Con-fusing contours & pieces of glass

We present a new illusory display in which illusory contours are misaligned with physical contours. In these displays, illusory Kanizsa squares, induced by the so-called pacmen, are positioned on top of a background grid of bars. The misalignment of the illusory contours with respect to physical contours of the grid of bars induces an overall 'restless' appearance and evokes the impression that parts of the grid within the illusory square are shifted. To test this impression, we created stimuli in which illusory squares were superimposed on a grid at different positions, where the grid could consist of either straight bars or indented bars. After briefly flashing these stimuli, observers reported indentations of the background grid for those cases in which physical and illusory contours were misaligned. In a control condition, the pacmen were replaced by crosses (not inducing an illusory square) at the same positions; as expected much less illusory shifts were reported in this condition. In a second experiment, we further tested the direction of the perceived shifts, revealing similar trends as in the first experiment and a consistent result with respect to the reported direction of the shifts. We explore and discuss possible underlying mechanisms with regard to our illusory display.     

Performance in Autobiographical Memory of Older Adults with Depression Symptoms

The aim of this study was to compare the performance in the Autobiographical Memory Test in older adults with high scores on depression symptoms (HDS) compared with a matched group with low scores on depression symptoms (LDS) according to the clinical cut‐off of the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale. Participants were asked to generate specific autobiographical memories in response to a series of positive and negative cue words. Latencies of responses for each item were also scored. LDS participants showed a higher proportion of specific memories than HDS participants. Latencies of responses to positive and negative cues were greater for HDS than LDS. Specific autobiographical memory was positively associated with Life Satisfaction. Cognitive emotional changes in the function of memory with age are suggested as a possible explanation for the findings. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impact of social support on health status and life satisfaction in people with a spinal cord injury

Abstract

Purpose: Assessment of the impact of received social support on functional health status and life satisfaction in people with spinal cord injury (SCI). Design: Respondents were 176 people with SCI between 18 and 65 years of age and living in the community. Mean time after injury was 3.6 years. Problem-oriented and emotion-oriented support, received from family members, friends and relatives, and professionals were assessed with the Sources of Social Support Inventory. Health status was assessed with the Sickness Impact Profile 68 and life satisfaction with the Life Satisfaction Questionnaire. Structural equation modelling with LISREL V8 was used to study relationships of different types and sources of social support with health status and life satisfaction.Results: Emotion-oriented support led to better psychological functioning and to greater life satisfaction. In addition, emotion-oriented support from the family led to greater satisfaction with relationships and emotion-oriented support from friends and acquaintances led to less satisfaction with social life. Problem-oriented support was not clearly related to health status and life satisfaction; there was only a negative relation between problem-oriented support and satisfaction with social life. Support, problem-oriented or emotion-oriented, from health-care professionals showed no relationships with health status or life satisfaction.Conclusions: Emotion-oriented support from family members and friends was most important for people with SCI. Greater problem-oriented support appears to be related to poorer life satisfaction.     

Maintaining a healthy diet: Effects of personality and self-reward versus self-punishment on commitment to and enactment of self-chosen and assigned goals

Abstract

A theory decomposing volition into four modes of central organization of executive control functions is outlined. These modes include (1) an autonomy-oriented mode (“self-regulation”) which is facilitated by challenging conditions and positive mood, (2) a self-suppressive mode oriented toward external-control (“self-control”) facilitated by negative mood and two modes associated with volitional inhibition (“state orientation”). Two experiments are reported that test predicted interactions between dispositional and situational factors in determining commitment to and actual enactment of self-chosen versus assigned activities directed at changing nutritional behavior. The results confirm the predicted disordinal interactions: The degree of commitment to and enactment of intended behavioral changes depends upon an interaction between personality (volitional styles), type of self-regulatory task (eat more healthy versus avoid unhealthy food), and instructional focus on easy versus difficult steps (Study 1) or self-reward versus self-punishment strategies (Study 2). Practical implications for designing intervention procedures according to individual personality characteristics and situational constraints are discussed.     

