Differentiation in preschooler's categories of emotion.

Two studies (N = 68, ages 2;0–3;11; N = 80, ages 2;6–4;11) explore the idea that, rather than starting with a separate mental category for each discrete emotion, children start with two broad categories (positive and negative) and then differentiate within each until adult-like categories form. Children generated emotion labels for (a) facial expressions or (b) stories about an emotion's cause and consequence. Emotions included were happiness, anger, fear, sadness, and disgust. Both conditions yielded the predicted pattern of differentiation. These studies of younger children found the face more powerful in eliciting correct emotion labels than had prior research, which typically relied on older preschoolers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationships as natural categories.

Five experiments assessed the hypothesis that perceivers spontaneously organize social information around relationship categories. Ss were exposed to information items (structured in 3 formats) about each of 8 targets. Half of the Ss were told that the targets were 4 married couples, and the couple members were identified (married couple condition). The remaining Ss received the target information in the same sequence, but were informed that targets were married to an unspecified other (yoked couple condition). Ss free recalled the information and matched the information items with the target names. Ss cognitively organized the information around married couple categories more so than yoked couple categories and confused married couple members with one another more so than yoked couple members. Formation of relationship categories occurred at the encoding rather than the retrieval stage. The hypothesis that relationships serve as natural categories was strongly supported. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Necessity and natural categories.

Our knowledge of natural categories includes beliefs not only about what is true of them but also about what would be true if the categories had properties other than (or in addition to) their actual ones. Evidence about these beliefs comes from three lines of research: experiments on category-based induction, on hypothetical transformations of category members, and on definitions of kind terms. The 1st part of this article examines results and theories arising from each of these research streams. The 2nd part considers possible unified theories for this domain, including theories based on ideals and norms. It also contrasts 2 broad frameworks for modal category information: one focusing on beliefs about intrinsic or essential properties, the other focusing on interacting causal relations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The use of aftereffects in the study of relationships among emotion categories.

The perception of visual aftereffects has been long recognized, and these aftereffects reveal a relationship between perceptual categories. Thus, emotional expression aftereffects can be used to map the categorical relationships among emotion percepts. One might expect a symmetric relationship among categories, but an evolutionary, functional perspective predicts an asymmetrical relationship. In a series of 7 experiments, the authors tested these predictions. Participants fixated on a facial expression, then briefly viewed a neutral expression, then reported the apparent facial expression of the 2nd image. Experiment 1 revealed that happy and sad are opposites of one another; each evokes the other as an aftereffect. The 2nd and 3rd experiments reveal that fixating on any negative emotions yields an aftereffect perceived as happy, whereas fixating on a happy face results in the perception of a sad aftereffect. This suggests an asymmetric relationship among categories. Experiments 4-7 explored the mechanism driving this effect. The evolutionary and functional explanations for the category asymmetry are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A developmental study of recall from natural categories.

27 6th graders, 25 college students, and 26 older adults (aged 57–77 yrs) were asked to list exemplars from the semantic domains of animals and occupations for 6 min each. Cumulative recall curves were found to fit a hyperbolic model of recall and to be stable over age in the animal domain; in the occupation domain, 6th graders reached asymptote earlier. A slope-difference algorithm was used to identify clusters within recall. It was found that the size of clusters was stable over time. Older adults tended to find new clusters at a faster rate in the later stages of recall, and the youngest and oldest Ss reported items within clusters at a slower rate. Results demonstrate the stability of some basic functions in semantic memory and support a production deficiency view of reported deficits in episodic memory tasks. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in language development: Implications for development and language.

Reviews literature on differences in characteristics of language development. Some children have been found to emphasize single words, simple productive rules for combining words, nouns and noun phrases, and referential functions; others use whole phrases and formulas, pronouns, compressed sentences, and expressive or social functions. The evidence for 2 styles of acquisition and their continuity over time is examined. Explanations in terms of hemispheric functions, cognitive maturation, cognitive style, and environmental context are considered, and an explanation in terms of the interaction of individual and environment in different functional contexts is suggested. Implications for development and the mastery of complex systems are discussed. (51 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The development of language and abstract concepts: The case of natural number.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 137(2) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (see record 2008-05019-011). The DOI for the supplemental materials was printed incorrectly. The correct DOI is as follows: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.137.1.22.supp] What are the origins of abstract concepts such as seven, and what role does language play in their development? These experiments probed the natural number words and concepts of 3-year-old children who can recite number words to ten but who can comprehend only one or two. Children correctly judged that a set labeled eight retains this label if it is unchanged, that it is not also four, and that eight is more than two. In contrast, children failed to judge that a set of 8 objects is better labeled by eight than by four, that eight is more than four, that eight continues to apply to a set whose members are rearranged, or that eight ceases to apply if the set is increased by 1, doubled, or halved. The latter errors contrast with children's correct application of words for the smallest numbers. These findings suggest that children interpret number words by relating them to 2 distinct preverbal systems that capture only limited numerical information. Children construct the system of abstract, natural number concepts from these foundations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retrieval strategies in recall of natural categories and categorized lists.

