Affordances as Properties of the Animal-Environment System

In this article, I argue that affordances are properties of the animal-environment system, that is, that they are emergent properties that do not inhere in either the environment or the animal. I critique and review the formal definition of affordance offered by Turvey (1992). Turvey defined affordances as properties of the environment; I discuss some consequences of this and argue that Turvey's strategy of grounding the definition of affordance in terms of dispositional properties is problematic. I also suggest that Turvey's definition of affordance may lead to problems for the specification and direct perception of affordances. Motivated by these problems, I propose a new definition of affordance, in which affordances are properties of the animal-environment system. This definition does not rely on the concept of dispositional properties and is consistent with direct perception.     

Certification of Specialties: Not If,But How

The guest editorial and featured articles have established the fact of counseling specialties and also that counselors have no clear or consistent scheme to recognize professional specialization. If counselors expect external recognition of and respect for their credentials, the credentials first must be recognized and understood by counselors. The experiences of other professions suggest strategies, but counselors must determine their own way of recognizing specialties without denying counselors' common identity. The profession and practice of counseling will be strengthened if all counselors have a minimum foundation of counseling knowledge and competencies and build accepted specializations on that foundation. The counseling profession must distinguish among work settings, professional interests, and specializations as a prerequisite to a coherent scheme of recognizing specialties.     

The Problem Is Not Professional Publishing,But the Publish-or-Perish Culture

Science and Engineering Ethics - The publication of scientific papers has become increasingly problematic in the last decades. Even if we agree that a renewed model is needed for peer-reviewed...     

Delayed,But Not Immediate,Feedback After Multiple-Choice Questions Increases Performance on a Subsequent Short-Answer,But Not Multiple-Choice,Exam: Evidence for the Dual-Process Theory of Memory

Three experiments, two performed in the laboratory and one embedded in a college psychology lecture course, investigated the effects of immediate versus delayed feedback following a multiple-choice exam on subsequent short answer and multiple-choice exams. Performance on the subsequent multiple-choice exam was not affected by the timing of the feedback on the prior exam; however, performance on the subsequent short answer exam was better following delayed than following immediate feedback. This was true regardless of the order in which immediate versus delayed feedback was given. Furthermore, delayed feedback only had a greater effect than immediate feedback on subsequent short answer performance following correct, confident responses on the prior exam. These results indicate that delayed feedback cues a student's prior response and increases subsequent recollection of that response. The practical implication is that delayed feedback is better than immediate feedback during academic testing.     

Doing Good at Work Feels Good at Home,but Not Right Away: When and Why Perceived Prosocial Impact Predicts Positive Affect

When and why does the experience of helping others at work spill over into positive affect at home? This paper presents a within‐person examination of the association between perceived prosocial impact at work and positive affect at home, as well as the psychological mechanisms that mediate this relationship. Sixty‐eight firefighters and rescue workers completed electronic diaries twice a day over the course of 1 working week. Random‐coefficient modeling showed that perceived prosocial impact predicted positive affect at bedtime. This relationship was mediated by perceived competence at the end of the working day and positive work reflection during after‐work hours but not by positive affect at the end of the working day. The findings demonstrate that the experience of helping others at work has delayed emotional benefits at home that appear to be channeled through the cognitive mechanisms of perceived competence and reflection rather than through an immediate affective boost.     

Perceiving the Lengths of Rods That are Held But Not Wielded

The ambiguity inherent in the act of experimental abstraction is discussed particularly with respect to experiments that seem to prove the superfluity of active exploration in perception. For example, in the case of haptic perception of the extent of hand-held rods, the variable of the second moment of mass distribution-the moment of inertia-has been shown to predict perceived length; this variable is inherently active, identifying a system's resistance to rotational acceleration. Other sources have reported that the length of an unseen rod could be perceived even when the rods were not rotated (rendering second moment theoretically inaccessible). The first experiment of this article confirms this ability in the extreme case in which observers are instructed not to move the rod at all. Four more experiments are reported in which the relative roles of the second moment and of the first moment-the other plausible mechanical candidate-are evaluated. The first moment was a better predictor of perceived length in cases in which exploration was restricted, and the second moment was a better predictor in conditions in which exploration was not restricted, although each played some role in all conditions. These results are discussed in terms of the possibility of more than one kind of information specifying the same property.     

