The Anxious Sleeper

Sleeper effects.

Early experience preserves and refines many capabilities that emerge prenatally. Here we describe another role that it plays -- establishing the neural substrate for capabilities that emerge at a much later point in development. The evidence comes from sleeper effects: permanent deficits when early experience was absent in capabilities that normally emerge long after birth. We provide evidence ...

Anxious mothers... anxious babies?

Many mothers of infants experience days of worry and weeks of work—an experience made so much harder by the presence of a crying infant. Up to 20% of mothers in developed countries report excessive crying in their infants. Although often thought of as a benign, self-limiting condition, infant crying—in particular, crying that lasts more than 3 h per day, for more than 3 days per week and for mo...

In search of reliable persuasion effects: III. The sleeper effect is dead. Long live the sleeper effect.

The sleeper effect in persuasion is a delayed increase in the impact of a message that is accompanied by a discounting cue. Despite a long history, the sleeper effect has been notoriously difficult to obtain or to replicate, with the exception of a pair of studies by Gruder et al. (1978). We conducted a series of 16 computer-controlled experiments and a replication of the Gruder et al. study to...

Microtubule Disassembly: When a Sleeper Is Activated

Tubulin modifications are emerging as interesting mechanisms to regulate microtubule dynamics. A new study shows that phosphorylation of α-tubulin by the atypical kinase PHS1 leads to rapid disassembly of cortical microtubules in plant cells that are under hyperosmotic stresses.

Vibrations of partly supported concrete railway sleeper