Exps I and II, using a total of 192 undergraduates, examined the effect of retrieval strategies on 3 or 12 min of recall from a natural category. Exp III, with 29 undergraduate Ss, examined the effect of strategy on 6 min of recall from a subset of a category presented as a list. In Exps I and II, a large recall deficit was produced by retrieval strategies involving recall in alphabetic order and by size of the words' referents, relative to free recall. In Exp III, 4 strategies—alphabetic, size, serial order, and free recall—gave similar levels of recall after 6 min, though the growth rate of the cumulative output functions differed among the strategies. An extension of the search of associative memory model of J. G. Raaijmakers and R. M. Shiffrin (1980; see also PA, Vol 66:491) was developed to explain these results; the new model postulates attention sharing among probe cues and the use of idiosyncratic strategies for free recall from natural categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Similarity-based categorization and fuzziness of natural categories

The adequacy of similarity to prototype as an account of categorization in natural concepts was assessed by analyzing the monotonicity of the relation between typicality of an item in a category and the probability of a positive categorization response using data from McCloskey and Glucksberg (1978). The analysis revealed a strong underlying similarity-based threshold curve, with systematic deviations. Further data collection showed that deviations from the curve could be attributed to the effects of unfamiliarity and non-categorical associations on typicality judgments, as well as differences between the perceptual appearance of an item (which tended to boost typicality) and its underlying nature (which tended to boost categorization). The results are discussed in terms of the different presuppositions and task constraints involved in rating typicality as opposed to performing a categorization.     

The magic spell of language: Linguistic categories and their perceptual consequences.

Language is a tool that directs attention to different aspects of reality. Using participants from the same linguistic community, the authors demonstrate in 4 studies that metasemantic features of linguistic categories influence basic perceptual processes. More specifically, the hypothesis that abstract versus concrete language leads to a more global versus local perceptual focus was supported across 4 experiments, in which participants used (Experiment 1) or were primed either supraliminally (Experiments 2 and 3) or subliminally (Experiment 4) with abstract (adjectives) or concrete (verbs) terms. Participants were shown to display a global versus specific perceptual focus (Experiments 1 and 4), more versus less inclusiveness of categorization (Experiments 2 and 3), and incorporation of more rather than less contextual information (Experiment 3). The implications of this new perspective toward the language-perception interface are discussed in the context of the general linguistic relativity debate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting features for members of natural categories when categorization is uncertain.

An important function of concepts is to allow the prediction of unseen features. A Bayesian account of feature prediction suggests that people will consider all the categories an object could belong to when they judge the likelihood that the object has a feature. The judgment and decision literature suggests that they may instead use a simpler heuristic in which they consider only the most likely category. In 3 experiments, no evidence was found that participants took into account alternative categories as well as the most likely one when they judged feature probabilities for familiar objects in meaningful contexts. These results, in conjunction with those of G. L. Murphy and B. H. Ross (1994), suggest that although people may consider alternative categories in certain limited situations, they often do not. Reasons for why the use of alternative categories may be relatively rare are discussed, and conditions under which people may take alternative categories into account are outlined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relative use of necessity and sufficiency information in causal judgments about natural categories.

Participants in 4 studies placed less emphasis on necessity information (instances when the event occurred but the target factor was absent) than sufficiency information (instances when the target factor was present but the event did not occur) when the target factor corresponded to a natural kind category (e.g., race or species) in comparison with an artificial category (e.g., preferences or facial features) or an artifactual category (e.g., product type). Results were not due to differences in familiarity, prior causal beliefs, or ease of imagining the class of instances, but instead derived from less willingness to search for alternative explanations when the target explanation was based on a natural kind category in comparison with artificial or artifactual categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of sentence constraint on priming in natural language comprehension.

In 4 cross-modal naming experiments, researchers investigated the role of sentence constraint in natural language comprehension. On the sentence constraint account, incoming linguistic material activates semantic features that in turn pre-activate likely upcoming words. The 1st and 2nd experiments investigated whether stimulus offset asynchrony played a critical role in previous studies supporting the sentence constraint account. The 3rd and 4th experiments examined further predictions of the sentence constraint account, in particular whether pre-activated words would compete for activation. In Experiment 3, the researchers manipulated whether an expected target word had a close competitor and found that response to the expected word was facilitated regardless of the proximity of a competitor. The 4th experiment established that close competitors were primed by the sentence frames and should have been available to compete with expected target words. Thus, word-level representations did not compete for activation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emergent themes in the study of emotional development and emotion regulation.

