Change Blindness: Theory or Paradigm?

The present paper examines a number of recent findings from the induced change blindness literature in an attempt to determine what these findings reveal about the role of attention in perception. The conclusion is drawn that change blindness research reveals that attention is necessary to raise a stimulus to a level of awareness (e.g. verbal report), as has been shown in related literatures, e.g. eye movement, masking, and the attentional blink. Some research possibilities employing the change blindness paradigm are suggested, which may prove useful in future research efforts.     

Sound Body,Sound Mind? The Interrelation Between Health Change and Personality Change in Old Age

Personality development is characterized by increasing maturation, that is, people become more conscientious, agreeable and emotionally stable as they age. In late life, however, these trends seem to be reversed. Because many changes and transitions in older age are related to health, we investigated correlated changes in health problems and personality traits, the sources of health changes in later life and the directionality of effects. Our sample consisted of older adult twins, aged 64–85 years at time 1 (n = 410; 135 male/275 female; 134 monozygotic/63 dizygotic twin pairs), assessed at two different time points about five years apart, and we ran bivariate latent change and latent change twin model analyses. Increasing health problems were associated with decreases in agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability and conscientiousness. Changes in health problems were only due to environmental influences, implying that the association between health and personality changes was exclusively environmental. Directional effects were largely absent, but health and personality were significantly related at the second measurement occasion (age 69–89 years). Our results support the link between health change and personality change in late life and spark the assumption of normative personality adaptations to deterioration of health status as a means of developmental regulation. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Change Detection Without Awareness: Do Explicit Reports Underestimate the Representation of Change in the Visual System?

Evidence from many different paradigms (e.g. change blindness, inattentional blindness, transsaccadic integration) indicate that observers are often very poor at reporting changes to their visual environment. Such evidence has been used to suggest that the spatio-temporal coherence needed to represent change can only occur in the presence of focused attention. In four experiments we use modified change blindness tasks to demonstrate (a) that sensitivity to change does occur in the absence of awareness, and (b) this sensitivity does not rely on the redeployment of attention. We discuss these results in relation to theories of scene perception, and propose a reinterpretation of the role of attention in representing change.     

Is Change Bad? Personality Change Is Associated with Poorer Psychological Health and Greater Metabolic Syndrome in Midlife

Personality change is emerging as an important predictor of health and well‐being. Extending previous research, we examined whether two types of personality change, directional and absolute, are associated with both subjective and objective indicators of health. Utilizing the longitudinal Midlife in the United States survey (MIDUS) data, we examined whether both types of change over 10 years were associated with psychological well‐being, self‐reported global health, and the presence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) components and diagnosis. Socially undesirable personality change (e.g., becoming less conscientious and more neurotic) and absolute personality change were independently associated with worse perceived health and well‐being at Time 2. Notably, absolute personality change, regardless of the direction, was also associated with having a greater number of MetS components and a greater probability of diagnosis at Time 2. In sum, too much personality change may be bad for one's health: Socially undesirable and absolute personality change were both associated with worse psychological health and worse metabolic profiles over 10 years. These findings suggest that personality change may contribute to psychological and physical health, and provide initial insight into potential intermediate links between personality change and distal outcomes such as mortality.     

Replacement—A Sheffer Stroke for Belief Change

By replacement is meant an operation that replaces one sentence by another in a belief set. Replacement can be used as a kind of Sheffer stroke for belief change, since contraction, revision, and expansion can all be defined in terms of it. Replacement can also be defined either in terms of contraction or in terms of revision. Close connections are shown to hold between axioms for replacement and axioms for contraction and revision. Partial meet replacement is axiomatically characterized. It is shown that this operation can have outcomes that are not obtainable through either partial meet contraction or partial meet revision.     

Is "Change Blindness" Attenuated by Domain-specific Expertise? An Expert-Novices Comparison of Change Detection in Football Images

When an aspect of a visual image is altered, observers often fail to notice the change. Recent studies suggest that successful change detection requires the observer to attend to and effortfully encode the changing aspect between the images. In this study we addressed the question of whether individual characteristics of the observer, namely expertise in a domain, selectively influence the ability to detect changes in images from that domain. A total of 48 individuals, half of whom were experts in the sport of American football and half of whom were American football novices, were presented alternating sequences of football-related and unrelated images. Our results indicate that expertise in a specific domain increases observers' sensitivity to semantic changes of domain-related images. Implications for the development of diagnostic tools are briefly addressed.     

Change: How do we recognize it?

