Defense Mechanisms and Object Relations as Factors in Marital Satisfaction

Two hundred and seven married men and 202 married women completed the Defense Mechanisms Inventory (DMI; Ihilevich & Gleser, 1986) and the Marital Satisfaction Inventory (MSI; Snyder, 1981). The DMI was scored to yield defensive as well as object relations indices. Results show that Turning Against the Object exacerbates conflict while Principalization minimizes it. Marital satisfaction is seen as correlated with mastery of object relations. Results are discussed in the context of DMI psychometrics.     

Understanding sentences with relative clauses

Sentences containing self-embedded relative clauses are generally believed to be difficult to understand because such clauses interrupt the clauses in which they are embedded. However, the experiments that purport to have demonstrated this have confounded the self-embedded or fight-branching location of the relative clauses with their internal structure, comparing self-embedded object relatives with right-branching subject relatives. In order to break this confounding, Experiment I compared the comprehension difficulty of self-embedded and right-branching object relative clauses on two measures of comprehension difficulty. Experiment II made the same self-embedded vs. fight-branching comparison for subject relative clauses. The results of both experiments consistently failed to support the interruption hypothesis.     

Feminist attitudes and mother-daughter relationships in adolescence

In spite of the growing amount of research on women's issues, there are few empirical studies of mother-daughter relationships, and almost none on the effects of the major women's movement of our times on relationships between mothers and daughters. In this study of late adolescent daughters' perceptions of their relationships with their mothers, two alternative hypotheses are examined: (1) feminism, with its emphasis on bonding among women, strengthens relations between adolescent daughters and their mothers, or (2) feminism as a force of social change, both attitudinal and behavioral, weakens the adolescent daughter-mother relationship. Based on 102 questionnaires completed by university-age women in the winter of 1983, it was found that the majority of daughters who have a good relationship with their mothers see both themselves and their mothers as feminist. However, these daughters do not attribute their positive mother-daughter relationship explicitly to feminism. For the minority of daughters who claim to have a poor relationship with their mothers, they attribute the problems to feminism.     

Effects of elaboration and relational distinctiveness on sentence memory

Memory for normal and distinct target sentences in elaborated and isolated contexts was examined in two experiments. Distinctiveness was operationalized as the uniqueness of the stated relation among the elements (words) of the sentence. In both experiments distinct target sentences were recalled significantly better than normal target sentences. Robust elaboration effects emerged only in Experiment 2, however, when care was taken to construct elaborations that were causally related to the target sentences. Further, the positive mnemonic effects of elaboration in Experiment 2 combined additively with the distinctiveness effects. These results demonstrate that text manipulations emphasizing both relational distinctiveness and causal elaboration facilitate memory performance. Several possible theoretical mechanisms underlying this facilitation are outlined.     

Situational-specificity of motivational differences between depressed and nondepressed subjects

Performance on an easy or a difficult coding task for 4 90-sec. repetitions by 15 college women who showed depressive symptoms on the Beck Depression Inventory and the MMPI-Depression Scale and 15 who did not indicated no support for a psychological or motivational deficit in depression. Replication with clinically depressed persons is recommended.     

Re-visiting the competence/performance debate in the acquisition of the counting principles

Advocates of the "continuity hypothesis" have argued that innate non-verbal counting principles guide the acquisition of the verbal count list (Gelman & Galistel, 1978). Some studies have supported this hypothesis, but others have suggested that the counting principles must be constructed anew by each child. Defenders of the continuity hypothesis have argued that the studies that failed to support it obscured children's understanding of counting by making excessive demands on their fragile counting skills. We evaluated this claim by testing two-, three-, and four-year-olds both on "easy" tasks that have supported continuity and "hard" tasks that have argued against it. A few noteworthy exceptions notwithstanding, children who failed to show that they understood counting on the hard tasks also failed on the easy tasks. Therefore, our results are consistent with a growing body of evidence that shows that the count list as a representation of the positive integers transcends pre-verbal representations of number.     

Multiple processes in prospective memory retrieval: factors determining monitoring versus spontaneous retrieval

Theoretically, prospective memory retrieval can be accomplished either by controlled monitoring of the environment for a target event or by a more reflexive process that spontaneously responds to the presence of a target event. These views were evaluated in Experiments 1-4 by examining whether performing a prospective memory task produced costs on the speed of performing the ongoing task. In Experiment 5, the authors directly tested for the existence of spontaneous retrieval. The results supported the multiprocess theory (M. A. McDaniel & G. O. Einstein, 2000) predictions that (a) spontaneous retrieval can occur and can support good prospective memory and (b) depending on task demands and individual differences, people rely to different degrees on monitoring versus spontaneous retrieval for prospective remembering.     

Relatives Children Say

In an experiment designed to elicit restrictive relatives clauses, 28 children ranging in age from 2:2 to 3:10 provided a corpus of communicatively appropriate relative clauses. In evaluating this corpus, we found that most children produced mostly adult relative clauses most of the time. Detailed study of these utterances uncovered a few error patterns, which we analyzed in light of several considerations (e.g., the overall frequency of an error type, its distribution across children and items, its relation to the construction under study, and the similarity of the error to what children do elsewhere). Only one error pattern, namely some children's production of inappropriate relative pronouns, is argued to reflect a systematic feature of language development. We conclude that children's ability to represent the syntactic structure of the embedded clause is on target very early.     

On imaging and seeing: Repetition priming and interactive views of imagery

Summary The interaction between perceptual and imaginal processes was investigated, with the use of the repetition-priming paradigm. The idea is that the overlap between processes employed in imagery and processes employed in perception will be reflected in the amount of transfer from one encounter with an item that engages perception or imagery and a second encounter that engages perception or imagery. The greater the overlap between perception and imagery, the greater the transfer between them should be. The results showed that perceptual and imaginal processes transferred maximally to themselves; that is, maximum transfer occurred when an item was processed in the same way on both encounters. Further, prior use of perceptual processes transferred to the use of imaginal processes, but not vice versa. These results are discussed as they relate to the interactive view of imagery, which holds that imagery relies on many of the same mental structures and processes as perception.Some of these data were presented at the Second Workshop on Imagery and Cognition, Padua, Italy, in September 1988.     

SIX CHARACTERISTICS OF A POSTPATRIARCHAL CHRISTIANITY

Abstract. Christianity is best understood not as a set of timeless doctrines, but as a historical movement capable of change and growth. In this respect, Christianity is like a science. Heretofore, most instances of Christianity have exhibited certain ways of thinking that, taken as a whole, have led to the subordination of women (and the Earth and animals as well) to men in power. This article describes these ways of thinking, then contrasts six ways of thinking and acting that can inform postpatriarchal Christianity and science.