Cinemusical meanings in motion pictures: commerce,art, and Brando loyalty … or … De Niro,My God,To Thee

• The theme of art‐versus‐commerce has surfaced in many motion pictures but serves here to juxtapose three otherwise disparate films that draw upon the power of jazz as a force toward the dramatic development of character, plot, central themes, and other cinemusical meanings. Specifically, via the significance of its ambi‐diegetic music, New York, New York (1977) shows the elevation of artistic integrity (Robert De Niro as Jimmy Doyle) over commercialism (Liza Minnelli as Francine Evans). In Heart Beat (1980), the raw honesty of a committed‐but‐doomed creative genius (Art Pepper) provides nondiegetic music that signifies the self‐destructive degradation of a key protagonist (Nick Nolte as Neal Cassady). Finally, in The Score (2001), the appealing nature of diegetic jazz in a cinemusically‐enriched nightclub environment helps to explain why a soon‐to‐be‐ reformed criminal (Robert De Niro, again, as Nick Wells) would risk everything in collaboration with two bizarre partners (Marlon Brando as Max Baron and Ed Norton as Jack Teller) in hopes of a payoff big enough to allow him to retire from a lucrative career in crime in order to run his legitimate jazz venue and to settle down with his true love (Angela Bassett as Diane Boesman).

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Volume contents and author index for Volume 10, 2009

Although there are very few published studies on the issue, there is much anecdotal evidence that, despite all its undisputed benefits, meditation practice can have psychologically deleterious effects. In this paper I will describe a body-based model for understanding trauma, the Trauma Resiliency model, and suggest it might be a helpful tool in anticipating, preventing and/or mitigating these effects. I will argue that Buddhist traditions are replete with frameworks, tools and techniques for addressing some of the psychological pitfalls highlighted. However, some of these methods may have been ‘lost in translation’ as Buddhist meditation training has been adapted for a Western audience. I will make the case that, somewhat ironically, in operational terms some of the secular modalities for teaching mindfulness (such as MBSR) may be psychologically ‘safer’ than those offered in a (Western) Buddhist context. I will call for further inquiry about how to mitigate and protect against psychological harms in Buddhist meditation training.     

Books Received from August 1, 2009 to July 31, 2010

This study aimed to explore the recognition of emotional and non-emotional biological movements in children with severe and profound deafness. Twenty-four deaf children, together with 24 control children matched on mental age and 24 control children matched on chronological age, were asked to identify a person's actions, subjective states, emotions, and objects conveyed by moving point-light displays. Results showed that when observing point-light displays, deaf children showed impairments across all conditions (emotions, actions, and moving objects) compared with their chronological age-matched controls but showed no differences across subjective states. The results are supportive that deaf children present developmental delays in their biological motion apart from the ones relative to their own mental state, and this may be interpreted in relation to the expertise they have acquired in decoding action toward themselves. The findings are discussed in relation to deaf children viewing motion stimuli very differently to hearing children.     

Replication is not coincidence: Reply to Iverson, Lee, and Wagenmakers (2009)

Iverson, Lee, and Wagenmakers (2009) claimed that Killeen’s (2005) statistic prep overestimates the “true probability of replication.” We show that Iverson et al. confused the probability of replication of an observed direction of effect with a probability of coincidence—the probability that two future experiments will return the same sign. The theoretical analysis is punctuated with a simulation of the predictions of prep for a realistic random effects world of representative parameters, when those are unknown a priori. We emphasize throughout that prep is intended to evaluate the probability of a replication outcome after observations, not to estimate a parameter. Hence, the usual conventional criteria (unbiasedness, minimum variance estimator) for judging estimators are not appropriate for probabilities such as p and p_rep.     

South‐East European Regional Conference of Psychology, 2009, Sofia,Bulgaria

The first South‐East European Regional Conference of Psychology was held in Sofia, Bulgaria, from 30 October to 1 November 2009, under the Patronage of the President of Bulgaria and the auspices of the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP), the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS), and the International Association for Cross‐Cultural Psychology (IACCP), with further financial support provided by the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations (EFPA) and the European Health Psychology Society (EHPS). The conference was hosted by the Bulgarian Psychological Society under the Conference Presidency of Dr Plamen Dimitrov, who was supported by Professor Sava Djonev as Chair of the Scientific Program Committee. It attracted over 350 participants from 25 countries, including 14 countries from the SEE region and its immediate neighbours. The Scientific Program explored ways and means to promote the role of psychology individually and institutionally at regional and international levels. Planning is already under way to organize a second regional conference in three years’ time.