The Perception of the Passage of Time among Death-Involved Hospital Patients*

The present study attempted to evaluate the extent of the relationship between death involvement and temporal orientation among hospitalized suicidal, terminal, geriatrically ill, and normal patients. Their perception of the passage of time was evaluated by (a) behavioral estimations of elapsed time and (b) a survey of their opinions concerning the passage of time. The latter method included an evaluation of various consequences of the rate of time passage. The results indicated that the suicidal patients, closely followed by the geriatrically ill, overestimated time intervals to a much greater extent than did the normal and terminal patients. The suicidal subjects expressed a great deal of impulsiveness and described themselves as feeling miserable to a much greater degree than did the other groups.     

Probe recall and short-term memory: Some evidence for nonlinear search strategies

Memory & Cognition - The subjects saw sequences of three, five, or seven digits. A subsequent probe test signaled subjects to respond with the item that had followed (forward probe) or preceded...     

Orthographic repetition blindness

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to report the second occurrence of a repeated word, when words are sequentially and briefly displayed (Kanwisher, 1987). RBis also observed for non-identical words, such as home, dome . Explanations for non-identity RB assume that similarity at the level of the whole word causes the secondword to be suppressed ('similarity inhibition'). Three experiments demonstrate that RB is robust for diverse types of orthographic relatedness, including critical words that share only their first initial letter, their last two letters, first three letters, middle three letters, beginning and final letters, three alternating letters, and three non-aligned letters (as in chance hand ). The theoretical construct of similarity inhibition may be able to account for these data, although one mechanism previously proposed in the literature, neighbourhood inhibition, is probably not a useful way to explain the data on RB for words sharing only one or two letters. Weintroduce an alternative explanation for orthographic RB: Only the repeated letters are suppressed, and amount of RB depends on howeasily the perceiver can reconstruct the target word from the non-suppressed letters.     

MODERN WOMEN AND THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL AMBIVALENCE

Because gender roles are rapidly changing, a more dynamic conceptualization of role is especially needed. Working toward this end, we build on the contributions of scholars such as Merton and Barber (1963), Rossi (1972), Bardwick and Douvan (1971), Koma-rovsky (1973a, 1973b), and Room (1976); develop two pivotal concepts, social psychological ambivalence and developmental alienation; and interpret current findings on the changing roles of women. Conflicts contemporary women may face because they are attracted to opposing values also are explored. One challenge for future researchers will be to clarify the situational factors that link ambivalence on the individual (i.e., psychological) level to structural or sociological ambivalence and to collective social action.     

Linearizing the z-axis of an oscilloscope display

In most oscilloscopes, the luminance of the display is not proportional to the z-axis voltage. We describe a simple circuit for linearizing this relationship.     

Discussion of Slade “Imagining Fear”

This discussion addresses the importance of fear as a key feature of attachment, examining some of the implications of Slade’s argument both for clinical work and for understanding of developmental process. The discussion also is focused on the kinds of genetic and evolutionary theories most useful in thinking about interactive effects, namely epigenetics, the study of genes in context. Finally the discussion identifies relational theory, which focuses on fear as an implicit dimension of attachment. Bromberg’s work on dissociation is cited as an example of work in which fear plays a prominent role.