Perceptual organization based upon spatial relationships in Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is often accompanied by impaired object recognition, thereby reducing the ability to recognize common objects and familiar faces. Impaired recognition may stem from decreased efficacy in integrating visual information. Studies of perceptual abnormalities in AD indicate an impairment in organizing elements of the visual scene, thereby confusing components of individual forms. This type of impairment is consistent with the characteristics of neural loss, which impact cortical integration. To examine the extent to which perceptual organization is impaired in AD, psychophysical measurements were made of visual perceptual grouping based upon spatial relationships in a group of AD patients and demographically matched elderly control subjects. A comparison was also made between young and elderly control subjects to evaluate the effects of aging on these capacities. Deficits in perceptual organization were found for a subgroup of AD patients, which corresponded to impairment on facial recognition. A less profound functional decline was found for the elderly control group. The degree of impairment for AD subjects did not correlate to level of dementia, but instead appears to be idiosyncratic to individual patients. These results are consistent with impaired integrative function in AD, the degree of which reflects individual differences in the regional distribution of neuropathological changes.     

Writing apprehension and academic procrastination among graduate students

Academic procrastination has been associated with both fear of failure and task aversiveness. Researchers have reported that most undergraduate and graduate students delay academic tasks. Among the latter, a large proportion report procrastination in writing term papers. Such procrastination may originate from and lead to anxiety about writing so the present purpose was to investigate the relationship between scores on Daly and Miller's 1975 Writing Apprehension Test and on the two dimensions, i.e., fear of failure and task aversiveness, of Solomon and Rothblum's 1984 Procrastination Assessment Scale-Students. Participants were 135 graduate students of varied disciplinary backgrounds. Correlations between writing apprehension and academic procrastination stemmed from fear of failure (29) and task aversiveness (.41). Implications are discussed.     

Indicatives,Subjunctives, and the Falsity of the Antecedent

It is widely held that there are important differences between indicative conditionals (e.g., “If the authors are linguists, they have written a linguistics paper”) and subjunctive conditionals (e.g., “If the authors had been linguists, they would have written a linguistics paper”). A central difference is that indicatives and subjunctives convey different stances toward the truth of their antecedents. Indicatives (often) convey neutrality: for example, about whether the authors in question are linguists. Subjunctives (often) convey the falsity of the antecedent: for example, that the authors in question are not linguists. This paper tests prominent accounts of how these different stances are conveyed: whether by presupposition or conversational implicature. Experiment 1 tests the presupposition account by investigating whether the stances project—remain constant—when embedded under operators like negations, possibility modals, and interrogatives, a key characteristic of presuppositions. Experiment 2 tests the conversational-implicature account by investigating whether the stances can be cancelled without producing a contradiction, a key characteristic of implicatures. The results provide evidence that both stances—neutrality about the antecedent in indicatives and the falsity of the antecedent in subjunctives—are conveyed by conversational implicatures.     

Integrating Career and Mental Health Counseling: Necessity and Strategies

Individuals seeking counseling might not recognize the interconnectedness of health, mental health, work, and life concerns. Counselors, however, need to be mindful that a person's wellness is interwoven with their work, life roles, and health. Research supports the interrelationship of career development and mental health as well as the effectiveness of an integrated approach to mental health and career counseling. An integrated approach from an ecological counseling perspective is proposed for conceptualizing client issues and intervention strategies.     

Collective Behavior and the Generality of Integrated Theory: A National Study of Gang Fighting

This paper uses integrated theory to explain gang fighting. Integrated theory combines elements of social control, social learning, and strain theories. We focus on gang fighting to assess the generality of integrated theory because it constitutes serious violent collective behavior which is linked to other problem behaviors. Few explanations for such behavior are offered. We examine the relationship between integrated theory and gang fighting using multi-level modeling and data from the first five waves of the National Youth Survey Family Study for the period 1976–1980. Support for direct effects of some components of integrated theory was found, including normlessness, delinquent peer-group bonding, and grades in school.     

Calibration of peripheral perception of shape with and without saccadic eye movements

The cortical representations of a visual object differ radically across saccades. Several studies claim that the visual system adapts the peripheral percept to better match the subsequent foveal view. Recently, Herwig, Weiß, and Schneider (2015, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1339(1), 97–105) found that the perception of shape demonstrates a saccade-dependent learning effect. Here, we ask whether this learning actually requires saccades. We replicated Herwig et al.’s (2015) study and introduced a fixation condition. In a learning phase, participants were exposed to objects whose shape systematically changed during a saccade, or during a displacement from peripheral to foveal vision (without a saccade). In a subsequent test, objects were perceived as less (more) curved if they previously changed from more circular (triangular) in the periphery to more triangular (circular) in the fovea. Importantly, this pattern was seen both with and without saccades. We then tested whether a variable delay between the presentations of the peripheral and foveal objects would affect their association—hypothetically weakening it at longer delays. Again, we found that shape judgments depended on the changes experienced during the learning phase and that they were similar in both the saccade and fixation conditions. Surprisingly, they were not affected by the delay between the peripheral and foveal presentations over the range we tested. These results suggest that a general associative process, independent of saccade execution, contributes to the perception of shape across viewpoints.

     

Positive affective tone and team performance: The moderating role of collective emotional skills

Research on affect as a group-level phenomenon has shown that over time, individual members within a group become highly similar in their affect (i.e., members experience and display similar emotions and moods), and often become similar enough that the aggregation of individuals’ affect can meaningfully represent the “affective tone” of the group. It is generally assumed that a more positive affective tone will lead to better team performance. We challenge the conclusion that positive affective tone is always good for team performance, suggesting that the relationship between positive affective tone and team performance is subject to moderating influences. Across two studies, we demonstrate that the self-reported collective emotional skills of team members play a crucial role in determining whether positive affective tone is beneficial or detrimental to team performance. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.