Personality and suicidal ideation in the elderly: factorial invariance and latent means structures across age

Objectives: Suicide among the elderly is a dramatic global health problem. Although fatal attempts are frequent in the elderly, research indicated that they rarely present long-term elaboration of suicidal ideation and communicate their intents. Consequently, risk factor detection and assessment are salient. Although evidence on the association between personality and suicidal ideation in young adults is accumulating, little is known about its relevance in the elderly. The purpose of the present study was to analyze the components of a measurement model that are invariant across young adults and older adults and then investigate the relations among dimensions of personality and suicide risk. We postulated a specific relation pattern a priori and tested the hypotheses statistically in order to examine the models for equivalency of the factorial measurement. Method: We investigated 316 young adults and 339 older adults, who were administered self-report questionnaires to assess depression, hopelessness, alternative five-factor model of personality, and self–other perception. Results: Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses were conducted, yielding a final model with excellent fit to the data. This model showed a similar pattern of associations between suicidal ideation and personality across both groups. Conclusions: Although the elderly are exposed to specific life stressors associated with suicidal ideation, our findings suggest that the elderly and young adults may be similar on personality and psychopathology variables predicting suicidal ideation than previously hypothesized. Implications are provided for enhanced assessment and intervention of the elderly high in neuroticism, depression, hopelessness, and with negative self–other perception

Stereotypes, theory of mind, and the action–prediction hierarchy

Both mindreading and stereotyping are forms of social cognition that play a pervasive role in our everyday lives, yet too little attention has been paid to the question of how these two processes are related. This paper offers a theory of the influence of stereotyping on mental-state attribution that draws on hierarchical predictive coding accounts of action prediction. It is argued that the key to understanding the relation between stereotyping and mindreading lies in the fact that stereotypes centrally involve character-trait attributions, which play a systematic role in the action–prediction hierarchy. On this view, when we apply a stereotype to an individual, we rapidly attribute to her a cluster of generic character traits on the basis of her perceived social group membership. These traits are then used to make inferences about that individual’s likely beliefs and desires, which in turn inform inferences about her behavior

Detection of malingering via cognitive cues

Malingering is a frequently encountered problem of faking psychological or physiological symptoms or exaggerating existing conditions for external gain. Malingerers typically are seen in clinical and forensic settings and create a burden to our society due to loss of economic resources or professional time. The impact of malingering is difficult to calculate due to problems with identifying actual cases of malingering. Psychological tests traditionally have been used in the assessment of malingering. Despite major improvements in instruments and clinical interviewing techniques, however, no failsafe assessment tool has been identified for the accurate detection of malingering. Cognitive studies of lie detection have provided evidence that liars differ from truth-tellers in terms of increased cognitive load that might be measured via several cognitive cues. For example, response time is longer for liars compared to truth-tellers. Eye gaze and pupil dilation also differ when individuals lie. TRI-Con is a new approach (officially introduced by Walczyk, 2005) that uses eye data to monitor, record, and compare truthful versus deceptive responses and might be a stepping stone to more accurate and objective detection of malingering in the future. The current study was designed to reveal differences between truth-tellers and malingerers in terms of response time and eye data when confronted with different scenarios that entail telling the truth, rehearsed malingering, and unrehearsed malingering. Findings showed that response time is a more reliable cue for detecting malingering than eye data

A text classification framework for simple and effective early depression detection over social media streams

With the rise of the Internet, there is a growing need to build intelligent systems that are capable of efficiently dealing with early risk detection (ERD) problems on social media, such as early depression detection, early rumor detection or identification of sexual predators. These systems, nowadays mostly based on machine learning techniques, must be able to deal with data streams since users provide their data over time. In addition, these systems must be able to decide when the processed data is sufficient to actually classify users. Moreover, since ERD tasks involve risky decisions by which people's lives could be affected, such systems must also be able to justify their decisions. However, most standard and state-of-the-art supervised machine learning models (such as SVM, MNB, Neural Networks, etc.) are not well suited to deal with this scenario. This is due to the fact that they either act as black boxes or do not support incremental classification/learning. In this paper we introduce SS3, a novel supervised learning model for text classification that naturally supports these aspects. SS3 was designed to be used as a general framework to deal with ERD problems. We evaluated our model on the CLEF's eRisk2017 pilot task on early depression detection. Most of the 30 contributions submitted to this competition used state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that our classifier was able to outperform these models and standard classifiers, despite being less computationally expensive and having the ability to explain its rationale.Fil: Burdisso, Sergio Gastón. Universidad Nacional de San Luis; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis; ArgentinaFil: Errecalde, Marcelo Luis. Universidad Nacional de San Luis; ArgentinaFil: Montes y Gómez, Manuel. Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica; Méxic

Social perception of faces: Neuropsychological and behavioural investigations

This thesis concerns theoretical and empirical issues in face processing and facial trait perception. First, I present evidence that challenges two hypotheses proposed as alternatives to face specificity, namely the individuation and the expertise hypotheses. Inconsistent with the individuation hypothesis, an extensive investigation of a new case of acquired prosopagnosia (Herschel) revealed normal exemplar recognition memory for a wide variety of objects, and normal ability to discriminate between highly similar items within a novel object category. Inconsistent with the expertise hypothesis, Herschel and Florence, a second acquired prosopagnosic, showed normal learning profiles and response times putative of successful expertise acquisition in an eight-day training procedure with novel objects, demonstrating that faces are processed by specialised mechanisms not used for objects-of-expertise. Second, testing four patients with acquired prosopagnosia, I demonstrate that perceptual mechanisms underlying trait judgments are dissociable from those implicated in recognising identity. Furthermore, I show that perception of facial aggressiveness does not depend on mechanisms for facial sex recognition, and that normal facial trustworthiness judgments are likely to occur without intact recognition of facial expressions, therefore challenging the overgeneralisation theory in facial trait perception. Third, I present a series of experiments with healthy participants to characterise various properties of facial trait perception. Specifically, I examine: i) the role of facial width-to-height ratio in perceived trustworthiness; ii) the accuracy of facial trustworthiness judgments; iii) the interaction between facial trustworthiness and reputation; and iv) the interaction between face impressions and voice impressions. Overall, the findings of the present thesis have important implications for the nature of the mechanisms underlying facial identity processing, the organisation of facial trait perception and its relationship to other face perception abilities, as well as the physical, ecological, and multimodal aspects of facial trait perception