When are nonwords easy to see?

The influences of presentation mode (mixed vs. blocked trials) and target variability on the detection of targets in words and in random letter strings were examined. The results indicated that there was a substantial word superiority effect in mixed lists of words and nonwords, but that this effect was eliminated when pure lists of words and nonwords were compared. Also, target variability affected the shape of the serial position curve. When subjects searched repeatedly for a single target, the serial position curve had only a significant linear component. However, when the identity of the target varied from trial to trial, the serial position curve had a significant quartic component (i.e.. it was M-shaped). These results were interpreted in terms of strategies and feature learning.     

When Are Clients Ready to Terminate?

Termination of psychotherapy has received less attention in the research literature than other aspects of the treatment process. This paper presents a structured framework emphasizing observable markers to indicate when termination with a client is appropriate during cognitive behavioral treatment. The 7 criteria that indicate when a client is ready for termination are: (a) decrease in symptoms as assessed by sound measures; (b) decrease in symptoms that is stable and maintained for 8 weeks; (c) decrease in functional impairment; (d) evidence that the decrease in symptoms is not a spontaneous remission, such as lower symptoms associated with the use of new skills; (e) usage of the new skills, particularly at times or on themes of former vulnerability; (f) sense of pride regarding the new skills, in contrast to initial doubt regarding whether the techniques would work; and (g) carryover of decrease in symptoms to other areas. A case report and discussion regarding the clinical application of the framework is presented.     

When is it time to stop? When good enough becomes bad enough

This article draws on Winnicott’s concept of the good enough mother to discuss how to know whether a therapeutic situation is good enough to continue or bad enough to end. This dilemma is explored in terms of clinical syndromes, such as anorexia and pathological gambling, but focuses mainly on analyst-initiated endings, which are termed the ‘Casablanca dilemma’, based on an amplification of the ending of the film Casablanca. The author goes on to discuss such one-sided endings, drawing on interviews with 40 analysts and therapists about their clinical experience. A typology of bad enough endings is presented. The psychological differences between a good enough analysis as opposed to a bad enough one are explored through the ideas of Winnicott and Neumann.     

When do infants expect hands to be connected to a person?

A violation-of-expectation paradigm was used to test whether infants infer a person based on the presence of hands alone. Infants were familiarized to a pair of hands that extended out from a curtain to play with a rattle, after which the curtain was opened to reveal either a real person or a mannequin. Infants’ looking at these outcomes was compared with baseline looking at the person and the mannequin. Experiment 1 showed that 9-month-olds looked significantly longer at the mannequin than at the person after familiarization to hands. Experiment 2 ruled out a low-level feature matching interpretation by showing the same looking pattern in 9-month-olds even when the hands were covered with silver gloves. In Experiment 3, 6-month-olds showed no differential looking at the mannequin and person after familiarization to hands. Taken together, these experiments suggest that infants acquire the expectation that hands are connected to a person between 6 and 9 months of age. This finding has implications for how infants’ attribute goals to manual actions.     

When is received social support related to perceived support and well-being? When it is needed

How do perceptions of being supported relate to the amount of social support received? Received and perceived support have generally been found to be only moderately related. Previous research has however focused on the amount of support received regardless of whether it was needed. We hypothesized that a measure of support received when needed would predict perceived support and well-being better than would an unqualified measure of received support. Study 1 found that correlations between received support and perceived support measures were, on average, twice as high when received support was measured as the proportion of times support was received when needed (average r = .54) than when it was measured as the number of times support was received (average r = .28). Similar results were found for correlations between received support and mental health which rose from r = .04 to r = .31 when need for support was considered. Study 2 replicated the strong relationship between support received when needed and both perceived support and mental health. Received support measures should be adapted to take the need for support into consideration in future investigation of these relationships. Social support interventions may only be beneficial if the recipient’s support needs are not already being met.     

Just do it? When to do what you judge you ought to do

While it is generally believed that justification is a fallible guide to the truth, there might be interesting exceptions to this general rule. In recent work on bridge-principles, an increasing number of authors have argued that truths about what a subject ought to do are truths we stand in some privileged epistemic relation to and that our justified normative beliefs are beliefs that will not lead us astray. If these bridge-principles hold, it suggests that justification might play an interesting role in our normative theories. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, a value that’s notoriously difficult to understand if we think of justification as but a fallible means to a desired end. We will argue that these bridge-principles will be incredibly difficult to defend. While we do not think that normative facts necessarily stand in any interesting relationship to our justified beliefs about them, there might well be a way of defending the idea that our justified beliefs about what to do won’t lead us astray. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, but this way of thinking about justification and its value comes with costs few would be willing to pay.     

