Is academic buoyancy anything more than adaptive coping?

Academic buoyancy refers to a positive, constructive, and adaptive response to the types of challenges and setbacks experienced in a typical and everyday academic setting. In this project we examined whether academic buoyancy explained any additional variance in test anxiety over and above that explained by coping. Two hundred and ninety-eight students in their final two years of compulsory schooling completed self-report measures of academic buoyancy, coping, and test anxiety. Results suggested that buoyancy was inversely related to test anxiety and unrelated to coping. With the exception of test-irrelevant thoughts, test anxiety was positively related to avoidance coping and social support. Test-irrelevant thoughts were inversely related to task focus, unrelated to social support, and positively related to avoidance. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that academic buoyancy explained a significant additional proportion of variance in test anxiety when the variance for coping had already been accounted for. These findings suggest that academic buoyancy can be considered as a distinct construct from that of adaptive coping.     

Psychosis: A Synthesis of Motivational and Defect Perspectives

Based on the evolution of human intelligence and the tremendous cognitive capacities arising from it, we have an innate tendency for the extreme thought content, thought form, and sensory perceptions of psychosis. During the conscious and awake state, cognitive regulatory control processes block these more extreme variants to facilitate reality congruency necessary for adaptive functioning. While asleep there is no need for reality congruency and the cognitive regulatory control processes are deactivated allowing psychotic equivalents to be expressed in dreams. This paper helps synthesize the two dominant perspectives regarding the etiology of psychosis: the neuroscience defect perspective and the psychoanalytic motivational perspective. Regarding the former, defective cognitive regulation arising from certain conditions, such as the deficit state of schizophrenia, allows extreme cognitive distortions, thought form variants, and sensory perceptual experiences to intrude into the conscious and awake state, thereby producing psychosis. Consistent with the psychoanalytic motivational perspective, defensive processes can motivate extreme cognitive distortions, thought form variants and sensory perceptual experiences, and also facilitate their expression by deactivating the relevant cognitive regulatory control processes.     

GABA, glutamate, dopamine and serotonin transporters expression on forgetting

Notwithstanding several neurotransmission systems are frequently related to memory formation; forgetting process and neurotransmission systems or their transporters; the role of γ-aminobutyric acid (GAT1), glutamate (EACC1), dopamine (DAT) and serotonin (SERT) is poorly understood. Hence, in this paper western-blot analysis was used to evaluate expression of GAT1, EAAC1, DAT and SERT during forgetting in trained and untrained rats treated with the selective serotonin transporter inhibitor fluoxetine, the amnesic drug d-methamphetamine (METH) and fluoxetine plus METH. Transporters expression was determined in the hippocampus (HIP), prefrontal cortex (PFC) and striatum (STR). Results indicated that forgetting of Pavlovian/instrumental autoshaping was associated to up-regulation of GAT1 (PFC and HIP) and DAT (PFC) while SERT (HIP) was down-regulated; no-changes were observed in striatum. Methamphetamine administration did not affect forgetting at 216 h post-training but up-regulated hippocampal DAT and EACC, prefrontal cortex DAT and striatal GAT1 or EACC1. Fluoxetine alone prevented forgetting, which was associated to striatal GAT1 and hippocampal DAT up-regulation, but prefrontal cortex GAT1 down-regulation. Fluoxetine plus METH administration was also able to prevent forgetting, which was associated to hippocampal DAT, prefrontal cortex SERT and striatal GAT1, DAT or SERT up-regulation, but prefrontal cortex GAT1 down-regulation. Together these data show that forgetting provokes primarily hippocampal and prefrontal cortex transporters changes; forgetting represent a behavioral process hardly modifiable and its prevention could causes different transporters expression patterns.     

Identification with the retail organization and customer-perceived employee similarity: Effects on customer spending

Two constructs important to academicians and managers are the degree to which employees and customers identify with an organization, employee organizational identification (employee OI) and customer-company identification (customer identification), respectively. This research examines the effects of these identification constructs and the related construct of customer perceived similarity to employees on customer spending. Via a 1-year multilevel study of 12,047 customers and 1,464 store employees (sales associates) covering 212 stores of a specialty apparel retailer, our study contributes to the literature in 2 critical ways. First, we expand the theoretical network of employee OI and customer identification by examining the related construct of a customer's perceived similarity to store employees. We examine the incremental (not fully mediated) main and interaction effects of customer-perceived similarity to employees and employee OI on customer spending. Second, we examine the effect of customer identification on customer spending relative to the effect of customer satisfaction on customer spending. Thus, our study also contributes by demonstrating a potential complementary route to achieve customer spending (customer identification), a route that may be more readily affected by management than the efforts required for a sustained increase in customer satisfaction. Implications for academics and managers are offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Repetition blindness reveals differences between the representations of manipulable and nonmanipulable objects

We used repetition blindness to investigate the nature of the representations underlying identification of manipulable objects. Observers named objects presented in rapid serial visual presentation streams containing either manipulable or nonmanipulable objects. In half the streams, 1 object was repeated. Overall accuracy was lower when streams contained 2 different manipulable objects than when they contained only nonmanipulable objects or a single manipulable object. In addition, nonmanipulable objects induced repetition blindness, whereas manipulable objects were associated with a repetition advantage. These findings suggest that motor information plays a direct role in object identification. Manipulable objects are vulnerable to interference from other objects associated with conflicting motor programs, but they show better individuation of repeated objects associated with the same action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Critical Transference in a Case of Severe Epilepsy

In this paper, the author presents a summary of a brief treatment with a young woman, suffering from severe epileptic illness, which describes the mutuality of cross-transferences of deep and intense feelings and the unorthodox way to receive, to take in persons affected with critical phenomena. This treatment was deeply influenced by the traumatic triad, borrowed from Ferenczi: "amnesia, anaesthesia, aboulia," the ways of forgetting (or erasing) the past/the present/the future. The investigation led us to clarify, on the one hand, the incestophilic-or perhaps incestuous-source in the family, and on the other, the burdensome and tragic genealogy and history of each parent. At the end of this short treatment, which took place at a frequency of one session a week (with the patient sitting, standing, lying on the floor; with sometimes severe fits, deliria, threats; bringing of letters, texts, drawings; and a few phone calls), there was an alleviation of the critical phenomena and revival.