Pitzer College

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A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes ...Read More

In three experiments, young and older adults were compared on both implicit and explicit memory tasks. The size of repetition priming effects in word completion and in perceptual identification tasks did not differ reliably across ages. However, age-related decrements in performance were obtained in free recall, cued recall, and recognition. These results, similar to those observed in amnesics, suggest that older adults are impaired on tasks which require conscious recollection but that memory which depends on automatic activation processes in relatively unaffected by age.

In four studies, recognition memory for faces rated as similar to a prototype was found to be inferior to memory for faces rated as unusual in appearance. This result was obtained under both incidental and intentional learning conditions, at presentation rates ranging from 3 to 15 sec, and with retention intervals from 3 to 24 hr. A fifth experiment established interitem similarity as the structural basis of this typicality effect in recognition memory. Difficulties in interpreting the findings in terms of some current models for classification learning, depth of processing models, or present models of the word frequency effect are discussed.

A sex difference on mental-rotation tasks has been demonstrated repeatedly, but not in children less than 4 years of age. To demonstrate mental rotation in human infants, we habituated 5-month-old infants to an object revolving through a 240 degrees angle. In successive test trials, infants saw the habituation object or its mirror image revolving through a previously unseen 120 degrees angle. Only the male infants appeared to recognize the familiar object from the new perspective, a feat requiring mental rotation. These data provide evidence for a sex difference in mental rotation of an object through three-dimensional space, consistently seen in adult populations.

Abstract Young children's early understanding of emotion was investigated by examining their use of emotion terms such as happy, sad, mud, and cry. Five children's emotion language was examined longitudinally from the age of 2 to 5 years, and as a comparison their reference to pains via such terms as burn, sting, and hurt was also examined. In Phase 1 we confirmed and extended prior findings demonstrating that by 2 years of age terms for the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are commonly used by children as are terms for such related states as crying and hurting. At this early age children produce such terms to refer to self and to others, and to past and future as well as to present states. Over the years from 2 to 5 children's emotion vocabulary expands, their discussion of hypothetical emotions gets underway, and the complexity of their emotion utterances increases. In Phase 2 our analyses go beyond children's production of emotion terms to analyses of their conception of emotion. We focus especially on when children use emotion terms to refer to subjective experiential states of persons. From their earliest uses of these terms in our data children

This review synthesizes behavioral research with neuromolecular mechanisms putatively involved with the low-toxicity cognitive enhancing action of Bacopa monnieri (BM), a medicinal Ayurvedic herb. BM is traditionally used for various ailments, but is best known as a neural tonic and memory enhancer. Numerous animal and in vitro studies have been conducted, with many evidencing potential medicinal properties. Several randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials have substantiated BM's nootropic utility in humans. There is also evidence for potential attenuation of dementia, Parkinson's disease, and epilepsy. Current evidence suggests BM acts via the following mechanisms-anti-oxidant neuroprotection (via redox and enzyme induction), acetylcholinesterase inhibition and/or choline acetyltransferase activation, β-amyloid reduction, increased cerebral blood flow, and neurotransmitter modulation (acetylcholine [ACh], 5-hydroxytryptamine [5-HT], dopamine [DA]). BM appears to exhibit low toxicity in model organisms and humans; however, long-term studies of toxicity in humans have yet to be conducted. This review will integrate molecular neuroscience with behavioral research.

Community organizing groups that have built coalitions for local change over the past few decades are now involving young people as leaders in efforts to improve quality of life. The current study explores a particularly effective youth organizing initiative through review of organizational documents and collection and analysis of qualitative data. The study finds that this model for youth organizing is effective at producing impacts at multiple levels because it weaves together youth development, community development, and social change into a unified organizing cycle. The initiative encourages participants by promoting psychological empowerment, leadership development, and sociopolitical development. Simultaneously, youth organizing produces community-level impacts, including new program implementation, policy change, and institution building. Social changes include intergenerational and multicultural collaboration in the exercise of power. This interplay between youth development, community development, and social change is discussed in relation to the growing field of youth organizing and other efforts to engage youth in civil society.

