Age, anger regulation and well-being.

Emotion regulation has been argued to be an important factor in well-being. The current study investigated the effects of adult aging on emotional expression, emotional control and rumination about emotional events, focusing on an emotion which is particularly important in social interaction: anger. Measures of anger regulation and well-being were obtained in a sample of 286 adults aged between 18 and 88. Older adults expressed anger outwardly less often, and reported more inner control of anger using calming strategies compared to their younger counterparts. These age differences were not explained by variance in social desirability of responding. Age improvements in negative affect and anxiety were partly explained by age differences in anger regulation suggesting an important role for anger management in good mental health amongst older adults. Further, age improvements in quality of life were explained by variance in anger regulation indicating that improved management of emotions with age is an important factor in maintaining well-being in old age.

Knowledge of display rules in prelingually deaf and hearing children.

Deaf children of elementary and secondary school age participated in a study designed to examine their understanding of display rules, the principles governing the expression and concealment of emotion in social situations. The results showed that deaf children's knowledge of display rules, as measured by their reported concealment of emotion, was comparable to that of hearing children of the same age. However, deaf children were less likely to report that they would conceal happiness and anger. They were also less likely to produce reasons for concealing emotion and a smaller proportion of their reasons were prosocial, that is, relating to the feelings of others. The results suggest that the understanding of display rules (which function to protect the feelings of other people) may develop more gradually in deaf children raised in a spoken language environment than it does in hearing children.

The development of theory of mind in deaf children.

Deaf children aged 4 to 16 years were given a false-belief test of theory of mind. Although the children experienced difficulty with the test, relative to hearing children, confirming a report by Peterson and Siegal (1995), performance was age-related, with a significantly higher proportion of 13- to 16-year-olds passing the test. It was concluded that deaf children raised in a spoken language environment show a developmental delay in theory of mind acquisition. This delay is consistent with the assumption that their early opportunities for learning about mental states are relatively restricted and that the normal development of theory of mind is dependent upon such opportunities.

The effect of experimental design on memory for typical and distinctive faces.

The effect of experimental design on memory for typical and distinctive faces was investigated in three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, a between-subjects, between-lists (distinctive-only faces, or typical-only faces) manipulation of distinctiveness was compared with a within-subjects mixed-list design. The results demonstrated an interaction between design type and distinctiveness, indicating an increase in the rate of misidentifications and a decrease in the response criterion to distinctive faces in the distinctive-only set relative to distinctive faces in the mixed-list condition. Experiment 3 addressed the locus of this effect by comparing the standard mixed-list within-subjects design with two sets of faces in which the target images were different in type from the distractor images, i.e. a typical target-distinctive distractor set and a distinctive target-typical distractor set. The results of this experiment demonstrated that distinctive distractor faces were more readily rejected as new faces when typical target faces were included in the same set. The relative sensitivity of memory for typical and distinctive faces to manipulations of experimental design are discussed with reference to current models of facial distinctiveness.

The effect of feature displacement on the perception of well-known faces.

The effect of feature displacement within two well-known faces (Terry Wogan and Cyril Smith) was examined. Image processing equipment was used to produce stimuli in which the features of an original facial image were displaced to form a number of modified images. This technique was first reported by Haig, in a recognition study in which the effect of feature displacement within unfamiliar faces was investigated. In the present experiment a perceptual judgement task was carried out in which subjects were presented with a number of modified faces and asked to judge how dissimilar these were with respect to an original image. A multi-dimensional scaling analysis of the comparative judgements of the subjects revealed a two-dimensional solution involving displacement of the eyes and mouth. A clear division between up/down and inward/outward displacement within these features (particularly the eyes) was observed. A similar pattern of results was found for both well-known faces. This result indicates that subjects were responding to changes in the facial configuration produced by the different types of feature displacement (horizontal or vertical), as opposed to movement of the features per se. Finally, the results also indicate that the displacement of inner features (mouth, eyes, nose) was more noticeable than displacement of the outer facial features (eg hairline).

The extraneuronal uptake and localization of noradrenaline in the cat spleen and the effect on this of some drugs, of cold and of denervation.

1. Extraneuronal uptake of noradrenaline (NA) was examined in the cat spleen first by perfusing with NA for 10 min, followed by a 2-min wash to clear the extracellular fluid, then measuring the amount retained, its subcellular distribution and the tissue components involved as revealed by the development of the characteristic fluorescence. Secondly, thin spleen slices were exposed to NA in vitro and the development of fluorescence in various structures, particularly arterial smooth muscle, measured.2. The cat spleen accumulated large quantities of NA and this, like the development of fluorescence, was concentration-dependent. After particle separation most of the retained amine appeared in the high-speed supernatant, with a lesser amount in the coarse granule fraction. There was little amine in either the mitochondrial or microsomal fraction. The microsomal fraction from unperfused spleens was rich in NA, presumably from storage granules from the adrenergic nerves. On an intermittent sucrose density gradient the NA-rich particles sedimented between 1.0 and 1.5 M sucrose, corresponding to the recently described dense granules from bovine splenic nerves.3. Fluorescence histochemistry revealed several tissues accumulating NA. At an NA concentration of 10(-5) g/ml., arterial smooth muscle and endothelium showed intracellular fluorescence; at 10(-4) g/ml., collagen, the perimeter of the smooth muscle cells of the capsule-trabecula-vein system and the reticular cells forming the framework of the spleen developed fluorescence. In the reticular cells the fluorescence was intracellular. The fluorescence pattern on the perimeter of non-arterial smooth muscle corresponded to the pattern of basement membrane as shown by PAS staining. The red pulp, lymphoid tissue and the phagocytic cells of the ellipsoids did not fluoresce.4. Cooling the tissue to 15 degrees C or less, phenoxybenzamine in a concentration of 5 x 10(-5) g/ml. or normetanephrine in a concentration of 10(-4) g/ml. prevented both uptake and loss of NA in arterial smooth muscle but had no effect on collagen.5. Chronic post-ganglionic denervation or reserpine had no effect on the development of fluorescence in any extraneuronal tissue.