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Developmental co-ordination disorder (DCD) is characterised by difficulties in motor control and coordination from early childhood. While problems processing facial identity are often associated with neurodevelopmental conditions, such issues have never been directly tested in adults with DCD. We tested this possibility through a range of tasks, and assessed the prevalence of developmental prosopagnosia (i.e., lifelong difficulties with faces), in a group comprising individuals who self-reported a diagnosis of, or suspected that they had, DCD. Strikingly, we found 53% of this probable DCD group met recently recommended criteria for a diagnosis of prosopagnosia, with 22% acquiring a diagnosis using traditional cognitive task-based methods. Moreover, their problems with faces were apparent on both unfamiliar and familiar face memory tests, as well as on a facial perception task (i.e., could they tell faces apart). Positive correlations were found between self-report measures assessing movement and coordination problems, and objective difficulties on experimental face identity processing tasks, suggesting widespread neurocognitive disruption in DCD. Importantly, issues in identity processing in our probable DCD group remained even after excluding participants with comorbid conditions traditionally associated with difficulties in face recognition, i.e., autism and dyslexia. We recommend that any diagnostic test for DCD should include an assessment for prosopagnosia. Given the high prevalence of prosopagnosia in our probable DCD group, and the positive correlations between DCD and prosopagnosia symptoms, there may be a stronger link between movement and facial identity abilities than previously thought.

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LAY ABSTRACT: Any thriving society must recognise, accept and celebrate all of its diverse talent. But how accepting is British society towards autism and autistic people? This research addressed this question through the lens of the press since the press both reflects and helps shape public attitudes towards various social categories. We used specialised 'corpus-based' methods to carry out a large-scale study, which examined all articles referring to autism or autistic people in 10 national British newspapers in the period 2011-2020. We first investigated how often newspapers referred to autism. We found that the coverage of autism increased slightly over the years, suggesting that autism was becoming an increasingly newsworthy topic. Furthermore, the rise in autism coverage differed considerably between individual newspapers: it was more pronounced in the broadsheets than tabloids, and in left-leaning than right-leaning newspapers. But what was the focus of these articles? We found that newspapers emphasised the adversities associated with autism and portrayed autism with a lot of negative language. Newspapers also tended to focus on autistic children, and particularly on boys. There were some signs of change in more recent years, with some newspapers now representing autism as a difference and, in addition, referring to more diverse groups of autistic people. However, these changes tended to be confined to broadsheets and left-leaning newspapers. Our findings suggest that representations of autism in the contemporary British press are skewed towards stereotypically negative views, which may well hinder the acceptance of autism and the fostering of a more inclusive society.

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The present study investigated how task-irrelevant attributes of a stimulus affected responses in a multiattribute version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In Experiment 1, participants categorized images of Black and White male and female individuals on the basis of either race or gender. Both the race and gender of the individuals affected task performance regardless of which attribute was currently relevant to performing the task, yielding the IAT effects on both attributes. However, the influences of a task-irrelevant attribute depended on whether the task-relevant attribute was categorized compatibly or incompatibly with the underlying implicit biases. These results suggest that individuals are still categorized implicitly based on task-irrelevant social attributes and that the explicit categorization required in the standard IAT has a considerable impact on implicit social biases. Experiment 2 considered a third, nonsocial attribute (the color of the picture frame) and reproduced task-irrelevant IAT effects and their dependence on explicit categorization. However, Experiments 3 and 4 suggested that the task-irrelevant IAT effects based on social attributes are determined by whether the task-relevant attribute is a social or nonsocial attribute. The results raise fundamental questions about the basic assumptions underpinning the interpretations of the results from the IAT. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

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The design of effective communications depends upon an adequate model of the communication process. The traditional model is that speech conveys semantic information and bodily movement conveys information about emotion and interpersonal attitudes. But McNeill (2000) argues that this model is fundamentally wrong and that some bodily movements, namely spontaneous hand movements generated during talk (iconic gestures), are integral to semantic communication. But can we increase the effectiveness of communication using this new theory? Focusing on advertising we found that advertisements in which the message was split between speech and iconic gesture (possible on TV) were significantly more effective than advertisements in which meaning resided purely in speech or language (radio/newspaper). We also found that the significant differences in communicative effectiveness were maintained across five consecutive trials. We compared the communicative power of professionally made TV advertisements in which a spoken message was accompanied either by iconic gestures or by pictorial images, and found the iconic gestures to be more effective. We hypothesized that iconic gestures are so effective because they illustrate and isolate just the core semantic properties of a product. This research suggests that TV advertisements can be made more effective by incorporating iconic gestures with exactly the right temporal and semantic properties.

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Research into the nature of attributional reasoning in paranoia has for the most part been restricted to questionnaire-based approaches. This fails to address the issue of whether a distinctive attributional style underpins the everyday talk of paranoid individuals. This study aimed to investigate whether attributional models of paranoid delusions applied to spontaneous attributions generated in the discourse of 12 paranoid and 12 non-paranoid speakers. Causal attributions for negative and positive life experiences were extracted from interview transcripts and rated using the Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations (CAVE) technique. It was found that, as a proportion, paranoids made more attributions for negative events that were of an external-personal, stable and global nature (as attributional models would predict). They also made significantly more external-personal attributions for negative events and, in one of two datasets, showed a more external mean CAVE rating for negative events than the non-paranoid controls. This paper highlights important issues underlying the extraction of attributions from paranoid talk, and discusses the implications for attributional models of paranoia and future discourse-based research in this area.

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When people talk, they frequently make movements of their arms and hands, some of which appear connected with the content of the speech and are termed iconic gestures. Critical to our understanding of the relationship between speech and iconic gesture is an analysis of what properties of talk might give rise to these gestures. This paper focuses on two such properties, namely the familiarity and the imageability of the core propositional units that the gestures accompany. The study revealed that imageability had a significant effect overall on the probability of the core propositional unit being accompanied by a gesture, but that familiarity did not. Familiarity did, however, have a significant effect on the probability of a gesture in the case of high imageability units and in the case of units associated with frequent gesture use. Those iconic gestures accompanying core propositional units variously defined by the properties of imageability and familiarity were found to differ in their level of idiosyncrasy, the viewpoint from which they were generated and their overall communicative effect. This research thus uncovered a number of quite distinct relationships between gestures and speech in everyday talk, with important implications for future theories in this area.

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It has been hypothesized that the iconic hand gestures that accompany talk communicate important semantic information. This research tests whether some gestures, in the absence of speech, are more communicative than others and considers what properties of gestures might affect their communicative power. Our research found that the communicative power of gestures does vary greatly, and that this is significantly affected by the viewpoint from which a gesture is generated, with character viewpoint gestures being more communicative than observer viewpoint gestures. It has also been suggested that gesture viewpoint is connected with the transitivity of the clause that it accompanies, and it was found in our study that respondents appeared to obtain syntactic information about the associated clause from the gesture. This conclusion was based on the observation that when respondents attempted to report what information was contained in gestures, viewed in the absence of speech, there was a significantly higher proportion of transitive structures in their answers after they had watched character viewpoint gestures compared with observer viewpoint gestures. Communication about the syntax of the accompanying clause might thus be a critical, but thus far neglected, aspect of the role of gestures in everyday talk.

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