Precompetitive anxiety and self-confidence in athletes with disability

This study examined the precompetition temporal patterning of competitive anxiety components in 42 athletes with disability who participated at the national level and at the national trials for the Paralympic Games in a variety of sports. All subjects completed a modified version of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 which measures intensity and direction of the competitive anxiety response on three occasions before competition (1 wk., 2 hr., and 20 min.). Analysis suggested that for cognitive and somatic dimensions athletes with disabilities show a similar precompetition anxiety response to athletes without disability. However, there appear to be some differences, particularly in the intensity of self-confidence, as athletes with disability reported a reduction of self-confidence just prior to competition.     

Memory impairment in the weapon focus effect

Two experiments are reported in which postevent source of misinformation was manipulated within weaponpresent and weapon-absent scenarios. Participants viewed slides depicting either a weapon or a newspaper event and then received either incomplete questioning or a narrative. Both postevent sources contained misleading information about a central and peripheral detail concerning either the weapon or the newspaper scenario. With a modified test in Experiment 1, questioning was found to increase misinformation effects concerning the central item, as compared with a narrative, and more misinformation effects were found for the weapon-peripheral than for the newspaper-peripheral item. In Experiment 2, the participants were more likely to claim to have seen contradictory and additive misinformation about the central item in the slides following questioning, and more contradictory and additive misinformation effects occurred for the weapon-peripheral than for the newspaper-peripheral item. The findings are considered in terms of the effects of both postevent and encoding factors on memory.     

Effects of working memory capacity on mental set due to domain knowledge

The present set of studies examines how working memory capacity (WMC) relates to performance on a Remote Associates Task (RAT), originally designed by Mednick as a quantifiable creative problem solving assessment. The source of fixation was manipulated across two sets of RAT items. One set was neutral with no specific fixation embedded in them, while the second set was baseball-misleading, designed so that prior knowledge of baseball would lead to an incorrect solution attempt. WMC scores were positively related to performance on RAT items in all conditions, except one. High baseball knowledge participants' WMC scores did not relate to performance on the baseball-misleading RAT. While in general WMC may lead to better RAT performance, these results suggest that when there is a candidate solution strongly activated by prior knowledge, WMC may actually lead to too much focus on the incorrect solution and exacerbate mental sets.     

Comparison of Single Unit Responses to Tone, Light, and Compound Conditioned Stimuli during Rabbit Classical Eyeblink Conditioning

Unit recordings and lesion studies have implicated the cerebellum as an essential site for the acquisition and maintenance of the conditioned eyeblink response. The current study looked at the neural characteristics of conditioned stimulus (CS) processing in the interpositus nucleus of the cerebellum after training New Zealand white rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) in one of two conditioning paradigms: (a) compound conditioning (CMP), a compound CS consisting of light and tone paired with an air puff unconditioned stimulus (US); or (b) stimulus compounding (ALT), alternating blocks of tone CS and light CS trials paired with the air puff US. Single unit responses were recorded during five sessions after the animals had reached an asymptotic level of responding. Animals were tested for behavioral and neural responses to CS alone trials that included tone alone, light alone, and compound tone-light trials. For the CMP group, the compound CS elicited 80 to 90% conditioned eyeblink responses (CRs), whereas the individual tone and light CSs elicited only 40 to 50% CRs. For the ALT group, all three CSs (tone, light, and compound) elicited very high levels of responding of at least 80% CRs. For the CMP group, there were roughly equal numbers of cells responding to all of the CSs. This includes cells that responded exclusively to one, and only one, of the three stimuli and also those cells that responded to combinations of two or more. Cells from the ALT group were far more likely to respond exclusively to only one of the CSs. Both the behavioral and physiological results suggest that the compound tone-light stimulus was processed as a distinct stimulus, separate from the component tone and light. These results are discussed in the context of multisensory processing.     

Ethics of caring and the institutional ethics committee

Institutional ethics committees (lECs) in health care facilities now create moral policy, provide moral education, and consult with physicians and other health care workers. After sketching reasons for the development of IECs, this paper first examines the predominant moral standards it is often assumed lECs are now using, these standards being neo-Kantian principles of justice and utilitarian principles of the greatest good. Then, it is argued that a feminine ethics of care, as posited by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings, is an unacknowledged basis for /EC discussions and decisions. Further, it is suggested that feminine ethics of care can and should provide underlying theoretical tools and standards for lECs.     

Personality maturity and Teresa's interior castle

The ego development stage model theory of Jane Loevinger is compared to the understanding of St. Teresa of Avila regarding development in spiritual life. The paper first presents Loevinger's theory, then goes through the mansions Teresa described in the interior castle of the soul, comparing each mansion with Loevinger's understanding. The paper concludes that a very similar line of development is traced in both understandings.This paper is a revision of a paper first presented to Division 36, Psychologists Interested in Religious Issues, at the annual meeting of The American Psychological Association.     

Facilitative school leadership and teacher empowerment: Teacher's perspectives

In recent years, facilitative forms of leadership and teacher empowerment for the democratic restructuring of schools have been emphasized. However, no published studies seem to have examined teachers' perspectives of both facilitative school leadership and empowerment. This article describes the everyday strategies and personal characteristics of exemplary principals practicing facilitative leadership in shared-governance schools and how these principals influenced teacher empowerment. The date were drawn from a qualitative study of teachers in 11 schools in Georgia. An openended questionnaire was designed to provide teachers the opportunity to identify and describe in detail the characteristics of principals that enhanced their sense of empowerment and what being empowered means to teachers. Inductive analyses of the data generated seven major strategies, one set of personal characteristics identified with facilitative leadership, and two major dimensions of teacher empowerment: affective and professional. This article emphasizes the meanings teachers identified with empowerment.