The paper seeks to examine the working assumptions that guide us as therapists engaged in the attempt to facilitate change in families. It summarizes a piece of preliminary research based on the responses of a group of therapists working in different agencies. A questionnaire on change was developed and given to the therapists followed by a group discussion.
The results suggest that therapy teams, and families, have common sense ideas about:

• the beginning, and end of a period of change;

• types of change—those falling into four categories; of behavioural, structural, communication and experiential.

Our results suggest that difficulties in therapy may be associated with a failure amongst the therapists in a team to negotiate their mutual assumptions about change. In addition the process of therapeutic change is seen as involving a negotiation between the family and the therapists about what will count as change.
The data were gathered from a group of therapists attending a local meeting of the Association for Family Therapy in Plymouth.     

Are Conflicts the Motor in Identity Change?

This paper aims to find empirical evidence for the assumption that conflicts are the motor of identity development. I hypothesized that conflicts in a specific domain cause an increase in exploration, a decrease in the strength of commitments, and a change in the content of commitments in that same domain. Eight participants kept a diary in which they reported the most important events during 6 months. The identity status in 6 domains before and after the diary period was assessed. Strong commitments with little exploration were preceded by a period of little or no conflicts in the relevant domain. Perceived change in content of commitments and decrease in strength of commitments were related to the number of conflicts during that same period, but exploration was not. This might be explained by the finding that most conflicts lasted much longer than 6 months. Using resampling techniques, significant results were found when we analyzed the 48 domains, but we cannot rule out the possibility that systematic differences between participants affected the findings.     

Does Educating Girls Really Change the World?

Directed by Richard Robbins and released in 2013, Girl Rising is a documentary-style film that takesviewers on a journey to nine countries, introducing a local girl in each context whose story underscores themyriad challenges facing girls in developing countries around the world. Interspersed between the girls’stories are statistics that offer viewers a macro-level picture of girls’ status in places like Haiti, Ethiopia, India,and Peru. The upshot of the film is that increasing girls’ access to education has the potential to spark broadbasedeconomic, political, and social change in the developing world. Among the film’s strengths are itseffectiveness as a consciousness-raising tool, beautiful composition, and the careful balance it strikesbetween depicting girls’ plight and foregrounding their strength and resilience in the face of hardship. Nevertheless, the film’s narrow focus on schooling for girls not only oversimplifies the multiple and intersectingforces – local, national, and global - that shape and constrain their lives, but also oversells education as asilver bullet solution.     

Why Don't People Change? A Psychoanalytic Perspective

From a psychoanalytic perspective, a central reason that people do not easily change is their fear of the dangers that they believe, at some level, change entails. These dangers include relinquishment of infantile wishes and fantasies, anxiety that would be experienced were defenses weakened, guilt, fantasies that change would harm a parental figure or threaten a vital relationship. Other factors that prevent change and maintain the sameness of behavior include defenses, unconscious pathogenic beliefs, devotion and loyalty to early figures, stable internal working models of self, other, and prototypic interactions, and emitting cues that elicit responses from others that confirm these working models. Finally, 1 discuss some selective psychoanalytic research on therapeutic change.     

Multiply Victimized Women: How Do They Change?

Recent studies have demonstrated that women are frequently victims of several types of violent actions via different agents throughout their life spans. Furthermore, multiple victimizations have been associated with psychological difficulties. The present study aimed to understand the change processes, in a self-directed way, of 19 female victims of multiple violent actions during their lifetimes. The women were evaluated for one year using a depression scale and a qualitative interview. The interviews were analyzed using the innovative moments (IMs) model. The results evidenced three groups, according to the evolution of their depressive symptoms during the one-year evaluation period. There were two unchanged groups, one being the symptomatic group (N = 6), which continuously presented symptoms at a clinical level, and the other the asymptomatic group (N = 7), which did not report depressive symptoms at any assessment moment. The change group (N = 6) exhibited a reliable decrease in clinically significant symptoms. Regarding IMs, the majority of the women were able to develop innovative moments regarding the dominant problem over a one-year evaluation period. Those women mobilized alternative ways to address multiple victimization experiences primarily through reflection IMs. Although there were several exceptions to the problematic narratives during the one-year assessment, the change group had a higher proportion and diversity of IM types—namely, a higher reconceptualization and reflection subtype II—compared with the unchanged groups. Moreover, reconceptualization differentiated the change group from the other two groups. These latter IMs may reflect the concept of “postvictimization growth” and the positive changes that arise from experiences of victimization.     

Does Self-Reported Posttraumatic Growth Reflect Genuine Positive Change?

