Subjectivity in psychological science: From problem to prospect

The problem of subjectivity within psychological research has long been recognized. The practices of scientific psychology, however, continue to assume that objectivity is desirable, even if not completely possible, and that subjectivity is a source of bias that must be minimized or eliminated. Such a dispassionate stance has offered and continues to offer a range of benefits, not least a tight focus on participants' relevant responses. Nonetheless, in this article, we question the wisdom of always or automatically working to minimize participant and researcher subjectivity, and we invite psychological researchers to consider the benefits of a more, what we term, reflexive scientific attitude. We turn in particular to recent theoretical and methodological innovations within qualitative research in order to help us progress toward a more reflexive psychological science where subjectivity is re-viewed as a resource that can be tapped in order to contextualize and enrich the psychological research process and its products. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

The Third Rail of Family Systems: Sibling Relationships, Mental and Behavioral Health, and Preventive Intervention in Childhood and Adolescence

Sibling relationships are an important context for development, but are often ignored in research and preventive interventions with youth and families. In childhood and adolescence, siblings spend considerable time together, and siblings’ characteristics and sibling dynamics substantially influence developmental trajectories and outcomes. This paper reviews research on sibling relationships in childhood and adolescence, focusing on sibling dynamics as part of the family system and sibling influences on adjustment problems, including internalizing and externalizing behaviors and substance use. We present a theoretical model that describes three key pathways of sibling influence: one that extends through siblings’ experiences with peers and school, and two that operate largely through family relationships. We then describe the few existing preventive interventions that target sibling relationships and discuss the potential utility of integrating siblings into child and family programs.     

Top-down modulation: bridging selective attention and working memory

Selective attention, the ability to focus our cognitive resources on information relevant to our goals, influences working memory (WM) performance. Indeed, attention and working memory are increasingly viewed as overlapping constructs. Here, we review recent evidence from human neurophysiological studies demonstrating that top-down modulation serves as a common neural mechanism underlying these two cognitive operations. The core features include activity modulation in stimulus-selective sensory cortices with concurrent engagement of prefrontal and parietal control regions that function as sources of top-down signals. Notably, top-down modulation is engaged during both stimulus-present and stimulus-absent stages of WM tasks; that is, expectation of an ensuing stimulus to be remembered, selection and encoding of stimuli, maintenance of relevant information in mind and memory retrieval.     

Consolidation of vocabulary is associated with sleep in children

Although the acquisition of a novel word is apparently rapid, adult research suggests that integration of novel and existing knowledge (measured by engagement in lexical competition) requires sleep‐associated consolidation. We present the first investigation of whether a similar time‐course dissociation characterizes word learning across development. Consistent with previous research but counter to adults, 7–12‐year‐olds showed sleep‐associated consolidation effects in declarative but not procedural memory. Nevertheless, the relationship between sleep and word learning in children was remarkably similar to the pattern for adults. Following exposure to nonword competitors (e.g. biscal) in the a.m. or p.m., children’s ability to recognize and recall the nonwords improved only after sleep (after approximately 12‐hrs for the p.m. group and 24‐hrs for the a.m. group), with performance stable 1 week later. Novel nonwords only induced lexical competition effects after sleep. These findings suggest that children utilize a dual memory system when acquiring and integrating new vocabulary and highlight sleep as integral to this process. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mm8SDUXw_0&feature=plcp .     

Object permanence in adult common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus): not everything is an “A-not-B” error that seems to be one

In this paper, we describe a behaviour pattern similar to the “A-not-B” error found in human infants and young apes in a monkey species, the common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus). In contrast to the classical explanation, recently it has been suggested that the “A-not-B” error committed by human infants is at least partially due to misinterpretation of the hider’s ostensively communicated object hiding actions as potential ‘teaching’ demonstrations during the A trials. We tested whether this so-called Natural Pedagogy hypothesis would account for the A-not-B error that marmosets commit in a standard object permanence task, but found no support for the hypothesis in this species. Alternatively, we present evidence that lower level mechanisms, such as attention and motivation, play an important role in committing the “A-not-B” error in marmosets. We argue that these simple mechanisms might contribute to the effect of undeveloped object representational skills in other species including young non-human primates that commit the A-not-B error.     

