On the cutting edge: Family therapy training in Russia

This article describes briefly the founding of the Moscow Institute for Family Studies and some of the far reaching results of beginning to offer family therapy training in Russia, as well as some of the challenges of this endeavor.     

Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development

Children who produce one word at a time often use gesture to supplement their speech, turning a single word into an utterance that conveys a sentence-like meaning ('eat'+point at cookie). Interestingly, the age at which children first produce supplementary gesture-speech combinations of this sort reliably predicts the age at which they first produce two-word utterances. Gesture thus serves as a signal that a child will soon be ready to begin producing multi-word sentences. The question is what happens next. Gesture could continue to expand a child's communicative repertoire over development, combining with words to convey increasingly complex ideas. Alternatively, after serving as an opening wedge into language, gesture could cease its role as a forerunner of linguistic change. We addressed this question in a sample of 40 typically developing children, each observed at 14, 18, and 22 months. The number of supplementary gesture-speech combinations the children produced increased significantly from 14 to 22 months. More importantly, the types of supplementary combinations the children produced changed over time and presaged changes in their speech. Children produced three distinct constructions across the two modalities several months before these same constructions appeared entirely within speech. Gesture thus continues to be at the cutting edge of early language development, providing stepping-stones to increasingly complex linguistic constructions.     

The virtual cutting edge: the internet and adolescent self-injury

The 2 studies reported here use observational data from message boards to investigate how adolescents solicit and share information related to self-injurious behavior. Study 1 examines the prevalence and nature of these message boards, their users, and most commonly discussed topics. Study 2 was intended to explore the correlations between content areas raised for discussion. Both studies were intended to shed light on the role of message boards in spreading information about self-injurious practices and influencing help-seeking behavior. More than 400 self-injury message boards were identified. Most are populated by females who describe themselves as between 12 and 20 years of age. Findings show that online interactions clearly provide essential social support for otherwise isolated adolescents, but they may also normalize and encourage self-injurious behavior and add potentially lethal behaviors to the repertoire of established adolescent self-injurers and those exploring identity options.     

Asians on the edge: the reciprocity of allied behavior

The discussion of racial and ethnic minority issues has traditionally been a Black-White discussion. As such, American Indians, Latinos, and Asians have been left out of this discussion. Such exclusion does not make scientific sense, as it makes conclusions about race relations less generalizable. It also comes with a cost, as the excluded groups are often asked to give up their respective ethnicities to join the discussion. The present article, discusses some of these scientific and social losses and suggests that prominent African American and White leaders serve as allies for the inclusion of all groups in the discussion of race relations, focusing particularly on the Asian experience. Such allies must come not only from academicians but also from community activists and those in power positions in the media.     

Lexical categories at the edge of the word

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining insights into the mechanisms by which children may accomplish these feats. Unfortunately, many of these models assume a computational complexity and linguistic knowledge likely to be beyond the abilities of developing young children. This article shows that, using simple statistical procedures, significant correlations exist between the beginnings and endings of a word and its lexical category in English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. Therefore, phonetic information can contribute to individuating higher level structural properties of these languages. This article also presents a simple 2-layer connectionist model that, once trained with an initial small sample of words labeled for lexical category, can infer the lexical category of a large proportion of novel words using only word-edge phonological information, namely the first and last phoneme of a word. The results suggest that simple procedures combined with phonetic information perceptually available to children provide solid scaffolding for emerging lexical categories in language development.     

Articulation in the context of edge classification

Many researchers believe the human visual system classifies luminance edges into those produced by reflectance edges or those produced by illumination edges, yet this classification process is not completely understood. One suggestion is that heuristics are used for edge classification. For example. specific contrast relationships at the luminance edge ('codirectional contrast invariance' and 'transversal luminance-ratio preserving') may distinguish an illumination edge from a reflectance edge on the one hand, and from a translucent edge on the other. Distinct from luminance junctions, these features are global characteristics of the luminance pattern that make distinguishing between different types of edge easier with more highly articulated scenes. I demonstrate that apparent translucency, nonreversing X-junctions, and single-reversing X-junctions are insufficient on their own to produce the lightness illusion of Adelson's well-known tile pattern. While tolerating violations of the codirectional contrast invariance and transversal-luminance-ratio presersving without reversing the sign of contrast, the visual system is quite sensitive to such contrast reversal at the luminance edge. I account for this by suggesting that humans process lightness in terms of an ordinal, rather than interval, (or ratio) scale.     

The effect of luminance variation on the apparent position of an edge

A gray outline against a white (or black) ground appears to deviate when one of the divided regions turns into black (white). The direction of shift is not predictable on the basis of luminance profile and polarity contrast of this part of contour, called gray edge (to indicate a stepwise gradient from black to gray and from gray to white). Rather, it appears to depend on the luminance profiles of the collinear regions: A gray edge shifts toward the dark side whenever collinear with a gray line traversing a white ground. The same gray edge takes the opposite direction whenever it extends against a black ground. This rule proved to be successful in predicting the illusory convergence of the sides of a square that formed the stimuli of the first experiment, but the magnitude of the phenomenon was affected by luminance ratios and polarity contrasts of the gray edges, in agreement with the findings of the experiments on gray or blurred edge misalignment. A second experiment tested some hypotheses predicting the combined effects of two or more distorting sources. These hypotheses, suggested by the physical theory of vector sum, were partially disproved. A new model is proposed that assumes different ways of integrating local distortions. The third experiment tested predictions of how distorting pulses in opposite directions combine. The illusory misplacement of edge studied in this experiment is proposed as the underlying phenomena of the café wall illusion, the hollow square illusion, and other illusory phenomena observed with blurred areas. A connection with the induction grid phenomena is hypothesized.     

Rapunzel: the symbolism of the cutting of hair

I have adduced data to demonstrate that the act of cutting of hair is a symbol. The criterion of proof used is the traditional one in psychoanalysis: the idea carries constant meanings in separate areas of human experience and behavior. Such constant meanings are shown in a folk tale, the mental lives of patients, clinical studies by other authors, and certain practices of other cultures. The cutting of hair symbolizes separation from a mothering object, castration, and reparation.