Makes explicit a reconceptualization of the nature of emotion that over the past decade has fostered the study of emotion regulation. In the past, emotions were considered to be feeling states indexed by behavioral expressions: now, emotions are considered to be processes of establishing, maintaining, or disrupting the relation between the organism and the environment on matters of significance to the person. When emotions were conceptualized in the traditional way as feelings, emotion regulation centered on ego-defense mechanisms and display rules. The former was difficult to test; the latter was narrow in scope. By contrast, the notion of emotions as relational processes has shifted interest to the study of person/environment transactions in the elicitations of emotion and to the functions of action tendencies, emotional "expressions," language, and behavioral coping mechanisms. The article also treats the importance of affect in the continuity of self-development by documenting the impressive stability of at least two emotional dispositions: irritability and inhibition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attachment and emotion in autobiographical memory development

The relation of attachment status to autobiographical memory was assessed in 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds. Of specific interest was the relation between attachment status and the emotional content of parent-child memory conversations. Forty-six mother-child dyads discussed four events designed to elicit positive and negative emotional themes. Both attachment status and gender moderated the emotional content of this memory talk. Mother-daughter dyads with insecurely attached girls engaged in relatively more negative memory talk than mother-daughter dyads with securely attached girls. However, the dyads of secure girls elaborated more often on both positive and negative emotional themes than did the dyads of insecure girls who primarily elaborated on positive themes. The relations between attachment status and emotion talk for mother-son dyads were inconsistent. Findings were discussed in terms of the role of attachment in the social construction of autobiographical memories.     

Accelerating language development through picture book reading.

We experimentally assessed a 1-month, home-based intervention, designed to optimize parental reading of picture books to young children. Parents in the experimental group received instructions to increase their rates of open-ended questions, function/attribute questions, and expansions; to respond appropriately to children's attempts to answer these questions; and to decrease their frequency of straight reading and questions that could be answered by pointing. Control-group parents were instructed to read in their customary fashion. All families audiotaped their reading sessions at home. Analysis of these tapes demonstrated that the experimental group scored significantly higher than children in the control group on standardized posttests of expressive language ability. On the basis of analysis of audiotapes, children in the experimental group also had a higher mean length of utterance (MLU), a higher frequency of phrases, and a lower frequency of single words. Follow-up 9 months after the completion of treatment disclosed continued, although statistically diminished, differences between the two groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A longitudinal study of emotion expression and personality relations in early development.

To investigate emotion expression and personality relations, the authors coded infants' full-face and component positive and negative expressions during Episodes 4 through 8 of the strange situation procedure at age 18 months and obtained maternal ratings of the 5-factor model of personality when children were 3.5 years old. Full-face negative expression was directly related to Neuroticism and inversely related to Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. By contrast, component positive expression showed the exact opposite pattern of relations. Full-face positive expression was positively correlated with Extraversion and Openness to Experience. These findings indicate that full-face and component expressions may index different intensities of emotions. Emotion expression and personality relations were not mediated by the security of attachment continuum or the emotional reactivity dichotomy derived from the attachment subclassifications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Color categories in macaques.

Investigated whether macaque monkeys partition the photic spectrum into the same 4 basic hue categories that humans do (i.e., blue, green, yellow, and red). Seven males were trained to respond in the presence of one chromatic stimulus and were tested, in extinction, for generalization to others. In extinction, Ss responded at similar and high levels to stimuli that fell in the same human hue category as the training stimulus and at similar and much lower levels to stimuli that fell in a different human hue category from the training stimulus. It is concluded that macaques and humans categorize the spectrum in a similar fashion. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evaluating natural language processors in the clinical domain

Evaluating natural language processing (NLP) systems in the clinical domain is a difficult task which is important for advancement of the field. A number of NLP systems have been reported that extract information from free-text clinical reports, but not many of the systems have been evaluated. Those that were evaluated noted good performance measures but the results were often weakened by ineffective evaluation methods. In this paper we describe a set of criteria aimed at improving the quality of NLP evaluation studies. We present an overview of NLP evaluations in the clinical domain and also discuss the Message Understanding Conferences (MUC) [1-4]. Although these conferences constitute a series of NLP evaluation studies performed outside of the clinical domain, some of the results are relevant within medicine. In addition, we discuss a number of factors which contribute to the complexity that is inherent in the task of evaluating natural language systems.