Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors     

The role of familism in stress and coping processes among African American and White dementia caregivers: effects on mental and physical health.

OBJECTIVE: To explore how familism, burden, and coping styles mediate the relationships between ethnicity and the mental and physical health of caregivers. DESIGN: A probability sample of 65 White and 95 African Americans respondents caring for an older family member with dementia was used to test hypotheses from a sociocultural stress and coping model using path analysis. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of caregivers' health included subjective health, self-reported diseases, blood pressure, and heart rate. Mental health measures included self-reported depression and psychological symptoms. RESULTS: Contrary to the hypothesis, familism had an adverse effect on outcomes and was related to low education levels rather than to African American ethnicity. A buffering effect of active coping between being African American and diastolic blood pressure was found even after controlling for levels of education. CONCLUSIONS: Findings supported a core stress and coping model in which more behavior problems of care recipients were associated with poorer mental health of caregivers via greater burden and more use of avoidant coping. Results also demonstrate that this core model can be extended to physical health.     

The role of causal models in multiple judgments under uncertainty

Two studies examined a novel prediction of the causal Bayes net approach to judgments under uncertainty, namely that causal knowledge affects the interpretation of statistical evidence obtained over multiple observations. Participants estimated the conditional probability of an uncertain event (breast cancer) given information about the base rate, hit rate (probability of a positive mammogram given cancer) and false positive rate (probability of a positive mammogram in the absence of cancer). Conditional probability estimates were made after observing one or two positive mammograms. Participants exhibited a causal stability effect: there was a smaller increase in estimates of the probability of cancer over multiple positive mammograms when a causal explanation of false positives was provided. This was the case when the judgments were made by different participants (Experiment 1) or by the same participants (Experiment 2). These results show that identical patterns of observed events can lead to different estimates of event probability depending on beliefs about the generative causes of the observations.     

Newly learned word forms are abstract and integrated immediately after acquisition

A hotly debated question in word learning concerns the conditions under which newly learned words compete or interfere with familiar words during spoken word recognition. This has recently been described as a key marker of the integration of a new word into the lexicon and was thought to require consolidation Dumay & Gaskell, (Psychological Science, 18, 35–39, 2007; Gaskell & Dumay, Cognition, 89, 105–132, 2003). Recently, however, Kapnoula, Packard, Gupta, and McMurray, (Cognition, 134, 85–99, 2015) showed that interference can be observed immediately after a word is first learned, implying very rapid integration of new words into the lexicon. It is an open question whether these kinds of effects derive from episodic traces of novel words or from more abstract and lexicalized representations. Here we addressed this question by testing inhibition for newly learned words using training and test stimuli presented in different talker voices. During training, participants were exposed to a set of nonwords spoken by a female speaker. Immediately after training, we assessed the ability of the novel word forms to inhibit familiar words, using a variant of the visual world paradigm. Crucially, the test items were produced by a male speaker. An analysis of fixations showed that even with a change in voice, newly learned words interfered with the recognition of similar known words. These findings show that lexical competition effects from newly learned words spread across different talker voices, which suggests that newly learned words can be sufficiently lexicalized, and abstract with respect to talker voice, without consolidation.     

Apologies: Levinas and Dialogue

Abstract

In his recent article ‘Speech and Sensibility: Levinas and Habermas on the Constitution of the Moral Point of View’, Steven Hendley argues that Levinas’s preoccupation with language as ‘exposure’ to the ‘other’ provides an important corrective to Habermas’s focus on the ‘procedural’ aspects of communication. Specifically, what concerns Hendley is the question of moral motivation, and how Levinas, unlike Habermas, responds to this question by stressing the dialogical relation as one of coming ‘into proximity to the face of the other’ who possesses ‘the authority to command my consideration’. Hendley’s thesis is bold and provocative. However, it relies on too partial a reading of Levinas’s work. In this paper I argue that the sense in which Levinas thinks of ‘justifying oneself’ cannot be adequately understood in terms of an ‘outstretched field of questions and answers’. Rather, Levinas’s primary concern is to show how, prior to dialogue, the ‘I’ is constituted in existential guilt: the violence of simply being‐there.