Making Life Complicated: Prompting the Use of Integratively Complex Thinking

ABSTRACT Two studies are reported which assess the proclivity of individuals to increase the integrative complexity of social, moral, or religious thinking when prompted to do so. We also examined the influence on complexity of topic area and respondents' religiosity. In both studies significant increases in complexity were obtained when participants were prompted to differentiate and integrate material, suggesting that an important distinction needs to be made between competence and performance with respect to complexity. However, there was some evidence that prompting complexity was more effective in eliciting differentiation than integration. Both studies indicated that overall, religious orientation was not a significant predictor of integrative complexity, nor did it interact with other factors (including religious vs. nonreligious content of stimulus materials). Finally, there was some evidence that complexity may vary across different content areas, and this variation may be differentially affected by prompting for complexity.     

Process generalization and the prediction of performance on mental imagery tasks

Kosslyn (1980, 1983) theorized that performance measures on imagery tasks may vary as a function of the existence of independent processes in imaging ability. The present study determined whether improvement can be made in performance on such tasks with practice. It also considered whether performance on such tasks improves with practice and whether this improvement generalizes. Experiment 1 determined whether improvement in a mental rotation task generalizes to improvement in a geometric analogies task, with both tasks weighted in Kosslyn's find process, but not in a line drawing memory task weighted in Kosslyn's regenerate process. In Experiment 2, we examined generalization in improvement from a geometric analogies task to a mental rotation task. In Experiment 3, we tested whether improvement in an animal imagery task (Kosslyn, 1975) generalizes to improvement in a line drawing memory task, with both tasks weighted in Kosslyn's regenerate process, but not to improvement in a mental rotation task. Performance improved with practice on all tasks. Furthermore, performance improved from one task to another only if both tasks loaded on the same process.     

The impact of household economy on stress reactions among professional women

The impact on felt stress and and stress-related behaviors of household composition and proportion of pay utilized to sustain the household economy was evaluated using a homogenous group of female professionals. After controlling for individual-difference and work-load influences, the impact of household variables was found to be weak and inconsistent. While living alone with a child and having a larger proportion of one's salary allocated to sustaining the household economy was associated with psychosomatic distress, household factors did not predict sickdays, medication usage and alcohol consumption. The reasons for these weak and inconsistent findings were explored.     

Menstrual cycle effects on task performance examined in the context of stress research

The study examined the effects of degree of paramenstrual distress, signal frequency, task load and time on task on psychomotor performance across the menstrual cycle. Simple reaction time, choice reaction time and pursuit tracking were the tasks employed, and performance was assessed using the metrics of mean level, variability, and errors of omission and commission. The results showed performance as a function of menstrual cycle phase and paramenstrual distress to be highly task and metric specific, a finding typical of stressor variables: pursuit tracking was affected by phase, with mean performance at its worst premenstrually; choice reaction time was dependent on a complex interaction of experimental variables and measurement metrics; simple reaction time showed no significant effects. Patterns of attention allocation in a time-sharing situation combining both pursuit tracking and choice reaction time components were also investigated. Trends here indicated relatively better performance both menstrually and intermenstrually as components increased in signal/response frequency, with a corresponding deterioration premenstrually. Overall performance capacity appeared to be greatest at menstruation, and the degree of attentional selectivity was least. High distress women performed better on low frequency components, whereas asymptomatic women did better at higher signal rates.     

Concomitants of social support: Attitudes, personality characteristics, and life experiences

Determining the extent of social support and its consequences and personality correlates has been of increasing interest to researchers. The two studies reported here deal with the possibility that people low in social support are characterized by rigid, authoritarian personality characteristics and a lack of confidence in the support that informal social networks can provide. Groups differing in social support were compared on scales measuring attitudes toward mental illness and personal feelings of anomy. Subjects high in social support had more benign attitudes concerning the mentally ill and felt less anomy than did subjects low in social support. They also perceived their own early relationships with parents as being more positive. The findings are in agreement with several hypotheses about individual differences related to social support differences, and suggest that studies geared toward understanding the causal relations involved would be both theoretically and practically valuable.     

