Community reintegrating former child soldiers in Northern Uganda: A qualitative study on the road to recovery

This study aimed to profile the qualities of a holistic community reintegration program for former child soldiers (FCS) in the Lira region of Northern Uganda. Informants were a convenience sample of 37 FCS (age range 17 to 34, mean age 23.86, SD = 4.715 years; females = 29.73%). FCS completed semi-structured interviews on their current living situations and existing resources. This was aimed at assessing how they were transitioning back into the community and identifying gaps in resources. About 24% of FCS reported feeling unwelcome in their communities, suggesting a need for additional support and resources through the community integration models. Thematic analysis of the data suggests that the FCS would benefit from a holistic community reintegration program with the following qualities: psychosocial support, workforce development training, and job placement. FCS emphasised the need for skills training and employment opportunities over health and wellness; suggesting that mental health support and health care are not sufficient alone for them to successfully reintegrate into the community. FCS community integration policies and practices should prioritise holistic approaches.     

The effects of anxious mood induction on suggestibility to misleading post‐event information

Little research has been carried out into the effects of anxious mood at the time of either the encoding of misleading post‐event information or the time of its possible retrieval, on subsequent suggestibility. Participants comprised 160 first‐year undergraduates. Using a standard suggestibility paradigm, half of all participants were exposed to misleading information while half were non‐misinformed controls. In addition there were four state anxiety conditions, dependent on the timing of the anxious mood induction: at the time of encoding misleading information; at retrieval only; at both encoding and retrieval; or at neither encoding nor retrieval (controls). Results showed memory accuracy for non‐suggestible items was unaffected by the anxious mood induction. With respect to suggestibility, there was a strong effect of misleading information. In addition, within the misinformed group, all three groups who experienced the anxious mood induction were significantly less suggestible than controls. These findings are discussed both in terms of theories of anxiety and cognition and the applied implications for the increasing use by the police of video‐recorded witness interviews. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When your brain decides what you see: grouping across monocular, binocular, and stimulus rivalry

Research suggests that the neural concomitants of visual rivalry are contingent on the stimulus parameters, implying the existence of three different types of rivalry. Binocular rivalry (dissimilar patterns are presented, one to each eye) is seemingly mediated by interactions between pools of monocular neurons. Monocular rivalry (superimposed patterns are presented to one or both eyes) is presumably the result of competition between neural representations of the patterns. Stimulus rivalry (dissimilar patterns are swapped rapidly between the two eyes) is independent of eye of origin. In the experiment reported here, we integrated these three different types of rivalry into one stimulus. We found that perceptual alternations span the three types of rivalry, demonstrating that the brain can produce a coherent percept sourced from three different types of visual conflict. This result is in agreement with recent work suggesting that the resolution of competitive visual stimuli is mediated by a general mechanism spanning different levels of the visual-processing hierarchy.     

Suggestibility and state anxiety: how the two concepts relate in a source identification paradigm

Source identification tests provide a stringent method for testing the suggestibility of memory because they reduce response bias and experimental demand characteristics. Using the techniques and materials of Maria Zaragoza and her colleagues, we investigated how state anxiety affects the ability of undergraduates to identify correctly the source of misleading post-event information. The results showed that individuals high in state anxiety were less likely to make source misattributions of misleading information, indicating lower levels of suggestibility. This effect was strengthened when forgotten or non-recognised misleading items (for which a source identification task is not possible) were excluded from the analysis. Confidence in the correct attribution of misleading post-event information to its source was significantly less than confidence in source misattributions. Participants who were high in state anxiety tended to be less confident than those lower in state anxiety when they correctly identified the source of both misleading post-event information and non-misled items. The implications of these findings are discussed, drawing on the literature on anxiety and cognition as well as suggestibility.     

A quantitative method for studying the testing supervision process

A quantitative method by Holloway for studying the supervision process in counseling training was adapted for use in psychological testing supervision. Ratings of 80 sessions indicated that most of the 25 potential interactions between the supervisor and trainee occurred in most of the sessions. The rate of occurrence was the lowest for the Emotional Awareness task (21%-24%). The author offers a speculation about how this result may be understood as involving the structured nature of testing. Results suggested that this model could be used as a tool for both practical and theoretical empirical evaluation of the supervision process during training in psychological testing.     

Painting with light by Rob and Nick Carter: dramatic failures of colour constancy in articulated scenes

Recent work by British artists Rob and Nick Carter uses kinetic lights illuminating abstract photographic prints to induce dramatic failures of colour constancy.     

From covariation to causation: a test of the assumption of causal power

How humans infer causation from covariation has been the subject of a vigorous debate, most recently between the computational causal power account (P. W. Cheng, 1997) and associative learning theorists (e.g., K. Lober & D. R. Shanks, 2000). Whereas most researchers in the subject area agree that causal power as computed by the power PC theory offers a normative account of the inductive process. Lober and Shanks, among others, have questioned the empirical validity of the theory. This article offers a full report and additional analyses of the original study featured in Lober and Shanks's critique (M. J. Buehner & P. W. Cheng, 1997) and reports tests of Lober and Shanks's and other explanations of the pattern of causal judgments. Deviations from normativity, including the outcome-density bias, were found to be misperceptions of the input or other artifacts of the experimental procedures rather than inherent to the process of causal induction.     

Operation Blue,ULTRA: DION--the donation inmate organ network

Presently more than 80,000 Americans await an organ transplant, while 10 to 12 people die each day because of the lack of organs. The program proposed here would allow federal inmates additional "time off" for agreeing to become living donors or to provide organs or their bodies upon death. Such a program could add 100 to 170 thousand new organ donors to the pool, with another 10 to 12 thousand added annually. If the program were applied to all state inmates, up to 4 million new donors might be added, with another 10 to 13 thousand added annually. Given the extreme need for more organ donors and the need for more living donors, the current National Transplant Act of 1984 and the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act must be amended, while still retaining control of donation procedures.     

Fitting the mind to the world: face adaptation and attractiveness aftereffects

Average faces are attractive, but what is average depends on experience. We examined the effect of brief exposure to consistent facial distortions on what looks normal (average) and what looks attractive. Adaptation to a consistent distortion shifted what looked most normal, and what looked most attractive, toward that distortion. These normality and attractiveness aftereffects occurred when the adapting and test faces differed in orientation by 90° (+45° vs. −45°), suggesting adaptation of high-level neurons whose coding is not strictly retino- topic. Our results suggest that perceptual adaptation can rapidly recalibrate people's preferences to fit the faces they see. The results also suggest that average faces are attractive because of their central location in a distribution of faces (i.e., prototypicality), rather than because of any intrinsic appeal of particular physical characteristics. Recalibration of preferences may have important consequences, given the powerful effects of perceived attractiveness on person perception, mate choice, social interactions, and social outcomes for individuals.