How accurate are women's estimates of date of onset of next menses?

Abstract

Because of individual differences in Occurrence of ovulation and patterns of hormonal secretions, one would usually prefer to measure locus in the menstrual cycle using physiological assessment procedures. But such methods are time consuming and costly. When exploring a new domain for possible relations to the menstrual cycle, it would be cost effective to use the simpler procedure of having each women verbally estimate date of onset of next menses. The accuracy of such estimates was studied in two college age samples. Estimated number of days until next onset correlated highly with actual number of days, as verified by follow-up (r = 0.90). As a group, women neither under- nor overestimated number of days. The precision with which these judgments were made was reasonably high. In sum, when a group of women are followed for one cycle, the average accuracy is very high, certainly high enough to support use of such verbal reports for certain scientific purposes.     

Is the Best Practices Movement Consistent With the Values of the Counseling Profession? A Critical Analysis of Best Practices Ideology

The counseling profession has increasingly embraced a medicalized vision of counseling processes. The latest manifestation of this vision is the best practices (BP) movement. This movement is critically examined to determine if it is consistent with the traditional values of the counseling profession. The author concludes that BP ideology is inconsistent with the value the counseling profession has traditionally placed on the counseling relationship and diversity.     

Who's the Best? A Relativistic View of Expertise

The dictionary and the expert performance approach view an expert as one who, after sufficient training and experience in a domain, can perform the requisite tasks above a threshold level. In contrast, we argue for a performance‐based approach that implies expertise is a continuum; the experts are the best performers. Most tasks in which expertise can be demonstrated have an underlying core of judgment, including domains in which the tasks call for judgment to be overlain with performance, prediction, or instruction. To evaluate judgment, we employ the metaphor of the judge as a measuring instrument. Like an instrument, expert judgment according to the performance‐based approach has three key properties: discrimination, consistency, and validity. Validity requires ground truth and is usually difficult to establish; but the other two properties are readily observable, and they are combined in the Cochran–Weiss–Shanteau index. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Operationalism” in psychotherapy: A possible means of putting a sorry state of theory in better order?

It will be shown in this paper that the study of the actual conduct of psychotherapy, at least in its classical form with a patient speaking his or her mind in any way the patient desires and a therapist helping the patient pursue those thoughts and wishes and conflicts and hopes for better luck in real life than before, is more conducive to agreement among rather different therapists, to clearer reasoning over psychotherapeutic interventions, and to more promising theoretical articulations than anything available in the theoretical texts of psychotherapy.     

The possible connection between “private speech” and prayer

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the psychological origins of prayer through a preliminary examination of certain aspects of social and cognitive development in early childhood. Specifically, it is the thesis of this essay that the phenomenon of “private speech” in early childhood can tell us something about prayer activity as it occurs in older persons. It is not the intention of this essay to present a detailed or complete theology of prayer from the perspective of pastoral theology or pastoral care. This essay is a prolegomena to the future study of the origins of prayer as social communication and personal regulation.     

The structured representation of information in long-term memory: A possible explanation for the accomplishments of “idiots savants”

Traditional accounts of the “idiot savant”—the development of a superior skill in otherwise subnormal individuals—are challenged through the examination of two cases, a pair of twins with extraordinary numerical ability but otherwise moronic, and Nadia, an autistic girl with extraordinary drawing ability. It is suggested that these phenomenal but particular skills are due to the functional reallocation of representational space in long-term memory. The hierarchical schematic organization of the mnemonic space, normally used for a range of conventional skills such as language, is employed instead for the hypertrophy of one-particular skill. What may appear to be feats of rapid calculation or artistic creativity actually represent automatic routings through long-term memory and translation into motor activity, possibly attributable to an unorthodox context of socialisation and social interaction. Evidence from such cases therefore proves to be inconclusive with regard to determining the nature of intelligence.     

Does aggregation produce spuriously high estimates of behavior stability?

A number of arguments as to why aggregation produces spurious correlations are considered and shown to be specious. A series of computer-simulated studies, claimed by H. D. Day and his colleagues to demonstrate that aggregation produces artifactually high stability coefficients, was shown to involve bizarre distributions and inappropriate conclusions. Nevertheless, their data actually indicated the potency of aggregation in detecting whatever empirical relations they built into their data. This was not true of their analyses of their unaggregated data, which, as a result of a high level of noise of measurement, failed to enable them to detect anomalies in their data. No amount of aggregation produced evidence of stability in its absence. It is concluded that aggregation provides a powerful tool for reducing error of measurement and for establishing and enhancing generality as well as stability in measurement. Although there is nothing intrinsic in aggregation that fosters spurious correlations, it like any other technique can be used wisely or foolishly. In order to achieve the former, aggregation must be guided by psychometric principles and theoretical considerations. A procedure guaranteed to achieve the latter is to simply aggregate whatever can be assigned a common label.     

Is a naturalistic theory of communication possible?

This article presents a theoretical discussion of the relationship between language and communication. I discuss Chomsky’s position on this topic. Chomsky claims that if it is possible to construct a scientific theory of the language faculty, there is no possibility to construct a scientific theory of communication because in communication human intentionality is involved. This position is contrasted by philosophers of language considering that communication is to be studied as a form of rational action. I maintain that both these positions are not supported by the evidence coming from developmental research. Taking a cognitive point of view I contend that a communicative faculty can be defined that develops since infancy to adulthood, which has features independent of language and action. Different steps in the development of the communicative ability are linked to a parallel development of the theory of mind. I then argue in favor of a distinction between collective action and communication considering that while collective action is common to human and nonhuman primates, communication is typically human.     