When and why is it disrespectful to excuse an attitude?

Philosophical Studies - It is intuitive that, under certain circumstances, it can be disrespectful or patronizing to excuse someone for an attitude (even for an attitude one finds objectionable)....     

Preaching to the Converted. Why Argue When Everyone Agrees?

This paper discusses the definition of argumentation as a means for persuading an audience on the acceptability of a thesis. It is argued that persuasion is a goal that relates more to the communicative situation, the type of interaction or the type of discourse, rather than to the argumentative nature of it. Departing from the analysis of a short conversational sequence between people who agree on an issue and nevertheless argue, I suggest that a definition of argumentation in terms of persuasion fails to account for what people are actually doing in these situations. I propose instead that several functions may be assigned to argumentation when considering the context in which it is produced: a cognitive function (which helps participants to elaborate a position on the discussed issue), and an identifying function (which enables them to portray themselves through the expression and the justification of their opinion). In the case analyzed here, a third function to which the argumentative activity contributes can also be identified, namely the enhancing of the emotional tonality of the relationship between the participants. While it becomes clear from the discussion of this argumentative sequence that the participants do not seek to persuade each other or some third party, it is not suggested that argumentation never aims at persuading an audience, but rather that persuasion cannot be considered as a defining feature of argumentation.     

When does feature search fail to protect against attentional capture?

ABSTRACT

When participants search for a shape (e.g., a circle) among a set of homogenous shapes (e.g., triangles) they are subject to distraction by colour singletons that are more salient than the target. However, when participants search for a shape among heterogeneous shapes, the presence of a non-target colour singleton does not slow responses to the target. Attempts have been made to explain these results from both bottom-up and top-down perspectives. What both accounts have in common is that they do not predict the occurrence of attentional capture on typical feature search displays. Here, we present a case where manipulating selection history, rather than the displays themselves, leads to attentional capture on feature search trials. The ability to map specific colours to the target and distractor appears to be what enables resistance to capture during feature search.     

When is a mental health professional competent to assess a person's decision to hasten death?

As the country continues to debate the legality of aid-in-dying, it appears inevitable that at some point there will be a need for mental health professionals to be involved in assessments of individuals asking for a hastened death. I designed this article to provide a set of guidelines that will allow both mental health professionals and potential consultees to determine if a professional has the training and expertise necessary to be a competent consultant.     

Happiness: When does it lead to self-indulgence and when does it lead to self-denial?

Previous research on self-gratification in children has found that happiness, compared to a neutral affective state, sometimes causes self-indulgence and sometimes causes self-denial. Review of this research led to the hypothesis that happiness leads to self-indulgence when children have no reason to believe that excessive self-gratification is morally wrong but that happiness promotes selfdenial when children fear that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral rule. In the present study, children were first placed in either a happy or neutral mood. They were then given an opportunity to help themselves freely to a reward supply, but half the children in each affect condition were warned that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral rule whereas the other half were not. In the absence of information that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral standard, happiness produced self-indulgence, but when children were told that excessive self-gratification would be wrong, happy children denied themselves significantly more than neutral-mood children. It was suggested that happiness motivates children to try to sustain their elevated mood; the behavioral route to maintaining positive mood, however, depends on how children perceive the moral implications of their actions.     

Sex differences in attraction to infants: When do they occur?

Harlow (1971) observed that all-female college audiences responded to a pictured infant rhesus monkey with an “ecstasy response,” while males were “completely unresponsive,” and females in coeducational audiences “inhibited the ecstasy response,” explaining these differences in terms of innate sex differences. The present study compared college students' self-reported attraction to pictures of 15 infant and adult nonhuman primates under several conditions. Infant pictures were of two types: infants which were engaged in typical infant behaviors (Infant Behavior), and those which were not (Infant). Subjects made judgments in same- or mixed-sex groups and reported degree of attraction publicly or privately. Ratio scores were used to represent each subject's attraction to infant or infant-behavior pictures compared with his or her attraction to pictures of adults. There were no significant sex differences in attraction to infant or infant-behavior pictures, and sex did not interact with any other variable. However, situational variables significantly affected the response. Males as well as females reported greater attraction to infant and infant-behavior pictures when they viewed the pictures in same-sex compared with mixed-sex groups. Both sexes reported greater attraction to infant and infant-behavior pictures privately than publicly.     