Women Are On, But Not In, the News: Gender Roles in Local Television News

This investigation examined 580 news stories in the top three local television news programs in a Northeastern U.S. television market for a two-week period. Content analysis was used to determine whether or not there were gender differences in the prevalence of reporters and anchors and in the type of stories they reported. Analysis of newscasts revealed that female reporters were more likely to present human interest and health related stories, while males were more likely to present political stories. Analysis of news sources revealed that male experts were used significantly more often than were female experts as news sources. There was no relationship between time news stories were presented and gender of the reporters or anchors.     

Affordances,Dynamic Experience,and the Challenge of Reification

Why is it that affordances have received attention within psychology only in recent decades if they are supposedly what individuals perceive most fundamentally? This paradox can be explained, in part, by the fact that psychologists have usually considered the character of perceiving from a detached stance, and then reified the results of this analysis-an error that William James called the psychologist's fallacy-rather than attending to the immediate flow of perception-action. By the same token, if ecological psychologists were to take stimulus information as what is perceived, rather than as part of a conceptual framework offered to explain how we perceive, they would be committing a similar reification error. Ecological optics as a conceptual framework is always open to revision, even while the reality of affordances is assumed. Bearing in mind this distinction between what is perceived and how it is perceived, investigators need to return regularly to immediate experience, both as a means of verifying that our concepts connect back to our experience of the world and as a way of uncovering new qualities of perceptual experience for investigation. From this perspective, several exemplars of phenomenologically driven perceptual research are examined. Furthermore, the multidimensionality of affordances is considered, with an emphasis on their place in the flow of immediate experience, development, and sociocultural processes.     

Bidirectional Effects of Positive Affect,Warmth, and Interactions Between Mothers With and Without Symptoms of Depression and Their Toddlers

Maternal depression has negative implications for parenting and child outcomes, but it is also important to understand the daily transactional interactions that occur between mothers varying in symptoms of depression and their children. The current study aimed to examine immediate bidirectional effects between maternal warmth and positive affect and toddler affect in a sample of mothers varying in symptoms of depression. Ninety-one mothers and their 24-month-old toddlers completed a laboratory free-play/clean-up task. Mothers rated their symptoms of depression using the CES-D, and maternal warmth and positive affect and toddler positive and negative affect were observationally coded from a free-play and clean-up laboratory task. Sequential analyses indicated that mothers with no or mild symptoms of depression exhibited mutual positive affect with their children, but mothers with more severe symptoms of depression did not. Mothers with higher symptoms of depression displayed a decrease in warmth concurrent with toddlers’ positive affect. Further, unlike dyads in which mothers had higher symptoms of depression, dyads of mothers with lower symptoms appeared to exhibit some covariation in positive affect across the episode. These results provide evidence that even in non-clinical samples, affective manifestations of mothers’ subthreshold levels of depression may have negative immediate effects on toddlers’ emotions, and that mothers without symptoms of depression may have more reciprocal affective exchanges with their toddlers.     

Number, But Not Rhythmicity, of Temporal Cues Determines Phrasing Effects in Rat Serial-Pattern Learning

Recent work on experimental manipulations that affect chunking in sequential learning has shown that cues inserted into a sequence, termed “phrasing cues,” can facilitate learning by serving as discriminative cues that overshadow associations between sequence items (Stempowski, Carman, & Fountain, 1999). This experiment assessed whether rhythmicity is an important determinant of temporal phrasing effects or, instead, that a discrimination learning view can adequately account for the results of manipulating the number and sequential positioning of phrasing cues. Rats learned serial patterns in which the number and organization of phrasing cues were manipulated so that phrasing cues were positioned at the beginning of four or eight chunks in an eight-chunk serial pattern. Alternate Chunks phrasing, Aperiodic phrasing (four cues always positioned before the first, third, fourth, and seventh chunks), and Random phrasing (four cues positioned at four chunks chosen randomly for each new pattern presentation) produced equal facilitation of acquisition for cued chunks relative to a No Phrasing condition, but not as much facilitation as Every Chunk phrasing. Cue removal produced deficits, with greater impairment observed for the eight- versus four-cue conditions. Thus, the effects of temporal phrasing cues were predicted less by their rhythmicity than by the common discrimination learning notion that associative strength is a function of the number of stimulus–response pairings.     

