Intermediate Vision: Architecture,Implementation, and Use

This article describes an implemented architecture for intermediate vision. By integrating a variety of Intermediate visual mechanisms and putting them to use in support of concrete activity, the implementation demonstrates their utility. The sytem, SIVS, models psychophysical discoveries about visual attention and search. It is designed to be efficiently implementable in slow, massively parallel, locally connected hardware, such as that of the brain. SIVS addresses five fundamental problems. Visual attention is required to restrict processing to task-relevant locations in the image. Visual search finds such locations. Visual routines are a means for nonuniform processing based on task demands. Intermediate objects keep track of intermediate results of this processing. Visual operators are a set of relatively abstract, general-purpose primitives for spatial analysis, out of which visual routines are assembled.     

Rejecting the Null: Research and Social Justice Means Asking Different Questions

The focus of this article is on the specific ethical issues related to social justice research and the practical implications of engaging in social justice research, including the potential impact of research results on practice, policy, and advocacy at the local and national level. Specific recommendations are offered, including identifying research questions that advance social justice, managing researcher bias and power differentials, improving research methodologies, disseminating research, and giving back and advocating for social justice concerns.     

Hearing a Voice: Results of a Participatory Action Research Study

Interest in participatory action research (PAR) is rising among academics, researchers, families, and youth themselves who are involved in the system of care. PAR combines systematic research and professional guidance with the development of a practical intervention tailored to the user population in collaboration with the user population. We designed our research to sample and assess the level of interest in PAR for adolescents, gathering qualitative data about the level of understanding of, and expectations for, youth participatory action research. We present the results of a pilot study and then a survey, administered to two different conference populations during 2008. Our data offers insight into the world of service providers, beneficiaries, and advocates for children with mental health disorders. Based on the responses to our questionnaire, we identify four major themes and their underlying issues concerning the benefits and drawbacks of PAR for a young population. We also examine the concerns of each of the self-identified group to determine whether there were dominant characteristics for each group. We conclude that stakeholders do have reasonable expectations of participatory action research as a process and of the youth who could be empowered to bring about change in their system of care. Finally, we make recommendations for future research.     

Retrospective Frequency Formats Promote Consistent Experience‐Based Bayesian Judgments

On the basis of their experiences with pregnant patients in their practice, obstetrician/gynecologists estimated the posterior probability of Down syndrome given a positive screening result. They also estimated the base rate of Down syndrome in their practice, along with the hit and false alarm rates for the screening test; for each subject, these numbers were combined to calculate a posterior probability to which the initial estimated posterior probability could be compared. Physicians gave highly consistent estimates when asked to think about their past experiences in terms of event frequencies. However, those told to respond using single event probabilities or to use past experiences to predict prospective frequencies gave inconsistent Bayesian estimates. Thus, when making Bayesian judgments based on real life experience, natural frequency formats only lead to better judgments, compared with single event probability formats, if people think retrospectively, not when using past experiences to make prospective predictions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When the entrepreneur sneezes,the organization catches a cold': A practitioner's perspective on the state of the art in research on the entrepreneurial personality and the entrepreneurial process

In smaller organizations the first and foremost factor of importance is the power and centrality of the lead entrepreneur. It is the personality, the beliefs, the values and the behaviour of this single individual that exerts a powerful impact on the past, present and future of the business. Their destinies are inextricably linked. This article reviews ways in which this duality is explored and the extent to which research has contributed insight and understanding into the complex and idiosyncratic nature of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurial process. Emphasis is placed on the importance of language and the need to access the unique lexicon of the entrepreneur in order to understand how this individual constructs his/her world in order to facilitate change. The emerging importance of intuition is highlighted, which, it is argued, offers exciting prospects for the design of both entrepreneurship and executive development programmes. The article concludes by suggesting that intuition is a core capability that lies at the heart of emotional intelligence and that both concepts are worth exploring in future entrepreneurship research.     

Treatment hurts: Lay theories of graded exposure in the treatment of four anxiety disorders

Objective: This paper concerned the perceived suffering/side effects caused by various well-known treatments for personal problems. It looked at whether people understood whether potentially painful treatments that confront negative aversive affect were effective or not.

Method: In total, 106 participants completed a long questionnaire assessing the ‘psychological pain’ ratings of 30 psychotherapy treatments, varying in fear exposure, for four relatively common anxiety disorders: social phobia, agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Results: Factor analytic results revealed four clear factors underlying lay efficacy beliefs of psychotherapy interventions, varying in fear exposure: talking therapies, fear confrontation, fear avoidance, and alternative therapies. Talking therapies were rated the most effective across all disorders, but also the most painful. Fear avoidance therapies were rated the least effective and, along with alternative medicine, the least painful. Treatments involving fear exposure were rated the most painful. Regression analysis revealed talking therapies to be rated more efficacious by younger subjects than older subjects.

Conclusion: Most people seem able to differentiate between the efficacies of interventions for different anxiety disorders and hold consensually held optimistic conceptions about the usefulness of psychotherapy treatments and counseling that involve fear exposure, despite knowledge of the psychophysical side effects that these therapies often entail. They favored talking cures over others, but that may have been due to misleading items in the questionnaire.     

Anxiogenic Patterns in Mother-Child Interactions

ABSTRACT

The current study examined psychosocial variables associated with the development of anxiety in children. While previous literature has established parental affectionless control as an important contributor to the development of anxiety in children, few have examined this construct within the dynamic context of parent-child interaction. In the current study, the affect and behavior of anxious mothers and their children (ages 6 to 12 years) were examined during two mildly stressful tasks, with a total of 64 mother-child dyads participating in the study. Analyses supported the hypothesis that maternal affectionless control mediates the relationship between child anxiety and child disengagement/withdrawal from difficult tasks. Results are discussed in terms of implications for psychosocial mechanisms of the familial transmission of anxiety.     

Limits of the Retrieval-Inhibition Construct: List Segregation in Directed Forgetting

The authors hypothesized that retrieval inhibition in list method directed forgetting could be improved by presenting a task that maximized the segregation step of the retrieval-inhibition process. In Experiment 1, they presented lists of semantically related words in a list method directed-forgetting task to maximize retrieval inhibition. Contrary to predictions, this manipulation eliminated the directed-forgetting effect. The authors further investigated the results of Experiment 1 in Experiments 2 and 3 by manipulating recall instructions and by presenting lists that contained both a categorized and an unrelated list-half. They found directed-forgetting effects for semantically related word lists when participants were asked to recall only the TBR (to-be-remembered) items but not when participants were asked to recall both the TBF (to-be-forgotten) and TBR items. They also found that directed-forgetting effects were not produced when categorized items were presented in the 1st list.