Recognizing moving faces: a psychological and neural synthesis

Information for identifying a human face can be found both in the invariant structure of features and in idiosyncratic movements and gestures. When both kinds of information are available, psychological evidence indicates that: (1) dynamic information contributes more to recognition under non-optimal viewing conditions, e.g. poor illumination, low image resolution, recognition from a distance; (2) dynamic information contributes more as a viewer's experience with the face increases; and (3) a structure-from-motion analysis can make a perceptually based contribution to face recognition. A recently proposed distributed neural system for face perception, with minor modifications, can accommodate the psychological findings with moving faces.     

Bringing actors together around large-scale water systems: Participatory modeling and other innovations

Conclusion The five areas of innovation found in the three case studies have brought actors together in new ways around water management strategies. We paid special attention to the role of participatory modeling, because it has been able to generate new policy options. For such complex and often deadlocked water management issues, new options are at a premium. The cases demonstrate that participatory modeling efforts are a key part of successfully addressing these major water management issues faced in the U.S. as well as elsewhere. Recent publications include Ecology, Engineering and Management: Reconciling Ecosystem Rehabilitation and Service Reliability (with Emery Roe; Oxford: Oxford University Press). Current research interest include the reliability of critical infrastructures (such as electricity, water, telecommunications and the internet) and the development of methods to recast the intractable policy issues. Since 1999, he has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and Mills College, Oakland. where he teaches and directs research in the application of economic theory and systems analysis methods to the solution of environmental and regional water resources problems. He has authored numerous articles and book chapters, served on various committees of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, and was a U.S. member of an advisory committee for the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. Emery Roe has published widely on science, technology and environmental controversies, including the debates over large technical systems, sustainable development, and ecosystem management. His books include Narrative Policy Analysis (Duke University Press, 1994), Taking Complexity Seriously: Policy Analysis, Triangulation and Sustainable Development (Kluwer, 1998), Except-Africa: Remaking Development, Rethinking Power (Transaction, 1999), and Ecology, Engineering and Management: Reconciling Ecosystem Rehabilitation and Service Reliability (with Michel van Eeten; Oxford: Oxford University Press).     

Cross-fertilization versus transmission: Recommendations for developing a bidirectional approach to psychotherapy dissemination research

Psychotherapy researchers are increasingly engaged in collaborations with clinical practitioners and mental health administrators. Each party brings its own perspectives, values, and agendas to bear in these encounters. Viable research—practice collaborations depend on understanding and negotiating some of the tensions in these relationships. In this article, we discuss the contexts that prevail for various participants in a psychotherapy dissemination study as well as the values, goals, costs, and benefits related to research participation. This article is a collaboration among the researchers, mental health administrators, therapists, and clients involved in an ongoing treatment dissemination study. Our recommendations for research—practice collaborations are based on our experiences and dialogues over the course of this study.     

Encoding and output order processes in short-term order recall of distinctive items.

Adults recalled the order of the letters in one of two four-letter segments following a distractor task. They knew in advance the identity of the letters in each segment. A letter was made distinctive by replacing it with a red dash. This unusual form of distinctiveness generally had negative effects on recall of both the segment containing the missing letter and the absent letter within the segment. Encoding and output processes were manipulated by varying precue information and recall order instructions, respectively. Informing participants in advance whether or not a trial would contain a distinctive (i.e., missing) letter depressed recall. Constraining output order eliminated the disadvantage for the absent letter. The results are discussed in terms of encoding and output order processes in short-term recall of order information.     

Risk Behaviors Among Young Mexican American Gang-Associated Females: Sexual Relations, Partying, Substance Use, and Crime

This research focuses on young Mexican American girls who are not formal gang members yet participate in street-based activities of male gangs and engage in risk behaviors. These females comprise a larger proportion associated with male gangs in inner-city neighborhoods than actual female gang members. Using a qualitative design, the article presents a typology of Mexican American females that reveals a hierarchy based on exposure to four risk-related activities: sexual relations, partying, substance use, and crime. Findings illustrate how outcomes associated with these activities vary according to the girl's relationship to the male gang and status within the community. Also, regardless of their relationship to the gang, participation in these activities resulted in different degrees of negative outcomes. The study concludes that problems associated with these females must go beyond being viewed as individual problems but rather seen within the social, cultural, and economic conditions of their environment.     

