Environmental factors and teenagers' personalities: The role of personal and familial Socio-Cultural Level.

Environmental (e.g., socio-cultural context), individual (e.g., genetic makeup), and interpersonal (e.g., caregiver-children relationships) factors can play a crucial role in shaping the development of the teenagers' personality. In this study, we focused on the Socio-Cultural Level that designates the set of preferences, knowledge, and behaviors that characterize an individual's way of life and depend on his or her cultural, social, and economic resources. We studied the relationship between Socio-Cultural Level (personal, maternal, and paternal) and Big Five personality traits of 191 teenagers living in the same geographical area. Results showed that Socioeconomic Status (i.e., parental education level and occupational prestige), which is the only dimension generally measured in investigations on Socio-Cultural Level, was not related with personality. In contrast, Cultural Capital and Social Capital were associated with different personality traits. Personal Cultural Capital was related to Openness to experience of boys and girls and to Extraversion of girls; personal Social Capital was related to Extraversion of girls, Emotional stability of boys, and Agreeableness of both boys and girls; maternal Cultural Capital was associated with Openness to experience of daughters. Overall, the personality of teenagers was more related to their own Cultural and Social Capital than to the Cultural and Social Capital of their parents. Moreover, the relationship between Cultural Capital and Social Capital of boys/girls and of fathers/mothers was moderate in strength. It seems that parents influence the development of personality of their teenagers indirectly, their Socio-Cultural Level shaping the Socio-Cultural Level of their sons and daughters.

When co-action eliminates the Simon effect: disentangling the impact of co-actor's presence and task sharing on joint-task performance.

This study aimed at assessing whether the mere belief of performing a task with another person, who is in charge of the complementary part of the task, is sufficient for the so-called joint Simon effect to occur. In all three experiments of the study, participants sat alone in a room and underwent two consecutive Go/NoGo tasks that were identical except for the instructions. In Experiment 1, participants performed the task first individually (baseline task), and then either co-acting with another person who responded from an unknown location to the NoGo stimuli (joint task) or imaging themselves responding to the NoGo stimuli (imaginative task). Relative to the baseline, the instructions of the imaginative task made the Simon effect occur, while those of the joint task were ineffective in eliciting the effect. This result suggests that sharing a task with a person who is known to be in charge of the complementary task, but is not physically present, is not sufficient to induce the representation of an alternative response able to produce interference, which happens instead when the instructions explicitly require to imagine such a response. Interestingly, we observed that when the Simon effect was already present in the baseline task (i.e., when the response alternative to the Go response was represented in the individual task due to non-social factors), it disappeared in the joint task. We propose that, when no information about the co-actor's position is available, the division of labor between the participant and co-actor allows participants to filter out the possible (incidental) representation of the alternative response from their task representation, thus eliminating potential sources of interference. This account is supported by the results of Experiments 2 and 3 and suggests that under certain circumstances task-sharing may reduce the interference produced by the irrelevant information, rather than increase it.

Cognitive approach to the assessment of limb apraxia.

A new instrument for the assessment of the different levels of gesture processing, as identified by recent cognitive models of apraxia, is presented. The battery comprises thirteen tasks -- eight assess the production of meaningful gestures both on command and on imitation, four tasks assess the ability to recognize and identify gestures, and one task assesses imitation of meaningless gestures. The battery encompasses a novel test of gesture production on visual command. A total of 60 healthy British volunteers were tested with the entire battery. On the whole, participants made more errors with pantomimes than with other tasks. Their scores served as norms.

List effect in apraxia assessment.

Imitation tests encompassing intermingled meaningful and meaningless items are normally used to assess ideomotor apraxia, implicitly assuming that they would test the lexical and the non-lexical route, respectively. However, these mixed lists might induce a "list composition" effect similar to that found in word recognition studies where familiar material can be processed via the non-lexical route. This hypothesis was put to test by examining praxis skills of 23 left-hemisphere damaged patients using the same gestures in two formats: pure and mixed lists (i.e., meaningless or meaningful gestures administered separately or intermingled, respectively). Results showed that patients performed better on the imitation task when pure lists were used. Moreover, asymmetries of performance were observed. Patient SL scored better in the imitation of meaningful gestures in the pure list than in the mixed list condition. Patient CA performed poorly in the imitation of meaningless gestures only in the mixed list condition. Dissociations observed in imitation tasks could be biased by the use of mixed lists. Also "pure" lists should be used for the diagnosis of imitation deficits in apraxia.