When to inspect? Recurrent inspection decisions in a simulated risky environment

Participants scheduled inspections to detect costly events for which they were repeatedly at constant risk (probability of event onset) within a computerized environment. They were responsive to risk variations, conveyed either in advance or by experience with inspection outcomes, although experiencing unannounced increases in risk affected inspections more than experiencing unannounced decreases. Participants responded to variations in cost (time varying or fixed) when the effects were made perceptually salient. Compared with a normative model (R. L. Klatzky, D. M. Messick, & J. Loftus, 1992), some conditions showed near-optimal inspecting or had flat payoff functions that tolerated observed departures from optimal performance. Costly departures occurred particularly when combined cost and risk levels caused optimal responses to be extreme (always or never inspect). Results assess people's processing of relevant variables and indicate circumstances in which they may set substantially nonoptimal inspection schedules.     

When objects lose their meaning: what happens to their use?

The 8 patients involved in this study were impaired on tests assessing knowledge of objects and on the demonstration of their use. The patients' success in object use was significantly correlated with their knowledge about the objects, providing further evidence that conceptual knowledge plays a key role in object use. Having a recipient present improved performance in the moderately impaired patients, suggesting that a certain level of conceptual knowledge must remain for the additional information to be beneficial. Although overall accuracy in using the target objects was not related to our measures of affordance, the specific aspects of use afforded by the objects' structures were relatively impervious to semantic impairment, suggesting a role for affordance information when object-specific knowledge is disrupted. The patients' familiarity with the objects was an important predictor of performance. Finally, despite good performance on tests of mechanical problem solving, the patients showed very little evidence of employing these skills in their interactions with real objects.     

Supportive When Not Supported? Male Responses to Negative Climates for Women

This study examined the relationship between perceived climate for women and job satisfaction in a male-dominated context, focusing on moderating variables which may augment or decrease this relationship for men. Specifically, it was predicted that job satisfaction will be lower for women and men in a male-dominated context when they perceive a negative climate for women, but that this relationship will be moderated for men based on the levels of support and exclusion they experience. Using a sample of 239 (75.7% male) professors, staff, graduate assistants, and undergraduate assistants in a male-dominated science department of a large Midwestern university, we found that perceptions of a negative climate for women were significantly related to lower reports of job satisfaction for both women and men. However, perceived organizational support moderated this relationship, such that the job satisfaction of men who felt highly supported by the organization were unaffected by the perceived climate for women. Discussion and implications of results are included.     

Openness to experience and creativity: When does global citizenship matter?

The relationship between the openness to experience trait (OTE) and creativity has been well documented in previous research. Likewise, the global citizenship construct has theoretical overlap with both OTE and creativity. We hypothesised global citizenship would make a unique contribution to explaining variance in five types of creativity (self/everyday, scholarly, performance, mechanical/scientific and artistic), above and beyond the contribution of OTE. Participants were predominantly female, European American, traditionally aged college students (N = 407). Global citizenship prosocial outcomes explained unique variance in self/everyday (sr² = .10), scholarly (sr² = .03) and mechanical/scientific (sr² = .03) creativity. Results are discussed in terms of dual processes theories of cognition.     

When did atoms begin to do any explanatory work in chemistry?

During the 19th century atomism was a controversial issue in chemistry. It is an oversimplification to dismiss the critics' arguments as all falling under the general positivist view that what can't be seen can't be. The more interesting lines of argument either questioned whether any coherent notion of an atom had ever been formulated or questioned whether atoms were ever really given any explanatory role. At what point, and for what reasons, did atomistic hypotheses begin to explain anything in chemistry? It is argued that 19th‐century atomic accounts of constant proportions and isomerism had little to offer, whereas a non‐atomic explanation of chemical combination was developed. Not until the turn of the century did atomism begin to do serious explanatory work in chemistry.