Psychometric properties of the Wolpe-Lazarus assertiveness scale with community-dwelling older adults

The psychometric properties of the Wolpe-Lazarus Assertiveness Scale (WLAS) were examined with an older community-dwelling, nonclinical, adult population. Three hundred twenty-seven older adults (ages, 57–96; mean, 75.68) who were not psychiatrically impaired completed a demographic questionnaire and the WLAS. Fifty-seven of the 327 subjects also filled out the WLAS on a repeated basis after 3 or 4 weeks in order to determine the test-retest reliability. Results indicate that the WLAS has an adequate internal consistency (Cronbach's=.75) and test-retest reliability (r=.81). WLAS cutoff scores of 14 and under identify unassertiveness. Older adults who are (1) African-American or (2) of lower SES tend to be significantly less assertive. Also, five factors emerged from a principal-components analysis accounting for 34.7% of the total variance.This research is based on the senior author's doctoral dissertation in partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. under the direction of the second, third, and fourth authors.     

Praxis and Poesis in Aristotle's practical philosophy

Conclusions All the paradoxes in the Engberg-Pedersen interpretation and all the present-day discussions about whether energeia is an activity or a state, are not, in my opinion, the result of a defective reading of Aristotle but, rather, the influence of the prevailing values of our industrial society. These values - held, as it seems, by these commentators - are conspicuously teleological: they prevent us from grasping the qualitative difference between praxis and poesis and between energeia and kinesis. Indeed, since these teleological values do not take this difference into account, the commentators only ask, when Aristotle distinguishes between praxis and poesis, how much time praxis takes, or if it takes time at all, which is totally irrelevant. Duration in time is incompatible with praxis, not because praxis does not take time nor because it is a state, but because duration in time relates only to purposeful thinking and productive activity, which praxis is not. Commentators fail therefore to analyze successfully the meaning of the expression actions in which the end (telos) inheres. It is not clear to them what is meant by activities that are ends in themselves. Failing to grasp this fact, they resort to analysing the temporality of the activity, which is irrelevant to it.Time is a measure of efficiency, and therefore relevant in poesis which is concerned with achievement. The relation of poesis to time is an inverse one: the shorter the time taken for an activity the better the poesis.In ancient-Greek consciousness a valuable activity was that which was undertaken for its own sake and therefore without concern for the amount of time employed in its performance; whereas an action taken as a means to an end was regarded as immoral. In modern society, on the other hand, utilitarian values tend to make it almost incomprehensible that something should be done for its own sake: every human action is evaluated by its result, and when the focus is on the result the criteria of efficiency and utility are obviously relevant. The Greeks valued praxis more than poesis, whereas our culture values poesis and techne more than praxis. The understanding of Aristotle's concept of praxis is useful therefore not only in order to understand ancient-Greek culture, but also to understand better our own presuppositions.     

A mathematical theory of optical illusions and figural aftereffects

If it is assumed that spurious enhancement of receptive field excitations near the intersection of image lines on the retina contributes to the cortical determination of the geometry of two-dimensional figures, an equation based on the least-squares fit of data points to a straight line-can be obtained to represent theapparent line. Such a fit serves as anextreemum on the precision with which a data set can be represented by a straight line. The disparity between theapparent line and the actual line that occurs in the case of peripheral (and to a lesser degree in more central regions of the retina) vision is sufficient to produce the perceptual errors that occur in the Poggendorff, Hering, and Mueller-Lyer illusions. The magnitude of the Poggendorff illusion as a function of the line angle is derived and experimentally tested. Blakemore, Carpenter, and Georgeson’s (1970) experimental data on angle perception are shown to fit this same function. Theapparent curve is derived for the Hering illusion. The Mueller-Lyer illusion is found to be a variation of the Poggendorff illusion. The equations are further developed and used to derive Pollack’s (1958) experimental results on figural aftereffects. The results involve onlyone experimentally determined coefficient that can be evaluated, within the limits of experimental error, in terms of physiological data. The use of these concepts provides a foundation for the abstract modeling of the initial phases of the central nervous system data reduction processes, including receptive field structure, that is consistent with the physiological limitations of the retina as a source of visual data, as well as with the findings of Hubel and Wiesel (1962).     

