Spatial depth relationships in young children's drawings

Previous research suggests that young children do not attempt to represent depth relationships between objects in their drawings. The present study, however, showed that when both objects are visible and the children's attention is drawn to the depth relationship between them, most 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds do attempt to portray this relationship.     

Managed Mental Health Care: Intentional Misdiagnosis of Mental Disorders

Managed health care regulations affect the manner in which counselors provide and deliver services. Counselors are challenged by ethical and legal dilemmas when diagnostic codes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) are not honored for insurance reimbursement. In this article, the authors examine violations of codes of ethics and legal statutes and the consequences related to intentional misdiagnosis of mental disorders for reimbursement. They explore implications for counselors and offer suggestions for professional conduct.     

The Substance Abuse Counseling Needs of Women in the Criminal Justice System: A Needs Assessment Approach

The authors assessed the substance abuse counseling needs of women in the criminal justice system using interviews (n = 304) and surveys (n = 1,170). On the basis of the results, the authors call for gender‐specific treatment as well as family‐oriented support for women who are mothers.     

Striatal outcome processing in healthy aging

Functional MRI of young adults has implicated the striatum in the processing of rewarding and punishing events. To date, only two published experiments (Samanez-Larkin et al., 2007; Schott et al., 2007) have explored similar phenomena in older adults, with both studies emphasizing the anticipation of monetary outcomes. To better understand older participants’ striatal responses to delivered outcomes, we engaged 20 older adults and 13 younger adults in a card-guessing task that rewarded correct guesses with monetary gain and punished incorrect guesses with monetary loss. Overall, the older adults retained most of the typical features of the striatal response, so that activity in the caudate head showed reliable differentiation between rewards and punishments during the 6- to 9-sec postoutcome window. Comparison of the older and younger adults also pointed to some potential aging effects on outcome activity, including reductions in the magnitude and extent of striatal activation, and a trend for the older adults to show a decreased early punishment response. In sum, our data suggest that the signaling of outcome valence remains relatively stable into late adulthood, although more research is needed to understand some subtle changes that might occur across the life span.     

Self-training of dynamic touch: Striking improves judgment by wielding

In traditional theories of perceptual learning, sensory modalities support one another. A good example comes from research on dynamic touch, the wielding of an unseen object to perceive its properties. Wielding provides the haptic system with mechanical information related to the length of the object. Visual feedback can improve the accuracy of subsequent length judgments; visual perception supports haptic perception. Such cross-modal support is not the only route to perceptual learning. We present a dynamic touch task in which we replaced visual feedback with the instruction to strike the unseen object against an unseen surface following length judgment. This additional mechanical information improved subsequent length judgments. We propose a self-organizing perspective in which a single modality trains itself.     

‘Faultless’ ignorance: Strengths and limitations of epistemic definitions of confabulation

There is no satisfactory account for the general phenomenon of confabulation, for the following reasons: (1) confabulation occurs in a number of pathological and non-pathological conditions; (2) impairments giving rise to confabulation are likely to have different neural bases; and (3) there is no unique theory explaining the aetiology of confabulations. An epistemic approach to defining confabulation could solve all of these issues, by focusing on the surface features of the phenomenon. However, existing epistemic accounts are unable to offer sufficient conditions for confabulation and tend to emphasise only its epistemic disadvantages. In this paper, we argue that a satisfactory epistemic account of confabulation should also acknowledge those features which are (potentially) epistemically advantageous. For example, confabulation may allow subjects to exercise some control over their own cognitive life which is instrumental to the construction or preservation of their sense of self.     

Cooperation versus competition in a mass emergency evacuation: A new laboratory simulation and a new theoretical model

Virtual reality technology is argued to be suitable to the simulation study of mass evacuation behavior, because of the practical and ethical constraints in researching this field. This article describes three studies in which a new virtual reality paradigm was used, in which participants had to escape from a burning underground rail station. Study 1 was carried out in an immersion laboratory and demonstrated that collective identification in the crowd was enhanced by the (shared) threat embodied in emergency itself. In Study 2, high-identification participants were more helpful and pushed less than did low-identification participants. In Study 3, identification and group size were experimentally manipulated, and similar results were obtained. These results support a hypothesis according to which (emergent) collective identity motivates solidarity with strangers. It is concluded that the virtual reality technology developed here represents a promising start, although more can be done to embed it in a traditional psychology laboratory setting.