Gender, social class, and the subjective experience of aging: self-perceived personality change from early adulthood to late midlife

This study explored the applicability of previous research (obtained with groups of college-educated women) about the subjective experience of aging in midlife to men and less-educated people. Two-hundred fifty-nine men and women who graduated from a public high school in 1955-1957 retrospectively assessed their feelings of identity certainty, confident power, generativity, and concern about aging for their 60s, 40s, and 20s. Participants reported higher levels of identity certainty, confident power, and concern about aging at each age, and a leveling off of generativity in their 60s. There were some gender and social class differences. Although men and women recalled the same trajectory of these feelings, men reported higher levels of identity certainty and confident power across age. Non-college-educated men recalled the highest levels of concern about aging across age. We discuss how these findings add to our understanding of the experience of aging in these domains.     

Eye movements during intentional car following

Does intentional car following capture visual attention to the extent that driving may be impaired? We tested fifteen participants on a rudimentary driving simulator. Participants were either instructed to follow a vehicle ahead through a simulated version of London, or were given verbal instructions on where to turn during the route. The presence or absence of pedestrians, and the simulated time of the drive (day or night) were varied across the trials. Eye movements were recorded along with behavioural measures including give-way violations, give-way accidents, and kerb impacts. The results revealed that intentional car following reduced the spread of search and increased fixation durations, with a dramatic increase in the time spent processing the vehicle ahead (controlled for exposure). The effects were most pronounced during nighttime drives. During the car-following trials participants were also less aware of pedestrians, produced more give-way violations, and were involved in more give-way accidents. The results draw attention to the problems encountered during car following, and we relate this to the cognitive demands placed on drivers, especially police drivers who often engage in intentional car following and pursuits.     

Describing suicidality: an investigation of qualitative SSF responses

Given the incidence and seriousness of suicidality in clinical practice, the need for new and better ways to assess suicide risk is clear. While there are many published assessment instruments in the literature, survey data suggest that these measure are not widely used. One possible explanation is that current quantitatively developed assessment instruments may fail to capture something essential about the suicidal patient's experience. The current exploratory study examined a range of open ended qualitative written responses made by suicidal outpatients to five assessment prompts from the Suicide Status Form (SSF)--psychological pain, press, perturbation, hopelessness, and self-hate. Two different samples of suicidal outpatients seeking treatment, including suicidal college students (n = 119) and active duty U.S. Air Force personnel (n = 33), provided a wide range of written responses to the five SSF prompts. A qualitative coding manual was developed through a step-by-step methodology; two naive coders were trained to use the coding system and were able to sort all the patients' written responses into the content categories with very high interrater reliability (Kappa > .80). Certain written qualitative responses of the patients were more frequent than others, both within and across the five SSF constructs. Among a range of specific exploratory findings, one general finding was that two thirds of the 636 obtained written responses could be reliably categorized under four major content headings: relational (22%), role responsibilities (20%), self (15%), and unpleasant internal states (10%). Theoretical, research, and clinical implications of the methodology and data are discussed.     

Effects of 3-D complexity on the perception of 2-D depictions of objects

In a recent study, Pelli (1999 Science 285 844-846) performed a set of perceptual experiments using portrait paintings by Chuck Close. Close's work is similar to the 'Lincoln' portraits of Harmon and Julesz (1973 Science 180 1194-1197) in that they are composite images consisting of coarsely sampled, individually painted, mostly homogeneous cells. Pelli showed that perceived shape was dependent on size, refuting findings that perception of this type is scale-invariant. In an attempt to broaden this finding we designed a series of experiments to investigate the interaction of 2-D scale and 3-D structure on our perception of 3-D shape. We present a series of experiments where field of view, 3-D object complexity, 2-D image resolution, viewing orientation, and subject matter of the stimulus are manipulated. On each trial, observers indicated if the depicted objects appeared to be 2-D or 3-D. Results for face stimuli are similar to Pelli's, while more geometrically complex stimuli show a further interaction of the 3-D information with distance and image information. Complex objects need more image information to be seen as 3-D when close; however, as they are moved further away from the observer, there is a bias for seeing them as 3-D objects rather than 2-D images. Finally, image orientation, relative to the observer, shows little effect, suggesting the participation of higher-level processes in the determination of the 'solidness' of the depicted object. Thus, we show that the critical image resolution depends systematically on the geometric complexity of the object depicted.     

Negative self-imagery in social anxiety contaminates social interactions

Patients with social phobia report experiencing negative images of themselves performing poorly when in feared social situations. The present study investigates whether such negative self-imagery (based on memory of past social situations) contaminates social interactions. High socially anxious volunteers participated in two conversations with another volunteer (conversational partner). During one conversation, the socially anxious volunteers held in mind a negative self-image, and during the other they held in mind a less negative (control) self-image. As predicted, when holding the negative image the socially anxious volunteers felt more anxious, reported using more safety behaviours, believed that they performed more poorly, and showed greater overestimation of how poorly they came across (relative to ratings by the conversational partner). Conversational partners rated the socially anxious volunteers' performance as poorer in the negative image condition. Furthermore, the conversation was contaminated since both groups of participants rated its quality as poorer in the negative image condition.     

Evaluating evidence of psychological adaptation: how do we know one when we see one?

Evolutionary psychologists argue that human nature contains many discrete psychological adaptations. Each adaptation is theorized to have been functional in humans' ancestral past, and empirical evidence that an attribute is an adaptation can come from showing it possesses complexity, efficiency, universality, and other features of special design. In this article, we present a tutorial review of the evidentiary forms that evolutionary psychologists commonly use to document the existence of human adaptations. We also present a heuristic framework for integrating and evaluating cross-disciplinary evidence of adaptation. Pregnancy sickness, incest avoidance, men's desires for multiple sex partners, and an easily learned fear of snakes are evaluated as possible human adaptations using this framework. We conclude that future research and teaching in evolutionary psychology would benefit from more fully utilizing cross-disciplinary frameworks to evaluate evidence of human adaptation.     

Stability in autobiographical memories

A total of 30 undergraduates recalled the same 20 autobiographical memories at two sessions separated by 2 weeks. At each session they dated their memories and rated them on 18 properties commonly studied in autobiographical memory experiments. Individuals showed moderate stability in their ratings on the 18 scales (r approximately .5), with consistency of dating being much higher (r = .96). There was more stability in the individuals' average rating on each scale (r approximately .8), even when the averages were calculated on different memories in the different sessions. The results are consistent with a constructive view of autobiographical memory, in which stable individual differences in cognitive style are important.