Is It Real or Is It Fiction? Children's Bias Toward Reality

Children aged 3 to 8 years old and adults were tested on a reality–fantasy distinction task. They had to judge whether particular entities were real or fantastical, and response times were collected. We further manipulated whether the entity is a specific character or a generic fantastical entity. The results indicate that children, unlike adults, show a tendency to err by judging fantastical entities as real (response bias toward reality). All children were significantly slower when categorizing fantastical stimuli compared with real stimuli. We conclude that the process of classifying items into real versus fantastical categories develops at least until children are 7 to 8 years old.     

Reviews

Chiron: a new review of Jungian analysis
J acoby , M ario . The Analytic Encounter: Transference and Human Relationship.
W estman , H einz . The Structure of Biblical Myths. The Ontogenesis of the Psyche.
P apadopoulos , R. S aayman , G. (eds.). Jung in Modern Perspective.
J ensen , F erne (Ed.). C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff. A Collection of Remembrances.
L awrence , M arilyn . The Anorexic Experience.
S pignesi , A ngelyn . Starving Women. A Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa.     

Book Reviews

W heelwright , J oseph B. Saint George and the Dandelion. Forty Years of Practice as a Jungian Analyst.
W hitmont , E dward C. Return of the Goddess.
K lauber , J ohn . Difficulties in the Analytic Encounter.
B ettelheim , B. Freud and Man's Soul.
B ion , W ilfred R. The Long Week-End, 1897–1919, Part of a Life.
K ugler , P. The Alchemy of Discourse: an Archetypal Approach to Language.     

Reviews

T e P aske , B radley , A. Rape and Ritual, a Psychological Study
M c G uire , W. Bollingen: an Adventure in Collecting the Past
O brist , W. Die Mutation des Bewusstseins (The Evolution of Consciousness)     

When looking back to nothing goes back to nothing

Previous research showed that the eyes revisit the location in which the stimulus has been encoded when visual or verbal information is retrieved from memory. A recent study showed that this behavior still occurs 1 week after encoding, suggesting that visual, spatial and linguistic information is tightly associated with the oculomotor trace and stored as an integrated memory representation. However, it is yet unclear whether looking behavior simply remains stable between encoding and recall or whether it changes over time in a more fine-tuned manner. Here, we investigate the time course of looking behavior during recall in multiple sessions across 1 week. Participants encoded visual objects presented in one of the four locations on the computer screen. In five sessions during the week after encoding, they performed on a visual memory recall task. During retrieval, participants looked back to the encoding location, but only in the recall sessions within 1 day of encoding. We discuss different explanations for the temporal dynamics of looking behavior during recall, searching for the role of eye movements in memory.     

Time in the eye of the beholder: Gaze position reveals spatial-temporal associations during encoding and memory retrieval of future and past

Time is grounded in various ways, and previous studies point to a “mental time line” with past associated with the left, and future with the right side. In this study, we investigated whether spontaneous eye movements on a blank screen would follow a mental timeline during encoding, free recall, and recognition of past and future items. In all three stages of processing, gaze position was more rightward during future items compared to past items. Moreover, horizontal gaze position during encoding predicted horizontal gaze position during free recall and recognition. We conclude that mental time line and the stored gaze position during encoding assist memory retrieval of past versus future items. Our findings highlight the spatial nature of temporal representations.     

Ethnicity, education, and the temporal stability of personality traits in the East Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area study

We examined the influence of age, gender, Black vs. White ethnicity, and education on five indices of personality stability and change across an average interval of 8 years in the East Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area study. In the full sample (n = 505, aged 30–88), examination of structural, rank-order, ipsative, and mean level stability, as well as indices of reliable change suggested that NEO-PI-R personality traits showed moderate to high levels of stability over time. There were few age and gender effects on temporal stability but rank-order, ipsative, and mean level stability were lower among Blacks and individuals with lower education. Future research should explore additional demographic predictors of temporal plasticity in a diverse range of samples, and employ observer ratings to assess personality.     

Analyses of mental contamination: Part II,individual differences

Recent research on mental contamination (internal, psychological feelings of dirtiness) has focused primarily on examining the experimental variables necessary to provoke contamination-related thoughts, feelings and behaviour; yet, relatively little is known regarding the individual differences among participants' mental contamination responses to these situational and experimental characteristics. The purpose of this study was to determine whether variables associated with symptoms, beliefs and appraisals could predict the experience of mental contamination after an established provocation. Female undergraduate students (n = 70 from Part I of this study; Elliott & Radomsky, 2009), completed a series of questionnaires then listened to an audio recording and imagined that they were receiving a forced, non-consensual kiss from a man described as moral or immoral. Participants indicated the presence and degree of mental contamination and appraisals of the man and act, then completed a behavioural task for which spontaneous washing was recorded. Results indicated that, although symptoms of physical contamination were able to predict feelings of mental contamination, appraisal variables emerged as unique predictors of feelings of mental contamination. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioural conceptualizations of and treatments for contamination fears.     

Five-Factor Model Personality Traits, Spirituality/Religiousness, and Mental Health Among People Living With HIV

ABSTRACT We examined the association between five-factor personality domains and facets and spirituality/religiousness as well as their joint association with mental health in a diverse sample of people living with HIV ( n =112, age range 18–66). Spirituality/religiousness showed stronger associations with Conscientiousness, Openness, and Agreeableness than with Neuroticism and Extraversion. Both personality traits and spirituality/religiousness were significantly linked to mental health, even after controlling for individual differences in demographic measures and disease status. Personality traits explained unique variance in mental health above spirituality and religiousness. Further, aspects of spirituality and religiousness were found to mediate some of the links between personality and mental health in this patient sample. These findings suggest that underlying personality traits contribute to the beneficial effects of spirituality/religiousness among vulnerable populations.     

Are Speedy Brains Needed when Divergent Thinking is Speeded—or Unspeeded?

In this study, we focus on mental speed and divergent thinking, examining their relationship and the influence of task speededness. Participants (N = 109) completed a set of processing speed tasks and a test battery measuring divergent thinking. We used two speeded divergent-thinking tasks of 2 minutes and two unspeeded tasks of 8 minutes to test the influence of task speededness on creative quality and their relation to mental speed. Before each task, participants were instructed to be creative in order to optimally measure creative quality. We found a large main effect of task speededness: less creative ideas were generated when tasks were speeded as compared to unspeeded (Cohen's d = −1.64). We could also replicate a positive relationship of mental speed with speeded divergent thinking (r = .21) and mental speed with unspeeded divergent thinking (r = .25). Our hypothesis that the relation is higher for the speeded divergent-thinking tasks was not confirmed. Importantly, variation in creative quality scores under speeded conditions was not explained by mental speed beyond the predictive power of unspeeded creative quality. The latter finding implies that measurement of creative quality under speeded conditions is not confounded by mental speed.