How is the arrival of things possible?

Ancient Chinese thought inquired primarily into how the achievement of things is possible rather than into what a thing as a thing is. It held that man should participate in the achieving or generation of things in order to realize his self-achievement. A thing is understood as an event. Because all things and man are united as one, it is possible for man to enter into things by tasting and feeling rather than by relying on the sense of sight. This may provide a possible new means of rescuing things from the numericalization and phenomenalization that sweep over the world today. Translated by Liu Liangjian from Renwen Zazhi 人文杂志 (The Journal of Humanities), 2007, (2): 14–21     

Haptic estimates of discordant visual—haptic size vary developmentally

In two size-conflict experiments, children viewed various squares through a reducing (1/2) lens while manually grasping them through a hand-concealing cloth. Then, using either vision or touch, they selected a match from a set of comparison squares. Forty 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds participated in Experiment 1. Vision dominated the visual estimates of all three age groups; however, for the haptic estimates, the dominant modality varied developmentally: Vision dominated the 6-year-olds’ haptic estimates, whereas neither modality dominated the 9-year-olds’ haptic estimates, and touch dominated the 12-ear-olds’ haptic estimates. In Experiment 2, 24 six-year-olds were tested, as in Experiment 1; however, half of them were shown the size-distorting effects of the lens just prior to testing. Although this reduced the visual dominance of their haptic estimates, the effect was weak and short-lived. The haptic dominance seen in the data of the 12-year-olds was conspicuously absent.     

Comparing the accuracy of experimental estimates to guessing: a new perspective on replication and the “Crisis of Confidence” in psychology

We develop a general measure of estimation accuracy for fundamental research designs, called v. The v measure compares the estimation accuracy of the ubiquitous ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator, which includes sample means as a special case, with a benchmark estimator that randomizes the direction of treatment effects. For sample and effect sizes common to experimental psychology, v suggests that OLS produces estimates that are insufficiently accurate for the type of hypotheses being tested. We demonstrate how v can be used to determine sample sizes to obtain minimum acceptable estimation accuracy. Software for calculating v is included as online supplemental material (R Core Team, 2012).     

Those Were the Best of Times,and Then…

ABSTRACT

Rachel T. Hare-Mustin describes a career of feminist activism in academic life, the professions, and clinical practice in the 1970s and 1980s. She has been an advocate for changes in professional ethics and improving conditions for women. Her primary areas of influence have involved applying feminist theory to the study of gender and pointing out that the sex role model of gender differences has an inherent bias that overlooks the gender hierarchy. Women’s voices are silenced, not only in the process of therapy, but in the wider society as well.     

Is a science of psychotherapy possible? Subjectivity problems

Two sorts of subjectivity problems are discussed. The 1st concerns the characterization of psychotherapy as an attempt to alter clients' meanings. The 2nd concerns the seemingly subjective nature of value judgments about psychotherapy outcomes. It is argued that despite initial appearances, neither of these problems poses an insuperable difficulty for transforming the discipline of psychotherapy into a genuine science.     

Category effects on estimates of stimuli: perception or reconstruction?

The present study examined a common category effect that has been reported in the literature: the tendency for estimates of individual stimuli to be biased toward the central value of the presented set of stimuli. Both encoding and reconstruction accounts of this central-tendency effect are considered. Plain vertical lines and vertical lines embedded in the Müller-Lyer illusion were estimated while still in view or from memory. Although bias due to the Müller-Lyer illusion remained constant across the two conditions, bias due to the context set (category) occurred only when stimuli were estimated from memory. The results suggest that the category bias occurs at a later stage of processing that the Müller-Lyer effect and offer support for a reconstruction account of category effects on stimulus estimation.     

Is voluntary control of natural postural sway possible?

The authors explored whether standing human participants could voluntarily decrease the amplitude of their natural postural sway when presented with explicit visual feedback and a target. Participants (N = 9) stood quietly, without any feedback and with feedback on the center of pressure coordinate or the head orientation. They were unable to decrease sway amplitude when presented with visual feedback and a target. Decreasing target size led to contrasting effects on the 2 fractions of sway: rambling and trembling. The smaller target was associated with a decrease in rambling and an increase in trembling. Those observations suggest that sway represents a superposition of at least 2 independent processes. They also suggest that providing visual feedback on a variable tied to body sway may not be an effective way to decrease postural sway in young healthy people.     

Mother Knows Best? Mother and Child Report of Behavioral Difficulties of Children of HIV-Infected Mothers

Children of HIV-infected mothers have more psychosocial adjustment difficulties than do those of noninfected mothers. In this study, child psychosocial adjustment in children of HIV-infected women is examined across the three stages of HIV-infected: asymptomatic, symptomatic and AIDS. Participants were 99 HIV-infected women and 148 noninfected women. Children were not identified as being HIV infected. Mother and child reports of behavioral difficulties are compared, and competing hypotheses about mother report of child behavior difficulties are tested. Results indicate an ascending linear trend for child report of internalizing and externalizing difficulties from the noninfected stage through increasingly severe stages of HIV-infection. According to mother report, child externalizing and internalizing difficulties are nonlinear, as mothers report an increase through the infected symptomatic stage, then a decrease in the AIDS stage. Implications for assessment, prevention and intervention in families with maternal HIV infection are discussed.