Religion and motion pictures' effects on reversing suicidal intentions: two case studies

Case studies of two veterans contemplating suicide are described. Their suicidal intentions subsided as a result of a rekindling of their Christian faith. Although their Christian beliefs were awakened following their attendance at a motion picture, they both attributed the remission of their suicidal intentions to the practices of their Christian faith in their lives. Despite the favorable outcome, these findings are not generalizable to other cases.     

Solitude experiences: varieties, settings, and individual differences

Solitude may be positive or negative, depending on situational and personal factors. From prior research, nine types of solitude were identified. Based on data from a questionnaire study of undergraduate participants, factor analysis suggests that these nine types can be reduced to three dimensions, two positive and one negative. These are, respectively, Inner-Directed Solitude (characterized by self-discovery and inner peace), Outer-Directed Solitude (characterized by intimacy and spirituality), and Loneliness. Personality and value correlates, as well as situational correlates, of the various types of solitude also were explored.     

Cross-modal and non-sensory influences on auditory streaming

Carlyon et al (2001 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27 115-127) have reported that the buildup of auditory streaming is reduced when attention is diverted to a competing auditory stimulus. Here, we demonstrate that a reduction in streaming can also be obtained by attention to a visual task or by the requirement to count backwards in threes. In all conditions participants heard a 13 s sequence of tones, and, during the first 10 s saw a sequence of visual stimuli containing three, four, or five targets. The tone sequence consisted of twenty repeating triplets in an ABA - ABA ... order, where A and B represent tones of two different frequencies. In each sequence, three, four, or five tones were amplitude modulated. During the first 10 s of the sequence, participants either counted the number of visual targets, counted the number of (modulated) auditory targets, or counted backwards in threes from a specified number. They then made an auditory-streaming judgment about the last 3 s of the tone sequence: whether one or two streams were heard. The results showed more streaming when participants counted the auditory targets (and hence were attending to the tones throughout) than in either the 'visual' or 'counting-backwards' conditions.     

Training monitoring skills improves older adults' self-paced associative learning

We investigated a memory-enhancement program that involved teaching older adults to regulate study through self-testing. A regulation group was taught standard strategies along with self-testing techniques for identifying less well-learned items that could benefit from extra study. This group was compared with a strategy-control group, which was taught only strategies, and with a waiting-list control group. Greater training gains were shown for the regulation group (effect size, d = 0.72) than for the strategy-control (d = 0.28) and waiting-list control (d = 0.03) groups, indicating that training a monitoring skill--self-testing--can improve older adults' learning.     

Character strengths before and after September 11

Did Americans change following the September 11 terrorist attacks? We provide a tentative answer with respect to the positive traits included in the Values in Action Classification of Strengths and measured with a self-report questionnaire available on-line and completed by 4,817 respondents. When scores for individuals completing the survey in the 2 months immediately after September 11 were compared with scores for those individuals who completed the survey before September 11, seven character strengths showed increases: gratitude, hope, kindness, leadership, love, spirituality, and teamwork. Ten months after September 11, these character strengths were still elevated, although to a somewhat lesser degree than immediately following the attacks.     

Grouping and gambling: a Gestalt approach to understanding the gambler's fallacy.

The gambler's fallacy was examined in terms of grouping processes. The gambler's fallacy is the tendency to erroneously believe that for independent events, recent or repeated instances of an outcome (e.g., a series of "heads" when flipping a coin) will make that outcome less likely on an upcoming trial. Grouping was manipulated such that a critical trial following a run of heads or tails was grouped together with previous trials (i.e., the last trial of "Block 1") or was the first trial of another group (the first trial of "Block 2"). As predicted, the gambler's fallacy was evident when the critical trial was grouped with the previous trials, but not when it was arbitrarily grouped with the next block of trials. Discussion centres on the processes underlying the gambler's fallacy and practical implications of these findings.     

Computerizing reading training: Evaluation of a latent semantic analysis space for science text

The effectiveness of a domain-specific latent semantic analysis (LSA) in assessing reading strategies was examined. Students were given self-explanation reading training (SERT) and asked to think aloud after each sentence in a science text. Novice and expert human raters and two LSA spaces (general reading, science) rated the similarity of each think-aloud protocol to benchmarks representing three different reading strategies (minimal, local, and global). The science LSA space correlated highly with human judgments, and more highly than did the general reading space. Also, cosines from the science LSA spaces can distinguish between different levels of semantic similarity, but may have trouble in distinguishing local processing protocols. Thus, a domain-specific LSA space is advantageous regardless of the size of the space. The results are discussedin the context of applying the science LSA to a computer-based version of SERT that gives online feedback based on LSA cosines.     

Spatial coherence does not affect contrast discrimination for multiple Gabor stimuli

Gestalt grouping rules imply a process or mechanism for grouping together local features of an object into a perceptual whole. Several psychophysical experiments have been interpreted as evidence for constrained interactions between nearby spatial filter elements and this has led to the hypothesis that element linking might be mediated by these interactions. A common tacit assumption is that these interactions result in response modulation which disturbs a local contrast code. We addressed this possibility by performing contrast discrimination experiments using two-dimensional arrays of multiple Gabor patches arranged either (i) vertically, (ii) in circles (coherent conditions), or (iii) randomly (incoherent condition), as well as for a single Gabor patch. In each condition, contrast increments were applied to either the entire test stimulus (experiment 1) or a single patch whose position was cued (experiment 2). In experiment 3, the texture stimuli were reduced to a single contour by displaying only the central vertical strip. Performance was better for the multiple-patch conditions than for the single-patch condition, but whether the multiple-patch stimulus was coherent or not had no systematic effect on the results in any of the experiments. We conclude that constrained local interactions do not interfere with a local contrast code for our suprathreshold stimuli, suggesting that, in general, this is not the way in which element linking is achieved. The possibility that interactions are involved in enhancing the detectability of contour elements at threshold remains unchallenged by our experiments.     

Coincidence timing of finger, arm, and whole body movements

Two experiments investigated the effects of different types of movement responses on coincidence timing skill. The view was taken that the sensory-motor integration of the movement responses would be reflected in the accuracy and consistency of anticipation timing. A Bassin anticipation timer provided a light stimulus velocity of 3 mph for both experiments and the movements studied included a simple key press using a finger, an arm movement to a key press, and whole body movements culminating with a kick or step to a target. The experiments were modelled closely on the seminal study by Grose (1967). The results of Exp. 1 supported our prediction by demonstrating superiority of the finger task over the two larger movements for all measures of coincidence timing ability. The purpose of Exp. 2 was to compare the slightly different versions of the whole body task-that used in the first experiment and that used by Grose (1967). The results confirmed the close similarity of the two movement tasks and re-affirmed the results of Exp. 1. Exp. 2 also investigated sex effects on coincidence timing ability and, in contrast to previous evidence indicating that females perform with less accuracy and consistency than do males, no significant differences were found. Analysis of practice effects showed that, although there were no significant improvements over trial blocks in Exp. 1, there were significant improvements in Exp. 2. Comparisons with other research suggests that repeated practice in solving a coincident timing problem using whole body movements can lead to improved performance. In general, the findings are consistent with the constructs of action theory and emphasize the roles perceptual and movement variables have in defining situational constraints. Also, findings indicate that proficiency in coincidence anticipation appears to be influenced by the planning and organisation required for movement execution.