Why do people do what they do? To address this question the papers in this volume take a new look at the nature and sources of human motivation. Human motivation has to be understood as the product of interaction between events and things in the social world and interpretations of those events and things in people's psyches. In this introduction I argue that models of motivation need to reject not only psychobiological determinism but also sociocultural determinism, if the latter is taken to mean that private interpretations are replicas of public messages.

The Multidimensional Acculturative Stress Inventory (MASI), a 36-item stress measure that was developed to assess acculturative stress among persons of Mexican origin living in the United States, was tested on a community sample of 174 adults (117 women, 57 men). Principal-components analyses yielded 4 stable and internally consistent factors: Spanish Competency Pressures (7 items), English Competency Pressures (7 items), Pressure to Acculturate (7 items), and Pressure Against Acculturation (4 items). These 4 factors accounted for 64.4% of the variance and correlated in the expected directions with criterion measures of acculturation and/or psychological adjustment. Further reliability and validity testing of the MASI is discussed as well as the utility of this measure in assessing acculturative stress among adults of Mexican origin.

Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. Harold Schiffman. New York: Routledge, 1996. 351 pp.

Many sociolinguistic studies have found that minority groups are not participating in the sound changes characteristic of the majority community. This study, however, presents evidence that /u/‐fronting, a sound change observable in California Anglo speakers, is found in the minority Mexican‐American community as well, among speakers of Chicano English. Furthermore, while a high percentage of variation research has focused on correlating sociolinguistic variables with traditional social factors (age, gender, and social class being the most common), the results of this research underscore the need to analyze variation within the context of those social categories that are of particular significance to the specific community being studied, as well as the importance of incorporating interactions among social factors into a sociolinguistic analysis.

Mothers of children diagnosed with autism ( N = 104) reported higher levels of stress than mothers of typically developing children ( N = 342) on 13 of 14 subscales of the Parenting Stress Index. The only scores that did not differ were from the Attachment subscale, which indicates lack of emotional closeness and rather cold patterns of parent-child interaction. Mean Child Domain subscale scores for mothers in the autism group were at the 99th percentile; mean scores on the Attachment subscale were at about the 50th percentile for both groups. Despite substantial stress, mothers of children with autism report close relationships with their children. Results substantiate the need to develop interventions to help these mothers reduce their stress.

Haematophagous insects are frequently carriers of parasitic diseases, including malaria. The mosquito Anopheles gambiae is the major vector of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and is thus responsible for thousands of deaths daily. Although the role of olfaction in A. gambiae host detection has been demonstrated, little is known about the combinations of ligands and odorant binding proteins (OBPs) that can produce specific odor-related responses in vivo. We identified a ligand, indole, for an A. gambiae odorant binding protein, AgamOBP1, modeled the interaction in silico and confirmed the interaction using biochemical assays. RNAi-mediated gene silencing coupled with electrophysiological analyses confirmed that AgamOBP1 binds indole in A. gambiae and that the antennal receptor cells do not respond to indole in the absence of AgamOBP1. This case represents the first documented instance of a specific A. gambiae OBP-ligand pairing combination, demonstrates the significance of OBPs in odor recognition, and can be expanded to the identification of other ligands for OBPs of Anopheles and other medically important insects.

The sociolinguistic study of discourse features is still at a very elementary stage, so there is very little evidence available on which to trace changes in the use of such features. One feature that has received attention is the use of non‐traditional quotatives in the U.S., particularly by younger speakers, in the past twenty years. The use of be like as a quotative has spread from its presumed origin in California to other parts of the U.S. and also to Canada and England. This paper examines the further spread of non‐traditional quotatives to the speech of adolescents in Glasgow and how these forms might have been transmitted.

