Suicide notes of Chinese youth.

Examination of 17 suicide notes from youthful Chinese suicides indicated the common appearance of anger, self-criticism, and interpersonal friction as precipitant.     

Suicide notes of the older adult.

Although not true in all countries, older adults are the developmental age group at highest risk for death by suicide in the United States. Our knowledge of suicide in the elderly is, however, limited. The psychological characteristics for suicide cannot be attributed primarily or even solely to being old. One avenue to understanding this complicated act in the elderly is suicide notes. Despite their limitations, suicide notes contain special revelations of the human mind and there is much one can learn from them about suicide in the older adult. This paper outlines the sparse literature on the topic of suicide notes of the older adult and then presents the author's own life-span research related to the elderly. The research indicated that long-term instability was critical in understanding suicide in the older adult. However, indirect expressions (e.g., ambivalence, unconscious implications) were much less frequently observed in the notes of the elderly than other adults. The research also found that older males often wrote about painful problems in their interpersonal relations in their final letters and this pain was significant in making their final decision. Future research, specifically regarding a protocol analysis based on a review of the research on suicide in the elderly, will be discussed.     

Planning and realization of complex intentions in traumatic brain injury and normal aging

The realization of delayed intentions (i.e., prospective memory) is a highly complex process composed of four phases: intention formation, retention, re-instantiation, and execution. The aim of this study was to investigate if executive functioning impairments are related to problems in the formation, re-instantiation, and execution of a delayed complex intention. In this context, it was another aim of the study to investigate the executive functioning hypothesis of cognitive aging in prospective memory performance. It was, therefore, explored if age-related prospective memory decline leads to similar decrements in the process of prospective remembering as executive functioning-related decline in young patients with traumatic brain injury. A group of patients with traumatic brain injury with retrospective memory within normal limits but impaired executive functions, a group of healthy older and a group of healthy younger adults completed a complex prospective memory task that allows for the separate assessment of the four phases of the prospective memory process. All groups showed a similarly high performance in the intention retention phase, whereas the patients with deficits in executive functioning and the older participants performed worse than the healthy young participants in the intention formation, re-instantiation and execution phases. The importance of executive functioning for prospective remembering in traumatic brain injury and normal aging is discussed.     

Disappearing Percepts: Evidence for Retention Failure in Metacontrast Masking

Results from a number of paradigms (including change blindness, inattentional blindness, integration over saccades, and backward masking) suggest that most of the visual information we take in is not retained, even for very short periods of time. This has led some to question whether such information is ever really perceived. We examine this issue using a variant of the classic metacontrast stimulus. When a briefly presented disk is followed by a briefly presented ring, observers may report not seeing the disk. Rather they report seeing the ring flicker as if the change in form from disk to ring is not recorded. This effect is highly dependent on the interval between the onset of the disk and the onset of the ring (the “stimulus onset asynchrony” or SOA). The maximum effect is usually found at a critical SOA of about 50 msec. Here we show that the ability of observers to distinguish such a disk/ring pair from a flickering ring is dependent also on how soon after the stimulus they respond. Early responses show a much smaller masking effect than late responses: Near the critical SOA accuracy improves when the observer responds more quickly (the opposite of the standard speed-accuracy trade-off), although at longer and shorter SOAs observers are less accurate on these early responses (a typical speed-accuracy trade-off). We interpret this finding as demonstrating that, at least in the case of metacontrast, retention of form information is disrupted, rather than initial access.     

Masking of and by tactile pressure stimuli

Masking of and by tactile pressure stimuli was investigated in six Ss as a function of stimulus intensity (force) and stimulus onset asynchrony. Increase in the force of the masked stimulus and decrease in the force of the masking stimulus were inversely related to the magnitude of masking, as defined by either a relative or an absolute decrease in sensitivity. The introduction of stimulus onset asynchrony produced both forward and backward masking, the latter being of somewhat larger magnitude. Comparisons are made with results obtained in visual metacontrast masking.     

Menninger's motives for suicide in the notes of completed and attempted suicides.

Brevard, Lester, and Yang in 1990, studying Menninger's motives for suicide, reported more evidence for the wish to be killed (i.e., self-blame or self-punishment) in suicide notes for completed suicides than in parasuicide notes for attempted suicide; however, they did not control for age and sex. A comparison of notes written by completed and attempted suicides that controlled for age and sex showed no differences in the presence of content which reflected Menninger's three motives for suicide, including the wish to be killed.     

