The Houston Conference: The Road More Traveled

Neuropsychology Review -     

Of Rats and Women: Fetal Sexuality and Hybrid Agency

This paper investigates the way in which the sexuality of women has been posited in relation to rats as experimental subjects, exploring the stakes of a scientific debate that takes the social world of female sexuality as its focus and as a political problem. Studies that purport to understand female sexuality by investigating rat behavior rely on problematic assumptions about sovereign agents motivating sexual behavior. Such studies also aim to do away with so-called deviant sexual behaviors and, as a consequence, gay people. Theories of agential realism and hybridity serve as counterforces to these inherently repressive perspectives by insisting on the multiple determinations of sexuality and subjectivity among women.     

Positive mood and executive function: evidence from stroop and fluency tasks

Contrasting predictions have been made about the effects of positive mood states on the performance of frontal lobe tests that tap executive functions such as inhibition, switching, and strategy use. It has been argued that positive mood is likely to improve some cognitive processes, particularly those dependent on the frontal cortex and anterior cingulate of the brain. However, there is some evidence that happy mood may impair executive functioning. The current experiments investigated the effects of positive mood on Stoop and fluency tests, which are frequently used to assess executive function. Positive mood impaired performance on a switching condition of the Stroop test, but improved performance on a creative uses test of fluency. The effect of positive mood on an executive task may therefore depend on whether a task is inherently motivating or is impaired by diffuse semantic activation.     

Practical and ethical issues pertaining to test revisions

Revisions of clinical psychological tests are occurring at more frequent intervals than in the past. These revisions involve such practical issues as the goals of the revision, the economic considerations relating to the revision, the methodology of the revision, and the degree to which the revision meets the available scientific and ethical standards governing the use of these tests in individual assessment. A tension between practical and ethical issues in the test revision process is inevitable and demands the best of psychologists in their decision making. Test developers, psychologists, patients, and consumers of the test interpretations and recommendations have legitimate interests and a stake in seeing that test revisions are applied with maximal effectiveness and fairness in the broadest sense.     

Exercise Dependence: Diagnostic and Therapeutic Issues for Patients in Psychotherapy

Health promotion and exercise is recognized as an important ingredient in health maintenance. Within the diagnostic category of obsessive-compulsive disorders has been the increased recognition by clinicians of a phenomena best described as exercise dependence. Reviewed herein is its definition, theoretical framework and a spectrum of factors often associated with exercise. Realizing that exercise dependence as a clinical entity is not yet recognized in either the International Classification of Disorders (ICD-9) or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV-R), proposed criteria for its inclusion are offered. Where a pattern of behavior shows the presence of symptoms consistent with exercise dependence, clinical diagnosis should be made to assure that appropriate treatment might be offered to manage the condition and continue to make exercise an important part of a healthy lifestyle. Diagnostic and therapeutic considerations are offered for the contemporary psychotherapist.     

Transfer of route learning from virtual to real environments

The authors investigated the extent to which route learning in a virtual environment (VE) transfers to the real world. In Experiment 1, active VE exploration, on its own or with a map, produced better transfer of training than either no VE training at all or passive VE training; however, transfer was achieved after shorter training times with the map. Experiment 2 demonstrated that VE + map training was not superior to training with a map alone, and Experiment 3 demonstrated that the poorer performances observed after passive VE training were not simply due to a lack of attention but to the lack of active navigational decisions. The authors concluded that the present VE technology does not provide better route learning than studying a map.     

Perceived gaze direction and the processing of facial displays of emotion

There is good reason to believe that gaze direction and facial displays of emotion share an information value as signals of approach or avoidance. The combination of these cues in the analysis of social communication, however, has been a virtually neglected area of inquiry. Two studies were conducted to test the prediction that direct gaze would facilitate the processing of facially communicated approach-oriented emotions (e.g., anger and joy), whereas averted gaze would facilitate the processing of facially communicated avoidance-oriented emotions (e.g., fear and sadness). The results of both studies confirmed the central hypothesis and suggest that gaze direction and facial expression are combined in the processing of emotionally relevant facial information.     

Adolescents' emotion expectancies regarding aggressive and nonaggressive events: connections with behavior problems

A total of 50 behaviorally disruptive (conduct-disordered or oppositional defiant-disordered) adolescents and 50 comparison adolescents assessed how they expected to feel following both aggressive and nonaggressive situations. Compared with their peers, behaviorally disruptive adolescents expected fewer normative emotions and exhibited somewhat more of an anger emphasis in their nonaggressive emotion attributions, and they expected to feel happier following acts of instrumental/proactive aggression. These patterns of emotion expectancies were linked more closely with teacher ratings of adolescents' proactive aggression than with ratings of reactive aggression. Regression analyses indicated that both nonaggression emotion expectancies and proactive aggression happiness made independent contributions to predicting adolescents' externalizing tendencies. Discussion focused on the contributions of different types of self-attributed emotion expectancies to adolescents' social understanding and behavior.     

Broverman's methodology reversed: assessing university students' perceptions of the gender-role characteristics of counselors

This study examined university students' perceptions of which gender-role characteristics described helpful counselors for 137 nonmajors from an introduction to counseling class. Using a modification of the Broverman, et al. method (1970) and a modified version of their Stereotype Questionnaire, participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. Participants indicated the characteristics of a helpful counselor, a helpful female counselor, or a helpful male counselor using 20 bipolar items of gender-role characteristics. t tests were applied to whether agreement of the pole considered most frequently was greater than chance (50%). Analysis indicated agreement on characteristics were most helpful in a counselor, and the direction of this agreement did not differ across the three conditions or as a function of participants' sex. Agreement was high for the individual gender-role characteristic items across conditions as two of 20 items showed significant differences. There was significantly more agreement that male counselors should not have their feelings easily hurt than female counselors and significantly less agreement that male counselors should be able to express tender feelings easily relative to a counselor of unspecified sex.