Efficacy of the program "Testas's (mis)adventures" to promote the deep approach to learning

This paper provides information about the efficacy of a tutorial training program intended to enhance elementary fifth graders' study processes and foster their deep approaches to learning. The program "Testas's (mis)adventures" consists of a set of books in which Testas, a typical student, reveals and reflects upon his life experiences during school years. These life stories are nothing but an opportunity to present and train a wide range of learning strategies and self-regulatory processes, designed to insure students' deeper preparation for present and future learning challenges. The program has been developed along a school year, in a one hour weekly tutorial sessions. The training program had a semi-experimental design, included an experimental group (n=50) and a control one (n=50), and used pre- and posttest measures (learning strategies' declarative knowledge, learning approaches and academic achievement). Data suggest that the students enrolled in the training program, comparing with students in the control group, showed a significant improvement in their declarative knowledge of learning strategies and in their deep approach to learning, consequently lowering their use of a surface approach. In spite of this, in what concerns to academic achievement, no statistically significant differences have been found.     

Closure of autobiographical memories: The effects of written recounting from first- or third-person visual perspective

Autobiographical memories are recalled with varying degrees of psychological closure. Closure is a subjective assessment of how far a remembered experience feels resolved, and it has been suggested that one predictor of closure is the amount of emotional detail in the memory. Study 1 examined which aspect of emotional detail is important for closure, and showed that open and closed negative memories were distinguished by ratings of emotion evoked during recall, not by remembered emotion from the time of the event. The recall of open memories was accompanied by more intense, more negative, and less positive emotion than the recall of closed memories. Biased retelling of memories has been shown to influence closure and on the basis of evidence that third-person recall serves a distancing function, Study 2 examined whether instructions to repeatedly recount an open memory from a third-person perspective would increase closure compared with a single or repeated recounting from a first-person perspective. While repeated third-person recounting had the greatest influence on closure, there were also increases in the first-person recounting groups. The results suggest that closure can be increased by reporting memories in written narrative form, particularly if repeatedly expressed from the third-person perspective.     

Discriminant analysis in career studying "decision/indecision": the Career Factors Inventory (CFI) as a diagnostic measure

Literature has shown that, nowadays, a multidimensional approach to decision-making has become prioritized. The Careers Factor Inventory (CFI) is, in fact, a multidimensional measurement instrument for evaluating career indecision, which may be useful in the diagnosis of adaptation behaviors in terms of career decision versus indecision. This study emerges as a follow-up to a previous study which used the CFI on a sample of university students in which this measurement instrument was found to be capable of distinguishing Low decided vs. Highly decided groups and to evaluate the discriminatory capacity of the CFI scales. It is the aim, here, to further analyse the results obtained in such study with a view to grounding the importance of the use of this Inventory as an instrument for distinguishing people who present different decision levels in relation to their careers. In this study, 494 university students from a number of higher education establishments and courses are part of the afore mentioned Low decided and Highly decided groups. The collected data were analysed by means of Discrete Discriminant Analysis models and corroborate the discriminant power of the Inventory and its use as a diagnostic instrument in the psychological intervention of career counseling and development.     

Test anxiety: associations with personal and family variables

Test anxiety is a common behavior among students facing social pressure centered on mastery. Only a few studies have analyzed the relations between test anxiety, academic procrastination, personal and family variables and math grades. This work focus on the analysis of the impact of students' social-personal variables such as parents' education level, number of siblings and under-achievement by performing ANOVAs in two samples of 533 and 796 students from junior high-school. Corroborating the findings in other studies, the data stress that test anxiety is higher in girls and decreases when students' parents have higher educational levels, with the number of courses flunked, and when students' math grades were lower. Test anxiety and procrastination correlate positive and significantly. Findings are discussed and compared with those of previous researches. The implications for teaching practice are also analyzed.     

At first glance, transparency enhances assimilation

We investigated the role of transparency, perceptual grouping, and presentation time on perceived lightness. Both transparency and perceptual grouping have been found to result in assimilation effects, but only for ambiguous stimulus displays and with specific attentional instructions. By varying the presentation times of displays with two partly overlapping transparent E-shaped objects, we measured assimilation in unambiguous stimulus displays and without specific attentional instructions. The task was to judge which of two simultaneously presented E-shaped objects was darker. With unrestrained presentation times, if a transparency interpretation was possible, assimilation was not found. Inhibiting a transparency interpretation by occluding the local junctions between the two E-shaped objects, did lead to assimilation. With short presentation times, if a transparency interpretation was possible, assimilation was now also found. Thus, we conclude that, although transparency appears to enhance assimilation, with unambiguous stimulus displays and without specific attentional instructions, perceptual grouping is more important for assimilation to occur.