Will the real grandmother please stand up? The psychological reality of dual meaning representations

Two types of meaning representation are described, symptom and criterion, and it is argued that both have psychological status in mental representations of kinship terms. Certain symptoms, such as old age and biofocals for grandmothers, are likely indicators of grandmotherhood, but they do not reliably pick out all positive instances, nor do they indicate negative ones. Criteria specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for grandmotherhood: having a grandchild. The psychological reality of these two representations was demonstrated by asking children and adults to select kin-term exemplars from pictures in which both age and reciprocal kin symptoms are displayed, and to justify their selections. In both tasks, there was change with age away from using typical age as the sole basis for performance; older subjects selected pictures displaying reciprocal kin, and justified their choices by referring to the criterion. More important, at each age level, there was evidence for dual representation: Even subjects who selected pictures based on the age symptom often gave criterial justifications, and subjects who selected pictures based on the reciprocal kin symptom still preferred pictures displaying age symptoms in addition to the reciprocal kin.     

Aphasic adults' understanding of complex adverbial sentences

Twelve aphasics with relatively preserved auditory comprehension were tested for their understanding of four adverbial sentence types expressing the temporal order of events. The relative effects of order of mention, adverbial choice, and adverbial clause placement on subjects' comprehension were investigated. Only adverbial choice was significant with aphasics producing more errors of temporal order on after than before sentences. Subjects' error patterns were not similar to those of children acquiring language. The results are discussed with respect to the theory of lexical marking and the regression hypothesis.     

Sex and handedness differences in EEG measures of hemispheric specialization

EEG alpha asymmetry was studied in 90 normal adults: right-handed, left-handed, and ambidextrous, male and female. Recordings were made from homologous central, parietal, and occipital leads, referenced to vertex, while subjects engaged in writing, speaking, reading, listening to speech, singing, and block design construction. These data confirm our previous findings that alpha asymmetry is task-dependent and extend them to a broader range of tasks, subjects, and leads. Among right-handers significant differences were found between the language tasks and the musical and spatial tasks: the $\text{R}\text{L}$ alpha ratio is higher in the language tasks. In addition, significant ordering of $\text{R}\text{L}$ alpha ratios was found among the language tasks themselves: WRITE å SPEAK > READ > LISTEN. No one “verbal” task can be considered representative of all language behaviors. Task differences in asymmetry were greater at the central than at the parietal leads, and no differences were found at the occiput. Differences among the handedness groups were found in $\text{R}\text{L}$ alpha ratio in specific tasks, in the relationship among tasks, and in alpha power level. Non-right-handers showed less task-dependent asymmetry. On some measures ambidexters appear to be a distinct group, not simply representing the middle range of a left-handed/right-handed continuum. Reversal of the “expected” right-handed pattern (SPEAK $\text{R}\text{L}$ ratio > BLOCKS $\text{R}\text{L}$ ratio) was seen in 10% of right-handers, and in 36% of left-handers, particularly among left-handed females (46%), suggesting a possible sex difference among non-right-handers. No sex difference was found among right-handers on any task with any measure at any lead.     

Family/school strategies in dealing with the troubled child

Often a troubled child will exhibit problem behaviors in school. In many cases, these behaviors can be controlled and quickly curtailed by the teacher. In other cases, parents may have to intervene with rules and consequences. Sometimes, however, both teacher and parents fail, and the child's school problems escalate until they have reached crisis proportions. At this point, a therapist often becomes involved. The therapist can greatly enhance his or her range of possible therapeutic strategies by temporarily including the child's teacher in the hierarchical reorganization of the family. The expansion of the family hierarchy to include the teacher expedites the problem-solving process. The phases of problem escalation and proposed hierarchical reorganization are offered by way of clinical principles and case illustrations to demonstrate this viewpoint.Barbara E. DiCocco, L.C.S.W., is the Clinical Coordinator of the RICA II Satellite Program, a bio-psycho-educational day program in Frederick, Maryland and is a private practicing fmaily therapist. Ellen B. Lott, Ph.D., Counseling Psychology, is a family therapist and psychometrician in the RICA II Satellite Program. Boththerapists are grateful to Jay Haley for his suggestions and support of this work.     

Instrumentation and software report: Computer-assisted coding of videotape material

The coding system described was originally devised to facilitate the analysis of mother-infant interaction. Our aims were to provide accurate measures of the duration of different activities, to enable identification of particular actions in order to carry out sequential analyses, and to allow systematic assessment and improvement of reliability. At the time recording began, there appeared to be no readily available systems which achieved all of these aims. The system described here enables coded videotape material to be examined with the assistance of a computer. This is implemented through two subsystems, those of record and playback. In the playback subsystem the behaviour units identified by a coder are mapped on to this record. This results in a protocol of behaviour on a highly accurate time base.