Peer rejection and social information-processing factors in the development of aggressive behavior problems in children.

The relation between social rejection and growth in antisocial behavior was investigated. In Study 1,259 boys and girls (34% African American) were followed from Grades 1 to 3 (ages 6-8 years) to Grades 5 to 7 (ages 10-12 years). Early peer rejection predicted growth in aggression. In Study 2,585 boys and girls (16% African American) were followed from kindergarten to Grade 3 (ages 5-8 years), and findings were replicated. Furthermore, early aggression moderated the effect of rejection, such that rejection exacerbated antisocial development only among children initially disposed toward aggression. In Study 3, social information-processing patterns measured in Study 1 were found to mediate partially the effect of early rejection on later aggression. In Study 4, processing patterns measured in Study 2 replicated the mediation effect. Findings are integrated into a recursive model of antisocial development.

Response decision processes and externalizing behavior problems in adolescents.

Externalizing behavior problems of 124 adolescents were assessed across Grades 7-11. In Grade 9, participants were also assessed across social-cognitive domains after imagining themselves as the object of provocations portrayed in six videotaped vignettes. Participants responded to vignette-based questions representing multiple processes of the response decision step of social information processing. Phase 1 of our investigation supported a two-factor model of the response evaluation process of response decision (response valuation and outcome expectancy). Phase 2 showed significant relations between the set of these response decision processes, as well as response selection, measured in Grade 9 and (a) externalizing behavior in Grade 9 and (b) externalizing behavior in Grades 10-11, even after controlling externalizing behavior in Grades 7-8. These findings suggest that on-line behavioral judgments about aggression play a crucial role in the maintenance and growth of aggressive response tendencies in adolescence.

Life-narrative and word-cued autobiographical memories in centenarians: comparisons with 80-year-old control, depressed, and dementia groups.

Centenarians provided autobiographical memories to either a request for a life narrative or a request to produce autobiographical memories to cue words. Both methods produced distributions with childhood-amnesia, reminiscence-bump, and recency components. The life-narrative method produced relatively more bump memories at the expense of recent memories. The life-narrative distributions were similar to those obtained from 80-year-old adults without clinical symptoms and from 80-year-old Alzheimer's dementia and depression patients, except that the centenarians had an additional 20-year period of relatively low recall between the bump and recency components. The centenarians produced more emotionally neutral memories than the other three groups and produced fewer and less detailed memories than the non-clinical 80-year-old sample.

The neural basis of naming impairments in Alzheimer's disease revealed through positron emission tomography.

The naming impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been attributed to a variety of cognitive processing deficits, including impairments in semantic memory, visual perception, and lexical access. To further understand the underlying biological basis of the naming failures in AD, the present investigation examined the relationship of various classes of naming errors to regional brain measures of cerebral glucose metabolism as measured with 18 F-Fluoro-2-deoxyglucose (FDG) and positron emission tomography (PET). Errors committed on a visual naming test were categorized according to a cognitive processing schema and then examined in relationship to metabolism within specific brain regions. The results revealed an association of semantic errors with glucose metabolism in the frontal and temporal regions. Language access errors, such as circumlocutions, and word blocking nonresponses were associated with decreased metabolism in areas within the left hemisphere. Visuoperceptive errors were related to right inferior parietal metabolic function. The findings suggest that specific brain areas mediate the perceptual, semantic, and lexical processing demands of visual naming and that visual naming problems in dementia are related to dysfunction in specific neural circuits.

Properties of word cues for autobiographical memory.

A sample of 124 words were used to cue autobiographical memories in 120 adults varying in age from 20 to 73 years. Individual words reliably cued autobiographical memories of different ages with different speeds. For all age groups, words rated high in imagery produced older memories and faster reaction times.

Distribution of important and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20-, 35-, and 70-year-old adults.

For word-cued autobiographical memories, older adults had an increase, or bump, from the ages 10 to 30. All age groups had fewer memories from childhood than from other years and a power-function retention for memories from the most recent 10 years. There were no consistent differences in reaction times and rating scale responses across decades. Concrete words cued older memories, but no property of the cues predicted which memories would come from the bump. The 5 most important memories given by 20- and 35-year-old participants were distributed similarly to their word-cued memories, but those given by 70-year-old participants came mostly from the single 20-to-30 decade. No theory fully accounts for the bump.

The Toronto Word Pool: Norms for imagery, concreteness, orthographic variables, and grammatical usage for 1,080 words

Imagery and concreteness norms and percentage noun usage were obtained on the 1,080 verbal items from the Toronto Word Pool. Imagery was defined as the rated ease with which a word aroused a mental image, and concreteness was defined in relation to level of abstraction. The degree to which a word was functionally a noun was estimated in a sentence generation task. The mean and standard deviation of the imagery and concreteness ratings for each item are reported together with letter and printed frequency counts for the words and indications of sex differences in the ratings. Additional data in the norms include a grammatical function code derived from dictionary definitions, a percent noun judgment, indexes of statistical approximation to English, and an orthographic neighbor ratio. Validity estimates for the imagery and concreteness ratings are derived from comparisons with scale values drawn from the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) noun pool and the Toglia and Battig (1978) norms. © 1982 Psychonomic Society, Inc.