The use of bio-feedback in meditation technique: An innovative combination in psychotherapy

Conclusion The transistorized GSR apparatus is a convenient bio-feedback tool for monitoring the level of anxiety in a patient and for teaching him a simplified and expedient technique of meditation. Furthermore, once a patient attains a state of meditative relaxation, he becomes instantly aware of thoughts and associations that are conflict provoking and tension-building, by the fluctuations in the tone of the GSR. The therapist also becomes simultaneously aware of the significant areas of the patient's psycho-dynamics that need probing. This happens even when he is not verbalizing these thoughts. The therapeutic process is thereby expedited. Where the aim is symptom removal by desensitization, the GSR apparatus is helpful in promoting and measuring relaxation and in determining the subject's reactions to the anxiety-producing imagery used in this procedure.In short, used skillfully, this electronic device can be a valuable feedback instrument in the hands of a competent therapist.     

Relationship of LMX and Agreeableness with Emotional Exhaustion: a Mediated Moderated Model

The aim of the study is to explore that whether Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and agreeableness incite an employee to create façade of conformity (FOC) and how creation of FOC affects employee’s emotional exhaustion considering moderating effects of trust in management and employee’s emotional stability amongst four service sector organizations of Islamabad, Pakistan. Data Analysis of 303 supervisor-subordinate dyads using OLS regression found that LMX is negatively and significantly related to FOC while agreeableness is positively and significantly related to FOC. Effects of LMX on FOC are moderated by employee’s trust in management. Effect of FOC was lower among those having high degree of trust in management as compared to those who have lower degree of trust in management. FOC leads to emotional exhaustion. Moreover, effects of FOC on emotional exhaustion are moderated by employee’s emotional stability. Such that the effect of emotional exhaustion seems to be lower among those who have higher levels of emotional stability. No evidence was found that LMX and agreeableness directly affects emotional exhaustion without their effect on FOC. Based on these findings, we have discussed practical implications for managers along with limitations of the study and future directions.     

Daughter-to-Father Attachment Style and Emerging Adult Daughter's Psychological Well-Being: Mediating Role of Interpersonal Communication Motives

Journal of Adult Development - This study investigated insecure attachment of emerging adult daughters with their fathers and how it affects daughter's psychological well-being, with...     

Active heading control in simulated flight based on vertically extended contours

In two experiments, we manipulated the properties of 3-D objects and terrain texture in order to investigate their effects on active heading control during simulated flight. Simulated crosswinds were used to introduce a rotational component into the retinal flow field that presumably provided the visual cues used for heading control An active control task was used so that the results could be generalized to real-world applications such as flight simulation. In Experiment 1, we examined the effects of three types of terrain, each of which was presented with and without 3-D objects (trees), and found that the presence of 3-D objects was more important than terrain texture for precise heading control In Experiment 2, we investigated the effects of varying the height and density of 3-D objects and found that increasing 3-D object density improved heading control, but that 3-D object height had only a small effect. On the basis of these results, we conclude that the vertical contours improved active heading control by enhancing the motion parallax information contained in the retinal flow.     

Learning antecedents for anaphoric one

Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months. Cognition, 89, B65-B73.] claim experimental substantiation of an argument from the poverty of the stimulus, in the sense of Pullum and Scholz [Linguist. Rev. 19 (2002) 9]. They cite a specific feature of English--the assignment of appropriate antecedents for anaphoric one--that cannot possibly be learned from experience because the evidence needed is found only in utterances of a type too rare to be encountered. Their argument involves three empirical claims. In this note we dispute all three.     

Two-year-olds' sensitivity to speakers' intent: an alternative account of Samuelson and Smith

Seventy-two 2-year-olds participated in a study designed to test two competing accounts of the effect of contextual change on children's ability to learn a word for an object. The mechanistic account hypothesizes that any change in context that highlights a target object will lead to word learning; the social-pragmatic account maintains that a change in context must be perceived as relevant to the speaker's communicative intentions. Consistent with the latter account, we found that children learned the word when a change in context was intentional but not when it was accidental, and children failed to learn the word for the highlighted object when a speaker naive to the preceding context named the object.     

Technical challenges faced by the immigrant psychoanalyst

This paper delineates the technical challenges faced by immigrant analysts. These include (i) maintaining cultural neutrality toward "native" patients, (ii) wondering about the patient's motivations for choosing an ethnoculturally different analyst, (iii) scanning the patient's associations for interethnic clues to deeper transferences, (iv) negotiating the dilemmas posed by conducting analysis in a language other than one's mother tongue, and (v) avoiding shared projections, acculturation gaps, and nostalgic collusion in working with homoethnic immigrant analysands. While by no means irrelevant to the clinical work of non-immigrant analysts, these tasks seem to have a greater importance for the immigrant analyst. Brief clinical vignettes are offered to illustrate these propositions and to highlight the tension between the universality of fundamental intrapsychic and relational configurations, on the one hand, and the nuances of cultural and linguistic context, on the other.     

Investigating differential prediction by gender in employment-oriented personality measures

Gender-based differential prediction of job performance in employment-oriented personality measures has been left virtually unexamined. The use of 3 personality composites from the U.S. Army's instrument to predict 5 dimensions of job performance across 9 military jobs was investigated. Differential prediction, occurring in one third of the cases, was predominantly in the form of overprediction of female performances (i.e., higher male intercepts); slope differences were not found at above-chance levels. Female performance on the Effort and Leadership dimension was overpredicted in 90% of all predictor-criterion-job combinations, suggesting the measurement of this performance dimension as the source of the differential prediction rather than bias in the personality measures. Findings of overprediction of female performance parallel those of research investigating differential prediction by race in the ability domain.