Unconscious choice: the dissociation of creative animus among writers and psychotherapists

The paper argues that writers and psychotherapists are drawn to their work through the desire to remedy an unconscious sense of lack brought about by early relational trauma. Often, because of its origins in psychic pain, the connection between these individuals' beginnings and their profession remains largely dissociated. The theme is developed with reference to the idea of the wounded healer taken up by Jung. It is proposed that the original wound is also the crack that lets the light in: a dissociated tough spirit that can be channelled into discriminating countertransference and strong writing. This paper is implicitly arguing against an objective or neutral analytic stance, and for the therapeutic and creative value of acquaintance with negative affect.     

I get so lonely,baby: The effects of loneliness and social isolation on romantic dependency

Individuals lacking fulfilling interpersonal interactions may experience feelings of loneliness. Consequently, these individuals may over-rely on their romantic partners to fulfill the need to belong. This study examined the effects of loneliness and social isolation on dependency on a romantic partner in a sample of college students (N = 104). Participants who were in a romantic relationship completed measures of loneliness, social isolation, and romantic dependency near the beginning of the semester (Time 1) and approximately 6 weeks later toward the end of the semester (Time 2). Toward the beginning of the semester, there were no significant predictors of dependency. Toward the end of the semester, individuals who reported higher social isolation reported higher levels of dependency. Time 1 dependency also predicted Time 2 dependency. Future methodological directions and suggestions regarding the examination of perceptions of loneliness and relationship expectations are discussed.     

Grammaticality,Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well‐formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large‐scale experiments using crowd‐sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state‐of‐the‐art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic.     

Profiles of Children’s Thinking About Violence in Families Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate partner violence remains a pervasive and common social problem. Evidence indicates that children witness many instances of intimate partner violence. However, the structure of children’s thinking about family violence is still not well understood. This research employed latent profile analysis to identify underlying latent profiles of children’s thinking about violence using the Attitudes and Beliefs About Violence Scale. The analysis identified two latent profiles mostly differentiated by children’s beliefs about whether or not victims of violence deserve to have violence inflicted upon them. Several covariates differentiated members of the two profiles. Suggestions for intervention and practice are included.     

Serotonin enhances the impact of health information on food choice

Serotonin has been implicated in promoting self-control, regulation of hunger and physiological homeostasis, and regulation of caloric intake. However, it remains unclear whether the effects of serotonin on caloric intake reflect purely homeostatic mechanisms, or whether serotonin also modulates cognitive processes involved in dietary decision making. We investigated the effects of an acute dose of the serotonin reuptake inhibitor citalopram on choices between food items that differed along taste and health attributes, compared with placebo and the noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor atomoxetine. Twenty-seven participants attended three sessions and received single doses of atomoxetine, citalopram, and placebo in a double-blind randomised cross-over design. Relative to placebo, citalopram increased choices of more healthy foods over less healthy foods. Citalopram also increased the emphasis on health considerations in decisions. Atomoxetine did not affect decision making relative to placebo. The results support the hypothesis that serotonin may influence food choice by enhancing a focus on long-term goals. The findings are relevant for understanding decisions about food consumption and also for treating health conditions such as eating disorders and obesity.     

Mind the gap: Improving the dissemination of CBT

Empirically supported psychological treatments have been developed for a range of psychiatric disorders but there is evidence that patients are not receiving them in routine clinical care. Furthermore, even when patients do receive these treatments there is evidence that they are often not well delivered. The aim of this paper is to identify the barriers to the dissemination of evidence-based psychological treatments and then propose ways of overcoming them, hence potentially bridging the gap between research findings and clinical practice.     

Social network composition and attitude strength: Exploring the dynamics within newly formed social networks

Recent evidence suggests that people who are embedded within attitudinally congruent social networks have stronger attitudes than those embedded in attitudinally diverse networks. The current research examines the causal processes responsible for this relation. Two studies capitalized on naturally occurring experiments whereby college students are quasi-randomly assigned to social contexts containing varying levels of attitudinal diversity. Replicating past research, individuals in attitudinally diverse social networks exhibited less resistance to attitude change and less attitude stability than those in more attitudinally congruent networks. Although there was evidence of attitude projection and selective network construction, neither of these processes could account for the relation between social network composition and attitude strength. These findings corroborate and extend previous results, reinforcing the notion that the social context in which people are embedded has important implications for the durability of their attitudes.     

Two Steps Forward,One Step Back: The Presence of Female Characters and Gender Stereotyping in Award-Winning Picture Books Between the 1930s and the 1960s

Since the late 1960s, there has been steady, progressive change in the depiction of gender in award-winning picture books for children (e.g., Clark, Almeida, Gurka, & Middleton, 2003). Female characters in Caldecott winners and runners-up have become increasingly visible and gender stereotyping has become decreasingly evident. In this article we consider whether this steady change can be projected back into the decades before the 1960s, or whether local, temporal variation in gender norms affected less monotonic change. We found that Caldecotts of the late 1940s and the late 1960s had fewer visible female characters than Caldecotts of the late 1930s and the late 1950s, but that characters in the 1940s and 1960s were less gender stereotyped than the characters of the 1930s and 1950s. We interpret these findings in terms of the greater level of conflict over gender roles that existed in the 1940s and 1960s, as well as the relatively greater status enjoyed by American women in those decades.     

Modeling the Role of Child Ethnicity and Gender in Children's Differential Response to Teacher Expectations1

This study examined the relationship between fall teacher expectations and year‐end achievement among 561 children in 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades. Specifically, we hypothesized that children from academically stigmatized groups (African Americans generally and girls in mathematics) are more likely to be responsive to negative teacher expectancies than are children from nonstigmatized groups. Controlling for prior achievement and class membership, moderator effects were tested with hierarchical linear models in the whole sample and with loglinear models in a subsample of children who were targets of extreme teacher over‐ and underestimates of ability. Among targets of extreme teacher over‐ and underestimates, in 3rd and 5th grade, ethnicity moderated expectancy effects in reading; and in 5th grade, gender moderated expectancy effects in math but not reading. Members of stigmatized groups were more susceptible to teacher underestimates of ability. Implications are discussed in terms of differential response to teacher expectations and in terms of how susceptibility to teacher expectations is conceptualized and inferred.