rooted in perceptual factors. We used Reverse Correlation to estimate visual representations of the pain expression in Black and White faces, in participants originating from both Western and African countries. Groups of raters were then asked to evaluate the presence of pain and other emotions in these representations. A second group of White raters then evaluated those same representations placed over a neutral background face (50% White; 50% Black). Image-based analyses show significant effects of culture and face ethnicity, but no interaction between the two factors. Western representations were more likely to be judged as expressing pain than African representations. For both cultural groups, raters also perceived more pain in White face representations than in Black face representations. However, when changing the background stimulus to the neutral background face, this effect of face ethnic profile disappeared. Overall, these results suggest that individuals have different expectations of how pain is expressed by Black and White individuals, and that cultural factors may explain a part of this phenomenon

The ability to empathize with others enables us to effectively interact with each other and may have specifically evolved to support parental roles and caregiving. The relationship between parenting and trait empathy is little understood as previous research focused on empathy exclusively in the context of parenting, for example parental sensitivity. Here we aimed to understand how trait empathy may moderate the association between child's negative emotionality and parental burnout. Two cohorts were examined (1) parents of infants (10–18 months old; N = 203) and (2) parents of children (3–10 years old, N = 201). Parents filled out a battery of online questionnaires assessing maternal empathy, parental burnout and child temperament. We found that the relationship between higher levels of negative emotionality and parental burnout is moderated by specific aspects of maternal emotional empathy. Our findings suggest that maternal emotional empathy acts as a buffer against parental burnout when faced with a child's characteristics that incur higher parental demands.

Previous research has found that music brings back more vivid and emotional autobiographical memories than various other retrieval cues. However, such studies have often been low in ecological validity and constrained by relatively limited cue selection and predominantly young adult samples. Here, we compared music to food as cues for autobiographical memories in everyday life in young and older adults. In two separate four-day periods, 39 younger (ages 18–34) and 39 older (ages 60–77) adults recorded their music- and food-evoked autobiographical memories in paper diaries. Across both age groups, music triggered more frequent autobiographical memories, a greater proportion of involuntary memories, and memories rated as more personally important in comparison to food cues. Age differences impacted music- and food-evoked memories similarly, with older adults consistently recalling older and less specific memories, which they rated as more positive, vivid, and rehearsed. However, young and older adults did not differ in the number or involuntary nature of their recorded memories. This work represents an important step in understanding the phenomenology of naturally occurring music-evoked autobiographical memories across adulthood and provides new insights into how and why music may be a more effective trigger for personally valued memories than certain other everyday cues.

Food-related attentional bias refers that individuals typically prioritize rewarding food-related cues (e.g. food words and food images) compared with non-food stimuli; however, the findings are inconsistent for restrained eaters. Traditional paradigms used to test food-related attentional bias, such as visual probe tasks and visual search tasks, may not directly and accurately enough to reflect individuals' food-word processing at different cognitive stages. In this study, we introduced the boundary paradigm to investigate food-word attentional bias for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. Eye movements were recorded when they performed a naturalistic sentence-reading task. The results of later-stage analyses showed that food words were fixated on for less time than non-food words, which indicated a superiority of foveal food-word processing for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. The results of early-stage analyses showed that restrained eaters spent more time on pre-target regions in the food-word valid preview conditions, which indicated a parafoveal food-word processing superiority for restrained eaters (i.e. the parafoveal-on-foveal effect). The superiority of foveal food-word processing provides new insights into explaining food-related attentional bias in general groups. Additionally, the enhanced food-word attentional bias in parafoveal processing for restrained eaters illustrates the importance of individual characteristics in studying word recognition.

While growing evidence supports that dispositional mindfulness relates to psychological health and cognitive enhancement, to date there have been only a few attempts to characterize its neural underpinnings. In the present study, we aimed at exploring the electrophysiological (EEG) signature of dispositional mindfulness using quantitative and complexity measures of EEG during resting state and while performing a learning task. Hundred twenty participants were assessed with the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire and underwent 5 min eyes-closed resting state and 5 min at task EEG recording. We hypothesized that high mindfulness individuals would show patterns of brain activity related to (a) lower involvement of the default mode network (DMN) at rest (reduced frontal gamma power) and (b) a state of ‘task readiness’ reflected in a more similar pattern from rest to task (reduced overall q-EEG power at rest but not at task), as compared to their low mindfulness counterparts. Dispositional mindfulness was significantly linked to reduced frontal gamma power at rest and lower overall power during rest but not at task. In addition, we found a trend towards higher entropy during task performance in mindful individuals, which has recently been reported during mindfulness meditation. Altogether, our results add to those from expert meditators to show that high (dispositional) mindfulness seems to have a specific electrophysiological pattern characteristic of less involvement of the DMN and mind-wandering processes.