ABSTRACT— In this study, we evaluated the validity of self-reported posttraumatic growth (PTG) by assessing the relation between perceived growth and actual growth from pre- to posttrauma. Undergraduate students completed measures tapping typical PTG domains at Time 1 and Time 2 (2 months later). We compared change in those measures with scores on the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996 ) for those participants who reported a traumatic event between Time 1 and Time 2 ( n = 122). PTGI scores generally were unrelated to actual growth in PTG-related domains. Moreover, perceived growth was associated with increased distress from pre- to posttrauma, whereas actual growth was related to decreased distress, a pattern suggesting that perceived and actual growth reflect different processes. Finally, perceived (but not actual) growth was related to positive reinterpretation coping. Thus, the PTGI, and perhaps other retrospective measures, does not appear to measure actual pre- to posttrauma change.     

How Does Change Occur Within the Psychoanalytic Encounter?

On November 6, 2002, Dr. James Fosshage delivered the following talk at a Clinical Training Conference held at the Blanton-Peale Institute. The Clinical Training Conference at Blanton-Peale provides experiential and conceptual resources to support the therapist-in-training in the context of his/her professional identity. The training conference is attended by candidates of all phases of the Psychoanalytic Program, the Pastoral Psychotherapy Program, and the Marriage and Family Program, as well as faculty members, administrators, staff, and interns of the institute. The residents were asked to review three articles written by Dr. Fosshage in preparation for his presentation: Toward Reconceptualising Transference: Theoretical and Clinical Considerations, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (1994) 75 (2): 265–280; Countertransference as the Analyst's Experience of the Analysand: Influence of Listening Perspectives, Psychoanalytic Psychology (1995) 12 (3): 375–391; and Listening/Experiencing Perspectives and the Quest for a Facilitating Responsiveness, Conversations in Self Psychology: Progress in Self Psychology, (1997) 13: 33–55.     

Did the Chinese Have a Change of Heart?

In their "The Prevalence of Mind-Body Dualism in Early China," Slingerland and Chudek use a statistical analysis of the early Chinese corpus to argue for Weak Folk Dualism (WFD). We raise three methodological objections to their analysis. First, the change over time that they find is largely driven by genre. Second, the operationalization of WFD is potentially misleading. And, third, dating the texts they use is extremely controversial. We conclude with some positive remarks.     

What Would It Take to Change Your Mind?

Most of us have settled views about various intellectual debates, and much of the activity of philosophers is devoted to giving arguments that are designed to convince one's opponents to change their minds about a certain issue. But, what might this process require? More pointedly, can you clearly imagine what it would take to make you change your mind about a position you currently hold? This article argues that the surprising answer to this question is no—you cannot imagine what would convince you to change your mind, since in doing so you would actually have to find those reasons compelling. The article then briefly looks at some implications of this conclusion.     

Who Started This? Investigating Different Sources of Organizational Change

This study explored whether organizational change had differential effects on perceptions of group leadership and group morale, depending on the source of the change activity. Data on work group leadership and morale was collected in two waves of an employee survey, and data on change activities were collected in the second wave of the survey. When leaders outside of a work group initiated change, employees reported more negative perceptions of their work group leader. However, when the work group leader initiated change, perceptions of that leader tended to be more positive. Finally, change activities initiated by group members did not influence perceptions of work group leadership, but were associated with improved work group morale.     

Come as you are? Public Reason and Climate Change

Res Publica - The likely adverse effects of climate change call for political action. In this paper, we argue that the public reason framework—with its insistence on justifiability to all...     

The Counselor—An Agent of What Change?

Goals in counseling must be clarified before the means of obtaining them can be determined. Success or failure can only be evaluated if these goals are stated in observable behavioral terms. The goals must be directly related to the problem or problems stated by the client. It is the initial responsibility of the counselor to help the client clarify these problems and subsequent behavioral goals through such means as discussion of the feelings of the client and the facts surrounding specific problem situations, and possibly through observation and psychometric evaluation. If the defined goals are within the bounds of the counselor's ethical standards as well as those of his profession, then means can be identified to bring about problem solution.     

Why Don't Continents Move? Why Don't People Change?

People don't change because they can't, don't want to, don't know how, or don't know what to change. The transtheoretical model provides an integ-rative model for understanding reasons for not changing, as well as readiness to change. Stages and levels of change guide therapists in their work in helping clients change. Clients in the precontemplative stage typically cannot change without special help. Those in the contemplation stage are not sure they want to change. Those in the preparation stage are afraid they do not know how to successfully change. The levels of change help guide therapists and clients on what to change.