Internet use in the contemporary media environment

Although a significant amount of research has focused on traditional media choice and use, and even on some ‘new’ media, these studies have either neglected the Internet and World Wide Web or were conducted prior to their recent popularity. This study offers a novel exploration of individuals' use of three Internet functions (information retrieval, information giving, and conversation capabilities) in the context of the use of other communication media. Data from 684 individuals demonstrate that the Internet is a multidimensional technology used in a manner similar to other, more traditional media. Specifically, conversation features of the Internet align with mediated interpersonal technologies (the telephone and electronic mail), whereas the Internet's information‐retrieval and information‐giving features are used in ways similar to mass media channels (newspapers, television, and books and magazines). In addition, needs fulfilled by these channels cluster in ways consistent with past research, regardless of the technologies employed to meet them.     

Emotional experiences during engagement in intrinsically and extrinsically motivated tasks

Previous theories of intrinsic motivation have traditionally ignored the experiential or subjective aspects of engagement in intrinsically and extrinsically motivated tasks. Part of the reason for the lack of research in this area was our ignorance of which emotions to study. Data are presented here from two studies designed to produce the first systematic evidence of changes in basic emotional states during task engagement. Our findings suggest that intrinsic and extrinsic tasks can be differentiated according to the emotional changes subjects retrospectively report about their engagement with these tasks, and point the way to future research incorporating emotion as an important variable to consider.The first author was supported in part by a Minority Fellowship administered by the American Psychological Association under a Clinical Training Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (5 T01 MH13833), and by a Regents Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley.     

Family interaction and child psychopathology: A comparison of two observation strategies

We examined two systems of assessing family interactions that are in common usage: a home based observation of free parent-child interaction and a clinic based observation of a structured mother-child problem solving discussion. Participants were 18 depressed, 27 conduct disordered and 16 comparison children and their mothers. Results indicated that: 1) these observations may yield very different data about child, and to a lesser extent, parent behavior, 2) parental affect in the clinic was related to their level of aversive behaviour in the home, 3) levels of both aversive and positive behavior for children and their mothers were correlated within each setting, 4) accuracy of diagnostic classifications made on the basis of the observational data were highest for comparison and conduct disordered children, but lowest for depressed children observed in the clinic, and 5) the inclusion of data on mothers' behavior increased classification accuracy for conduct disordered children only.     

Sweet sorrow: the color-shading response in an adult cystic fibrosis population

Research on the color-shading response on the Rorschach has been limited previously to its use as a predictor of suicide. The theoretical understanding of this response was addressed by some of the major Rorschach authors. Adult cystic fibrosis patients were administered a battery of psychological tests, including the Rorschach. While these patients face a premature death, none of these patients were suicidal. A higher than usual incidence of color-shading responses occurred. Rapaport's hypothesis that the color-shading response is an expression of a simultaneously conflicting emotion, or similar to "sweet sorrow," was suggested as a possible hypothesis.     

Adult age comparisons in the processing of event frequency information

The usual superiority in frequency-of-occurrence judgments of younger vs. older subjects was hypothesized to result from greater strategic encoding of the materials conveying frequency information. A subject-paced, visual search task was designed to control nontarget word encoding. Relative frequency judgments for the nontarget word pairs were equally accurate for younger and older subjects, and performance of both groups was above chance. Results suggest that strategic cover-task encoding can induce age differences in incidental frequency processing. Consistent with a nonoptimal as opposed to an optimal view, automatic processes require only minimal capacity for above-chance performance, but additional strategic resources can increase performance. When such additional resources are used more by younger than by older subjects, the former are better in frequency performance.     

Can skilled performers readily change technique? An example, conventional to wave action breaststroke

There has been a paucity of research that has investigated whether skilled performers of a complex sports skill can readily change their technique. This study was designed to investigate whether swimmers skilled in the conventional breaststroke technique could adjust readily to the wave action technique. Nine masters swimmers with well established and stable movement patterns for the conventional technique were coached in the wave action breaststroke technique. The swimmers were videotaped from the side during maximum speed trials of the conventional breaststroke technique before coaching and the wave action technique after ten 45-minute coaching sessions. The amplitude and phase of the waveforms comprising the vertical displacements of the body parts were determined by Fourier analysis. In response to the coaching, the amplitude of the fundamental frequency of the vertex of the head, shoulders, hips, and knees increased significantly (p < 0.01). The percentage of power contained in the fundamental frequency of the shoulder and hip vertical displacements also increased significantly (p < 0.01). All subjects changed the relative phase of the fundamental frequencies of the vertex, shoulder, and hip vertical displacements. It was concluded that in this complex skill, major changes to the low frequency waveforms comprising the motion were achieved readily.     

Child dissociation and the family context

Forty boys and their parents completed measures of dissociation, state anxiety, and perceptions of parental behaviors. Mothers completed a behavior problems checklist about their sons. The results indicated a correspondence between fathers' and sons' dissociation scores. In addition, links were found between parental dissociation, parental inconsistency and rejection, and child dissociation. The findings are discussed in the context of several recently proposed models of the etiology of child dissociative disorders.     

The effects of graphemic,phonetic, and semantic relationships on access to lexical structures

The question of whether or not lexical information is accessed directly from a visual code or by a process of phonetic mediation was investigated in three lexical decision experiments. Phonetic similarity influenced decisions about visually presented words only when they were to be discriminated from orthographically regular nonwords. When consonant strings or random letter strings were used as nonwords, phonetic similarity effects were absent, and graphemic similarity exerted a powerful effect while evidence of semantic priming was found. This pattern was interpreted as evidence of direct lexical access, which is probably the normal processing mode for skilled readers. Phonetic coding, when it occurs, may be a storage strategy rather than a part of the addressing chain for lexical structures.