Fiduciary Duties and the Ethics of Public Apology

The practice of official apology has a fairly poor reputation. Dismissed as ‘crocodile tears’ or cheap grace, such apologies are often seen by the public as an easy alternative to more punitive or expensive ways of taking real responsibility. I focus on what I call the role‐playing criticism: the argument that someone who offers an apology in public cannot be appropriately apologetic precisely because they are only playing a role. I offer a qualified defence of official apologies against this objection, considering them through the lens of fiduciary duties. This focus draws our attention to formal or impersonal relationships that are nevertheless normatively rich, capable of sustaining trust, concern, and care. At the same time, I highlight several pitfalls for fiduciary apologisers, including the tension between apology as a mode of truth telling and the duty of confidentiality. I consider whether the fiduciary apologiser, in reflecting on her fiduciary obligations, has ‘one thought too many’ for genuine apology, and argue that the issue of mixed motives is not limited to fiduciary contexts, cautioning against excessive idealism in our conception of apology. I conclude with some reflections on possible conflicts between fiduciary obligations and the conscientious desire to apologise.     

The perception of face gender: The role of stimulus structure in recognition and classification

The perception of face gender was examined in the context of extending “face space” models of human face representations to include the perceptual categories defined by male and female faces. We collected data on the recognizability, gender classifiability (reaction time to classify a face as male/female), attractiveness, and masculinity/femininity of individual male and female faces. Factor analyses applied separately to the data for male and female faces yielded the following results. First, for both male and female faces, the recognizability and gender classifiability of faces were independent—a result inconsistent with the hypothesis that both recognizability and gender classifiability depend on a face’s “distance” from the subcategory gender prototype. Instead, caricatured aspects of gender (femininity/masculinity ratings) related to the gender classifiability of the faces. Second, facial attractiveness related inversely to face recognizability for male, but not for female, faces—a result that resolves inconsistencies in previous studies. Third, attractiveness and femininity for female faces were nearly equivalent, but attractiveness and masculinity for male faces were not equivalent. Finally, we applied principal component analysis to the pixel-coded face images with the aim of extracting measures related to the gender classifiability and recognizability of individual faces. We incorporated these model-derived measures into the factor analysis with the human rating and performance measures.     

Therapeutic Document in Group Counseling: An Active Change Agent

In this article, the authors provide a therapeutic document model using language as an active change agent. The practice of the therapeutic letter has demonstrated substantial power in narrative therapy to foster client change. No literature, however, has applied this construct in group counseling. Grounded in social constructionism, re-authoring therapy and the power of written language, this model transforms the usually time-consuming and frequently nontherapeutic client documentation into a functional intervention. As a competency-based intervention, this model provides counselors with principles and procedures to enhance clients' self-agency and expedite the change process in group counseling.     

Cluttered communication in a deafened adult with autistic features

This is a case study of a 36-year-old man who was assessed by a psychiatric service for deaf people in London, England. Among the presenting symptoms of the client were poor eye contact, inconsistently hurried, poorly organized gross movement, apparent deficits in ability to establish rapport, grandiose content in the context of excellent writing skills, and, most relevant to this discussion, unintelligible speech marked by several types of disfluency. The client appeared to have little or no insight into his speech impairment. Formal and informal assessment procedures were used by the speech and language pathologist and clinical psychologist to distinguish the effects of childhood-onset deafness from those of autism, psychosis, depression, and/or a hitherto undiagnosed genetic or neurological disorder. Investigation included hematological and neurological tests.     

Can chimpanzees learn a phonemic language?

Two groups of investigators have recently reported some success in teaching language to chimpanzees. This finding has been generally attributed to the choice of a favorable communication modality. However, the fact that the languages employed were not phonemic also seems critical. It is doubtful whether chimpanzees could learn a phonemic language.This research was supported in part by PHS Grants No. GM01789 and GM16735 to The Rockefeller University.