Perceived utility of emotion: the structure and construct validity of the Perceived Affect Utility Scale in a cross-ethnic sample

This study introduces a new measure of the perceived utility of emotion, which is the degree to which emotions are perceived to be useful in achieving goals. In this study, we administered this new measure, the Perceived Affect Utility Scale (PAUSe), to a sample of 142 European American and 156 East Asian American college students. Confirmatory factor analyses provided support for a new, culturally informed parsing of emotion and for perceived utility of emotion to be distinguishable from ideal affect, a related but separate construct. Next, we explored the potential importance of perceived utility of emotion in cultural research. Through path analyses, we found that: (a) culturally relevant variables (e.g., independence) played a mediating role in the link between ethnic group and perceived utility of emotion; and (b) perceived utility of emotion played a mediating role in the link between culturally relevant variables and ideal affect. In particular, perceived utility of self-centered emotions (e.g., pride) was found to be associated with independence and ideal affect of those same emotions. In contrast, perceived utility of other-centered emotions (e.g., appreciation) was found to be associated with interdependence, dutifulness/self-discipline, and ideal affect of those same emotions. Implications for perceived utility of emotion in understanding cultural factors are discussed.     

Not Me,But Reflects Me: Validating a Simple Implicit Measure of Psychological Capital

We propose the recently introduced implicit measure of psychological capital (PsyCap), the Implicit Psychological Capital Questionnaire (I-PCQ; Harms & Luthans, 2012), can provide a needed valid alternative to the self-report Psychological Capital Questionnaire (PCQ). We explain the development of the I-PCQ items, assess the structural validity of the instrument, test its vulnerability to response distortion, and assess its capacity to predicting work attitudes and behaviors vis-à-vis the PCQ and Big Five personality facets. We found that the I-PCQ demonstrated acceptable structural validity that was consistent with and added to prior theorizing, was resistant to response distortion, and predicted work outcomes above and beyond the widely used self-report PCQ and Big Five personality traits. We conclude that the I-PCQ represents a valid, easily administered measure of psychological capital that minimizes problems associated with self-reports and is appropriate for use in work settings.     

“For Questioning is the Piety of Thought” But,Not Without Consequences in Technocratic Culture

Using a representative anecdote, insights from Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich, and in the form of a collage, this paper advocates a pedagogy of questioning and explores some of the conflicts and consequences of adopting such a pedagogy in a technocratic culture, especially as related to conventional expectations for education framed by efficiency, practicality, and functionality.     

Psychometric Properties of the Perceived Stress Scale in Youth with Mental Illness

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) is a widely used measure of psychological stress and has demonstrated robust psychometric properties in adult populations....     

I am Not a Better Teacher,But Others are Doing Worse: Burnout and Perceptions of Superiority Among Teachers

This study examined differences between teachers high and low in burnout in the perception of being superior to others. Because burnout implies a decline in well-being and because well-being is related to perceived superiority, it was hypothesized that perceived superiority would be reduced among individuals high in burnout. This would be particularly true for superiority with respect to positive behaviors (feeling better than others). As negative behaviors of others are generally highly salient, it was expected that even individuals high in burnout would be able to maintain a sense of negative superiority (feeling less bad than others). One hundred twenty teachers in secondary education were asked to generate information about inferior and superior others. Perceived superiority was assessed by response latencies and the quality of the information generated. As expected, only positive superiority was reduced among teachers high in burnout. Thus, they felt less good, but also less bad than others. Consequences for classroom performance and suggestions for the treatment of burnout are discussed.     

It's a Museum,But Not as We Know It: Issues for Local Residents Accessing the Museum of Old and New Art

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), in Australia's island state of Tasmania, bears all the hallmarks of the new museology and a flagship museum. Located in a largely working class area, there are expectations of visitors from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, particularly local residents. However most visitors are tourists, middle-class, and highly educated. In this article, the authors ask, “What are the issues affecting accessibility to MONA for local residents?” In asking this, they aim to better understand local engagement with MONA and shed light on potential socio-cultural transformation. Using a survey, interviews, and focus groups with local residents, the authors found that accessibility at MONA is defined along familiar socioeconomic lines, though there are indications of change that warrant further investigation. The expense of food and beverage, concern about children's behavior, and the explicit nature of some art all impact on accessibility, particularly for those with less cultural capital.