Influence of numerical magnitudes on the free choice of an object position

The link between numerical magnitude and mechanisms of spatial orienting has been underlined in an increasing number of studies. Similarly, the relationship between numerical magnitude and grasping actions has started to be investigated. The present study focuses on the influence of numerical magnitude processing in the free choice of the position of an object. Participants were presented with a digit (1-9 without 5) and were required to decide whether it was smaller or larger than 5. Then, they had to grasp a small cube and change its position before vocally responding "higher" or "lower". Results showed that in the initial phase of the grasp movement, the grip aperture was modulated by the numerical magnitude. Moreover, participants shifted the position of the cube more leftward with smaller digits compared with larger ones, and they tended to position the object closer to themselves with smaller digits compared with larger ones. These results extend the previous findings indicating that the processing of magnitude is tightly related to the mechanisms of spatial orienting that subserve action execution.     

Development and validation of the Body,Eating, and Exercise Comparison Orientation Measure (BEECOM) among college women

We constructed and validated a measure of comparison dimensions associated with eating pathology, namely, the Body, Eating, and Exercise Comparison Orientation Measure (BEECOM). Participants were 441 undergraduate women. In Study 1, items were generated and refined via exploratory factor analysis, yielding three interpretable factors (i.e., Body, Eating, and Exercise Comparison Orientation). Confirmatory factor analysis was then used to confirm the three-factor structure of the BEECOM and to investigate the potential presence of a higher-order factor. Given that the lower-order factors loaded strongly onto a higher-order factor, it is appropriate to use a total BEECOM score, in addition to subscale scores. Further, the BEECOM's scores yielded evidence of internal consistency and construct validity in this sample. Study 2 demonstrated two-week test–retest reliability of the BEECOM among college women. Overall, the BEECOM demonstrated good psychometric properties and may be useful for more comprehensively assessing eating disorder-related social comparison behavior.     

From trainee to trainer: crossing over to the other side of the fence

This article discusses the authors' experiences of the transition from trainee to trainer on a psychotherapeutic training programme, and some of the challenges involved. Using the framework offered by Rizq (2009), the article examines the many parallel processes implicit in the roles of trainee, trainer and therapist. We explore these using examples from personal experience and psychodynamic theory and concepts. We believe our experience illustrates one of the transitions that are inevitable throughout the process of training, qualifying and practising as therapeutic practitioners. These transitions, whilst often fraught with difficulty, are invariably paramount to the process of reflection and development as a practitioner and teacher. Therefore, this article hopes to formulate a deeper understanding of this edifying, yet challenging transition.     

Examining Prospective Mediation Models of Body Surveillance, Trait Anxiety, and Body Dissatisfaction in African American and Caucasian College Women

Within dominant U.S. culture, the feminine body has been positioned as an object to be looked at and sexually gazed upon; thus, females often learn to view themselves from an observer’s perspective and to treat themselves as objects to be looked at (i.e., self-objectification). Self-objectification often results in negative outcomes, such as body dissatisfaction, among Caucasian samples, but the correlates and consequences of self-objectification among African Americans are less clear. Given that this construct may vary considerably across racial/ethnic groups, the current study considers how self-objectification affects both African American and Caucasian college women’s body dissatisfaction. This was assessed via two prospective mediation models that utilized bootstrapping techniques. In the first model, trait anxiety was tested as a mediator of the relation between body surveillance, the behavioral indicator of self-objectification, and body dissatisfaction; in the second model, body surveillance was examined as a mediator of the relation between trait anxiety and body dissatisfaction. Participants at Time 1 were 276 undergraduate women attending a Midwestern university in the U.S.; 97 (35%) described themselves as African American/Black, and 179 as Caucasian non-Hispanic/White; at Time 2, 70 African American females and 156 Caucasian females provided data. At these two time points, separated by about 5?months, participants completed the same set of questionnaires. Results indicated that the first mediation model was not significant for either group, but the second model was significant for the Caucasian women. Results provide some support for the differential effects of self-objectification on women’s body dissatisfaction depending on race/ethnicity.     

Semantics of the transitive construction: prototype effects and developmental comparisons

This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar that shows abstract linguistic categories can behave in similar ways to non-linguistic categories, for example, by showing graded membership of a category. Thus, the findings lend psychological validity to the existing cross-linguistic evidence for prototypical transitive semantics. Second, we discuss a possible explanation for the fact that prototypical sentences were processed differently in adults and children, namely, that children's transitive semantic network is not as interconnected or cognitively coherent as adults'.