Abstract Purpose: This phase Ib study (NCT02179918) evaluated the safety, antitumor activity, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics of utomilumab, a fully human IgG2 mAb agonist of the T-cell costimulatory receptor 4-1BB/CD137 in combination with the humanized, PD-1–blocking IgG4 mAb pembrolizumab in patients with advanced solid tumors. Experimental Design: Utomilumab (0.45–5.0 mg/kg) and pembrolizumab (2 mg/kg) were administered intravenously every 3 weeks. Utomilumab dose escalation was conducted using the time-to-event continual reassessment method. Results: Twenty-three patients received combination treatment with no dose-limiting toxicities. Treatment-emergent adverse events were mostly grades 1 to 2, without any treatment-related discontinuations. Six patients (26.1%) had confirmed complete or partial responses. Pharmacokinetics and immunogenicity of utomilumab and pembrolizumab were similar when administered alone or in combination. A trend toward higher levels of activated memory/effector peripheral blood CD8+ T cells was observed in responders versus nonresponders. Conclusions: The safety, tolerability, and clinical activity demonstrated by utomilumab in combination with pembrolizumab support further investigation in patients with advanced solid tumors. Clin Cancer Res; 23(18); 5349–57. ©2017 AACR. See related commentary by Pérez-Ruiz et al., p. 5326

Abstract We examine how charitable giving is influenced by who in the household is primarily responsible for giving decisions. Looking first at single-person households, we find men and women to have significantly different tastes for giving, setting up a potential conflict for married couples. We find that, with respect to total giving, married households tend to resolve these conflicts largely in favor of the husband's preferences. Bargaining over charitable giving, rather than letting one spouse take charge, is estimated to reduce giving by at least 6 percent. When the woman is the decisionmaker, she will still make a significantly different allocation of those charity dollars, preferring to give to more charities but to give less to each. Our results give new insights into both the demographics of charitable giving and the costliness of household bargaining.

We examined the relationships between three dimensions of familism: importance of family, family support, and family conflict with acculturation, assessed orthogonally (Mexican and American cultural contributions assessed independently), and the relative contribution these factors make to psychological adjustment among 248 (124 women, 124 men) adults of Mexican origin. After controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, positive associations were found between importance of family and the biculturalism of Mexican and American cultural identity; family support and Mexican cultural identity; but no associations between family conflict and level of acculturation. Psychological well-being was positively associated with Mexican cultural identity and family support, whereas psychological distress was associated with greater family conflict and lower family support. The greater relative contribution of Mexican cultural identity to familism and well-being, and the importance of assessing acculturation orthogonally are discussed.

High intelligence is touted as being predictive of positive outcomes including educational success and income level. However, little is known about the difficulties experienced among this population. Specifically, those with a high intellectual capacity (hyper brain) possess overexcitabilities in various domains that may predispose them to certain psychological disorders as well as physiological conditions involving elevated sensory, and altered immune and inflammatory responses (hyper body). The present study surveyed members of American Mensa, Ltd. (n = 3715) in order to explore psychoneuroimmunological (PNI) processes among those at or above the 98th percentile of intelligence. Participants were asked to self-report prevalence of both diagnosed and/or suspected mood and anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and physiological diseases that include environmental and food allergies, asthma, and autoimmune disease. High statistical significance and a remarkably high relative risk ratio of diagnoses for all examined conditions were confirmed among the Mensa group 2015 data when compared to the national average statistics. This implicates high IQ as being a potential risk factor for affective disorders, ADHD, ASD, and for increased incidence of disease related to immune dysregulation. Preliminary findings strongly support a hyper brain/hyper body association which may have substantial individual and societal implications and warrants further investigation to best identify and serve this at-risk population.

It is common in anthropology now to speak of imaginaries instead of cultural beliefs. This article examines the way Cornelius Castoriadis, Jacques Lacan, Benedict Anderson, and Charles Taylor analyzed this concept. For Castoriadis, the imaginary is a culture's ethos, for Lacan, it is a fantasy, for Anderson and Taylor, it is a shared cognitive schema. Then Marilyn Ivy's application of these theories to Japanese ‘national-cultural imaginaries’ is examined. Finally, a more person-centered analysis is sketched, focusing on US Americans’ explanations of the Columbine school shootings. Current anthropological uses of the imaginary inherit from Castoriadis a tendency toward cultural abstraction, reification, and homogenization. Lacan's, Anderson's, and Taylor's applications of the imaginary are potentially valuable if we use person-centered methods to study real rather than abstract cultural subjects, if we insist on a deeper understanding of the psychological processes involved, and if we respect complexity at both the psychological and social levels.