The abject self: self-states of relentless despair

Early childhood deprivation, attachment chaos, repeated medical traumata, and abuse set up neural networks of dread, shame, worthlessness, and hopelessness: the phenomenology of abject experience that resides in implicit memory. Abject interactions with others condense yearning and despair into complex enactments of abject suffering. Working in abject subgroups dilutes the intensity of abject material as ownership of toxic affects is broadened. Affective engagement and a relational perspective facilitate the management and transformation of self-abjection into more optimal relatedness in combined group and individual treatment.     

The presence of a best friend buffers the effects of negative experiences

The goal of the current study was to examine how the presence of a best friend might serve as protection against the effect of negative experiences on global self-worth and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis (HPA axis). A total of 103 English-speaking male (n = 55) and female (n = 48) participants from Grade 5 (M = 10.27 years) and Grade 6 (M = 11.30 years) completed booklets about their experiences that occurred 20 min previously and how they felt about themselves at the moment, and they provided saliva multiple times per day over the course of 4 consecutive days. Having a best friend present during an experience significantly buffered the effect of the negativity of the experience on cortisol and global self-worth. When a best friend was not present, there was a significant increase in cortisol and a significant decrease in global self-worth as the negativity of the experience increased. When a best friend was present, there was less change in cortisol and global self-worth due to the negativity of the experience.     

Response Style Differences in the Inattentive and Combined Subtypes of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

This study examined potential differences between the inattentive and combined ADHD subtypes using laboratory tasks assessing behavioral inhibitory processes. Seventy-five children completed two tasks of behavioral inhibition believed to isolate different processes: the cued reaction time task (CRT), a basic inhibition task, and the go/no-go task (GNG), a complex inhibition task that incorporates motivational contingencies. Three groups of participants were identified, including ADHD/Inattentive (n = 17), ADHD/Combined (n = 37), and comparison (n = 21). Results indicated that rather than showing behavioral inhibition deficits, the ADHD/I children appeared overly inhibited, as evidenced by slower reaction times across the two tasks and significantly higher errors of omission in the GNG task. Additionally, the ADHD/I children did not demonstrate cue dependency effects on the CRT task, suggesting that they were failing to incorporate relevant information before making a response. The sluggish and inhibited performance of the ADHD/I group challenges the idea that it is a subtype of ADHD.     

Frames of reference for the light-from-above prior in visual search and shape judgements

Faced with highly complex and ambiguous visual input, human observers must rely on prior knowledge and assumptions to efficiently determine the structure of their surroundings. One of these assumptions is the 'light-from-above' prior. In the absence of explicit light-source information, the visual system assumes that the light-source is roughly overhead. A simple, low-cost strategy would place this 'light-from-above' prior in a retinal frame of reference. A more complex, but optimal strategy would be to assume that the light-source is gravitationally up, and compensate for observer orientation. Evidence to support one or other strategy from psychophysics and neurophysiology has been mixed. This paper pits the gravitational and retinal frames against each other in two different visual tasks that relate to the light-from-above prior. In the first task, observers had to report the presence or absence of a target where distractors and target were defined purely by shading. In the second task, observers made explicit shape judgements of similar stimuli. The orientation of the stimuli varied across trials and the observer's head was fixed at 0, +/-45 or +/-60 degrees . In both tasks the retinal frame of reference dominated. Visual search behaviour with shape-from-shading stimuli (SFS) was modulated purely by stimulus orientation relative to the retina. However, the gravitational frame of reference had a significant effect on shape judgements, with a 30% correction for observer orientation. In other words, shading information is processed quite differently depending on the demands of the current task. When a 'quick and dirty' representation is required to drive fast, efficient search, that is what the visual system provides. In contrast, when the task is to explicitly estimate shape, extra processing to compensate for head orientation precedes the perceptual judgment. These results are consistent with current neurophysiological data on SFS if we re-frame compensation for observer orientation as a cue-combination problem.     

Bilateral associations of low-level unilateral performance: an unremarked aspect of limb control

The experimenters examine upper limb movement discrimination performance in an arm-raising task for bilateral associations of low-level unilateral performance. On a cue from the experimenter, young adults (n = 23) with no history of shoulder injury raised either their left arm, right arm, or both together in a forward flexion movement until their hand or hands contacted an unseen, adjustable, overhead stop. The participant then judged which of the 5 possible stop positions, in the 12-20 degrees range forward of true vertical, the participant had contacted on the particular trial. Results showed that for the 16 participants whose best performance was in 1 of the unimanual conditions discrimination scores in the bilateral condition were equivalent to those of their worse-performing limb. For the 7 participants whose best discrimination performance was obtained on bimanual arm-raising, scores for the 2 unimanual conditions were equivalently low. Therefore, when a single limb that can perform well operates in conjunction with a limb performing at a lower level, the consequence is lowering the bimanual movement discrimination performance.     

Accuracy and awareness in the perception and categorization of male sexual orientation

For clear and unambiguous social categories, person perception occurs quite accurately from minimal cues. This article addresses the perception of an ambiguous social category (male sexual orientation) from minimal cues. Across 5 studies, the authors examined individuals' actual and self-assessed accuracy when judging male sexual orientation from faces and facial features. Although participants were able to make accurate judgments from multiple facial features (i.e., hair, the eyes, and the mouth area), their perceived accuracy was calibrated with their actual accuracy only when making judgments based on hairstyle, a controllable feature. These findings provide evidence that suggests different processes for extracting social category information during perception: explicit judgments based on obvious cues (hairstyle) and intuitive judgments based on nonobvious cues (information from the eyes and mouth area). Differences in the accuracy of judgments based on targets' controllability and perceivers' awareness of cues provides insight into the processes underlying intuitive predictions and intuitive judgments.     

Paired-associate learning, phoneme awareness, and learning to read

We report two studies examining the relations among three paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks (visual-visual, verbal-verbal, and visual-verbal), phoneme deletion, and single-word and nonword reading ability. Correlations between the PAL tasks and reading were strongest for the visual-verbal task. Path analyses showed that both phoneme deletion and visual-verbal PAL were unique predictors of a composite measure of single-word reading and of irregular word reading. However, for nonword reading, phoneme deletion was the only unique predictor (and visual-verbal PAL was not a significant predictor). These results are consistent with the view that learning visual (orthography) to phonological mappings is an important skill for developing word recognition skills in reading and that individual differences in this ability can be tapped experimentally by a PAL task.     

Dependency Stereotypes and Aging: The Implications for Getting and Giving Help in Later Life

Older adults are often stereotyped as dependent on others. This study explored how seeing an older adult receiving help triggers the dependency stereotype, by examining perceptions of older and younger adults helping and being helped by others. Participants (183 younger and older adults) read vignettes of young and old people helping others and rated the helpers and helpees on 2 variables: one a composite of dependency and capability; and the other composed of thoughtfulness, generosity, and unselfishness (i.e., considerateness). Participants rated older helpees as dependent, no matter who helped them. Younger helpers and those who helped the elderly rated high on considerateness. Females rated helpers more positively than did males. Implications of these findings for older adults are discussed.