Evaluating the evidence for multiple realization

Consider what the brain-state theorist has to do to make good his claims. He has to specify a physical–chemical state such that any organism (not just a mammal) is in pain if and only if (a) it possesses a brain of suitable physical–chemical structure; and (b) its brain is in that physical–chemical state. This means that the physical–chemical state in question must be a possible state of a mammalian brain, a reptilian brain, a mollusc’s brain (octopuses are mollusca, and certainly feel pain), etc. At the same time, it must not be a possible (physically possible) state of the brain of any physically possible creature that cannot feel pain. Even if such a state can be found, it must be nomologically certain that it will also be a state of the brain of any extraterrestrial life that may be found that will be capable of feeling pain before we can even entertain the supposition that it may be pain. It is not altogether impossible that such a state will be found... . But this is certainly an ambitious hypothesis. (Putnam 1967/1975, p. 436)

The belief that mental states are multiply realized is now nearly universal among philosophers, as is the belief that this fact decisively refutes the identity theory. I argue that the empirical support for multiple realization does not justify the confidence that has been placed in it. In order for multiple realization of mental states to be an objection to the identity theory, the neurological differences among pains, for example, must be such as to guarantee that they are of distinct neurological kinds. But the phenomena traditionally cited do not provide evidence of that sort of variation. In particular, examples of neural plasticity do not provide such evidence.     

Some notes on conducting a psychological autopsy.

This paper outlines procedures for conducting interviews with relatives of suicide victims or survivors of equivocal deaths, by means of the "psychological autopsy." A number of methodological recommendations are made which deal with training interviewers, contacting survivors and using experimental controls.     

The Masking Function of Self-Revelation in Group Therapy

Though similar to traditional group psychotherapy in many respects, a coping skill training approach differs principally in several areas and technically in many more. Coping skill training group therapy tends to employ many concrete intervention strategies to enhance various aspects of process, drawing on ongoing data to evaluate group interaction and individual responses. The approach draws more heavily on cognitive, modeling, reinforcement, and problem-solving procedures to achieve specifically determined goals, and it depends less on interpretive and confrontative methods. The author discusses a wide range of techniques to show the benefits of this approach.     

A bibliography of suicide notes: 1856-1979.

A bibliography of suicide notes, arranged chronologically, from 1856 to the present (1979) is presented without comment.     

Masking effects with targets and nontargets of varying similarity

The relationship between various types of masking, similarity of flanking nontarget shapes to that of a parafoveally presented target character, and target identification accuracy was examined in two experiments. In experiment 1 detection of a gap in a circle or square was more accurate when the target was flanked by two instances of the same shape as the target, but only with energy-limited displays. Pattern masking eliminated the facilitation with identically-shaped flankers and target. In experiment 2 performance was better when a target letter was flanked by letters which were identical in shape to the target or similar in shape (the alternative target) than when the flankers were dissimilar in shape to the target (from a nontarget set). However, performance was best when the target appeared alone, showing a stronger effect of lateral masking than of facilitation. Results were explained with reference to a comparison process which operates only under energy-masking conditions.     

儿童情绪伪装能力的发展和影响因素

情绪伪装体现了情绪的社会性和适应功能,是情绪的一种调节策略。该文综述了有关儿童情绪伪装的研究,分析了影响情绪伪装的家庭、同伴、文化等外部因素和言语能力、性别角色、气质特点等内部因素,探讨了儿童情绪伪装研究的未来方向     

Implicit Perception and Level of Processing in Object-Substitution Masking

ABSTRACT— Object-substitution masking (OSM) refers to reduced target discrimination when the target is surrounded by a sparse mask that does not overlap with the target in space but trails it in time. In four experiments, we used a novel paradigm to investigate the extent of processing of a masked target in OSM. We measured response-compatibility effects between target and mask, both when the offsets were simultaneous and when the offset of the mask was delayed. Evidence for both OSM and a dissociation between perception and awareness was found when detecting the match between the target and the mask required feature but not categorical analyses. Our results suggest that the locus of disruption in OSM is likely to be beyond feature analysis of the unreported target.     

Masking of tones by tones and of noise by noise

Using a two-alternative temporal forced-choice technique, two binaural detection experiments were performed. In the first, the detectability of a 250-Hz 128-msec tonal signal masked by a gated 70-dB SPL tone of the same frequency and duration was measured as a function of the level of the signal, the phase angle at which the signal was added to the masker, and the interaural phase difference of the signal. In the second experiment, the signal was a wideband (100-3,000 Hz) 128-msec Gaussian noise masked by a continuous Gaussian noise of the same bandwidth and coherent with the signal. The detectability of this noise signal was measured as a function of the same variables investigated in the first experiment. In both experiments detectability was found to follow a simple energy- or power-detection model when the interaural phase difference was 0 deg. When the interaural phase difference was 180 deg, the function relating the signal level required for a constant level of performance to the signal-masker phase angle is such that neither the Webster-Jeffress hypothesis nor Durlach’s E-C model accounts for the data. The data are reasonably well fit by a model proposed by Hafter and Carrier.