The old and thee, uh, new: disfluency and reference resolution

Most research on the rapid mental processes of on-line language processing has been limited to the study of idealized, fluent utterances. Yet speakers are often disfluent, for example, saying "thee, uh, candle" instead of "the candle." By monitoring listeners' eye movements to objects in a display, we demonstrated that the fluency of an article ("thee uh" vs. "the") affects how listeners interpret the following noun. With a fluent article, listeners were biased toward an object that had been mentioned previously, but with a disfluent article, they were biased toward an object that had not been mentioned. These biases were apparent as early as lexical information became available, showing that disfluency affects the basic processes of decoding linguistic input.     

Extraordinary moral commitment: young adults involved in social organizations

The personality of exemplary young adults was studied in an effort to paint a portrait of moral excellence that expanded upon the traditional emphasis on moral reasoning maturity. These young adults were nominated based on their extraordinary moral commitment towards various social organizations. The sample included 40 moral exemplars and 40 matched comparison individuals who responded to a battery of questionnaires and participated in a semistructured interview. It was found that moral exemplars, in contrast to comparison individuals, were more agreeable, more advanced in their faith and moral reasoning development, further along in forming an adult identity, and more willing to enter into close relationships. These findings are discussed in the context of describing moral excellence from a multifaceted, personality perspective.     

Grammatical intuitions about irregular verb inflections

If people possess a rule that the root of a verb plus -ed produces the past tense, why does this rule produce an unacceptable form when applied to an irregular verb (e.g., comed)? One possibility is that the unacceptability of comed is the result of lexical priming. That is, comed primes the correct form came, and the awareness of came causes comed to be perceived as unacceptable. If so, then the acceptability of a misinflected form should be determined by the factors that influence the priming of its correct form, such as the frequency and hence speed of retrieval of its correct form. Three experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, subjects were faster to reject misinflected irregular verbs when the correct irregular form had a higher frequency than when it had a lower frequency. Furthermore, the higher the frequency of the correct form, the more unacceptable the misinflected form seemed. Experiment 2 used the naming task to confirm that the presentation of a misinflected form facilitated the naming of its correct form. In Experiment 3, subjects were faster to accept an irregular verb when it was primed by a misinflected irregular verb than with a correct regular verb. This was taken as evidence that the misinflected irregular verb accesses the correct form.     

Issues of Power, Control, and Status in Group Interaction: From Ferenczi to Foucault

Examination of the issues of power, control, and status in human interaction is made from the works of Kafka, Ferenczi, and Foucault. Ferenczi's confusion of tongues theory as a model is used to describe the dynamics of charismatic group leadership in training group for analyst group candidates.     

Ferenczi's Rise and Fall from “Analytic Grace”: The Ferenczi Renaissance Revisited

In the last 20 years a Ferenczi Renaissance has been slowly building. There has been a rediscovery of the significance of Sándor Ferenczi, who can be considered the clinical genius of psychoanalysis. The politics of psychoanalysis led to the suppression of Ferenczi's ideas, removing his influence from psychoanalysis for about 50 years. Ferenczi's ideas and methods significantly deviated from his mentor, Sigmund Freud; he offered an alternative theory, The Confusion of Tongues and a new method, Relaxation Therapy. Ferenczi's pioneering contributions to analytic therapy include: the introduction of empathy into the analytic relationship; the curative function of the relationship in the analytic encounter; the role of activity in analytic therapy; the importance of non-interpretative behavior by the analyst; the function of the experiential and emotional dimensions in analytic therapy; analyst self-disclosure; and mutual analysis.     

Top-down and bottom-up attentional control: On the nature of interference from a salient distractor

In two experiments using spatial probes, we measured the temporal and spatial interactions between top-down control of attention and bottom-up interference from a salient distractor in visual search. The subjects searched for a square among circles, ignoring color. Probe response times showed that a color singleton distractor could draw attention to its location in the early stage of visual processing (before a 100-msec stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA]), but only when the color singleton distractor was located far from the target. Apparently the bottom-up activation of the singleton distractor’s location is affected early on by local interactions with nearby stimulus locations. Moreover, probe results showed that a singleton distractor did not receive attention after extended practice. These results suggest that top-down control of attention is possible at an early stage of visual processing. In the long-SOA condition (150-msec SOA), spatial attention selected the target location over distractor locations, and this tendency occurred with or without extended practice.     

Visual selection mediated by location: Feature-based selection of noncontiguous locations

Experiments using two different methods and three types of stimuli tested whether stimuli at nonadjacent locations could be selected simultaneously. In one set of experiments, subjects attended to red digits presented in multiple frames with green digits. Accuracy was no better when red digits appeared successively than when pairs of red digits occurred simultaneously, implying allocation of attention to the two locations simultaneously. Different tasks involving oriented grating stimuli produced the same result. The final experiment demonstrated split attention with an array of spatial probes. When the probe at one of two target locations was correctly reported, the probe at the other target location was more often reported correctly than were any of the probes at distractor locations, including those between the targets. Together, these experiments provide strong converging evidence that when two targets are easily discriminated from distractors by a basic property, spatial attention can be split across both locations.