The relation between gap discrimination and auditory stream segregation

Gap discrimination and stream segregation were examined using sequences of 2, 4, 8, or 16 tones. The frequency differences between tones ranged from 1/24 to 2 1/2 octaves. Judgments of stream segregation show large intersubject variability, whereas gap thresholds are comparatively stable. Gap thresholds and streaming judgments are both affected by the frequency separation between tones. However, only streaming judgments are affected by presentation rate. Gap-threshold functions show no discontinuities or plateaus with increasing frequency differences and faster presentation rates. These results suggest that stream segregation is not a primary factor limiting gap-discrimination performance in tonal sequences.     

Daily Occupations,Routines, and Social Participation of Homeless Young People

Homelessness disrupts young people’s participation in the productive occupations that facilitate transition to adulthood, impairs social connections, and has a disorganizing effect on their time use. Semi-structured focus group interviews were used to explore how 19 homeless young people perceived their daily routines, meaningful occupations, and social participation to be impacted by the experience of homelessness. Occupational therapy practitioners can use the findings from this study to inform the development of comprehensive community-based programming aimed at increasing social opportunities, developing balanced, healthy routines, decreasing intrinsic and extrinsic barriers to residential stability, and promoting participation in productive and leisure occupations.     

Response time modeling reveals multiple contextual cuing mechanisms

Contextual cuing refers to a response time (RT) benefit that occurs when observers search through displays that have been repeated over the course of an experiment. Although it is generally agreed that contextual cuing arises via an associative learning mechanism, there is uncertainty about the type(s) of process(es) that allow learning to influence RT. We contrast two leading accounts of the contextual cuing effect that differ in terms of the general process that is credited with producing the effect. The first, the expedited search account, attributes the cuing effect to an increase in the speed with which the target is acquired. The second, the decision threshold account, attributes the cuing effect to a reduction in the response threshold used by observers when making a subsequent decision about the target (e.g., judging its orientation). We use the diffusion model to contrast the quantitative predictions of these two accounts at the level of individual observers. Our use of the diffusion model allows us to also explore a novel decision-level locus of the cuing effect based on perceptual learning. This novel account attributes the RT benefit to a perceptual learning process that increases the quality of information used to drive the decision process. Our results reveal both individual differences in the process(es) involved in contextual cuing but also identify several striking regularities across observers. We find strong support for both the decision threshold account as well as the novel perceptual learning account. We find relatively weak support for the expedited search account.     

Specifying the self for cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience investigations of self-experience have mainly focused on the mental attribution of features to the self (self-related processing). In this paper, we highlight another fundamental, yet neglected, aspect of self-experience, that of being an agent. We propose that this aspect of self-experience depends on self-specifying processes, ones that implicitly specify the self by implementing a functional self/non-self distinction in perception, action, cognition and emotion. We describe two paradigmatic cases - sensorimotor integration and homeostatic regulation - and use the principles from these cases to show how cognitive control, including emotion regulation, is also self-specifying. We argue that externally directed, attention-demanding tasks, rather than suppressing self-experience, give rise to the self-experience of being a cognitive-affective agent. We conclude with directions for experimental work based on our framework.     

Neural and behavioral effects of interference resolution in depression and rumination

Individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) often ruminate about their depression and their life situations, impairing their concentration and performance on daily tasks. We examined whether rumination might be due to a deficit in the ability to expel negative information from short-term memory (STM), and fMRI was used to examine the neural structures involved in this ability. MDD and healthy control (HC) participants were tested using a directed-forgetting procedure in a short-term item recognition task. As predicted, MDD participants had more difficulty than did HCs in expelling negative, but not positive, words from STM. Overall, the neural networks involved in directed forgetting were similar for both groups, but the MDDs exhibited more spatial variability in activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (a region critical for inhibiting irrelevant information), which may contribute to their relative inability to inhibit negative information.     

Eyes wide shut: implied social presence, eye tracking and attention

People often behave differently when they know they are being watched. Here, we report the first investigation of whether such social presence effects also influence looking behavior--a popular measure of attention allocation. We demonstrate that wearing an eye tracker, an implied social presence, leads individuals to avoid looking at particular stimuli. These results demonstrate that an implied social presence, here an eye tracker, can alter looking behavior. These data provide a new manipulation of social attention, as well as presenting a methodological challenge to researchers using eye tracking.