Intellectual Safety, Moral Atmosphere, and Epistemology in College Classrooms

Students report feeling safe to express and challenge their beliefs and assumptions in some classrooms and interactions but not in others. This paper proposes a definition of intellectual safety derived from student responses to their experience of safety or threat in college classrooms, and explores students' experience of intellectual safety in relation to epistemological development. Intellectual safety defined here has two components: epistemic fit or lack of fit between student and professor's epistemology, and moral climate. Students can be challenged in their world-views and feel either threatened, unsafe, and uncomfortable, or supported and safe despite possible discomfort. Experiencing an intellectually safe moral climate may create conditions and opportunities for epistemological reflection and change. Using concepts from moral theory, including moral type and moral perspectives of justice and care, I describe features of an intellectually safe moral climate during the cognitively and emotionally difficult time of epistemological development.     

Childhood maltreatment associated with adult personality disorders: findings from the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study

Adverse childhood experiences such as abuse and neglect are frequently implicated in the development of personality disorders (PDs); however, research on the childhood histories of most PD groups remains limited. In this multisite investigation, we assessed self-reported history of abuse and neglect experiences among 600 patients diagnosed with either a PD (borderline, schizotypal, avoidant, or obsessive-compulsive) or major depressive disorder without PD. Results indicate that rates of childhood maltreatment among individuals with PDs are generally high (73% reporting abuse; 82% reporting neglect). As expected, borderline PD was more consistently associated with childhood abuse and neglect than other PD diagnoses. However, even when controlling for the effect of borderline PD, other PD diagnoses were associated with specific types of maltreatment.     

ERP and behavioral evidence of individual differences in metaphor comprehension

In two experiments, we examined individual differences in metaphor processing. In Experiment 1, the subjects judged the literal truth of literal, metaphorical, and scrambled sentences. Overall, metaphors were more difficult to judge as false, in comparison with scrambled controls, suggesting that the metaphorical meaning was being processed automatically. However, there were individual differences in that high-IQ subjects showed more interference. These effects were reflected in ERP amplitude differences at the onset of N400 and after the response. In Experiment 2, the subjects completed IQ tests and a series of working memory tests and then rated and interpreted the same set of metaphors. The results showed that IQ was correlated with working memory capacity and that low-IQ subjects had similar ratings but poorer quality interpretations than did high-IQ subjects. The results were most consistent with a constraint satisfaction approach to metaphor comprehension.     

The social representation of material culture and gender in children's books

This study examined the gender-typed portrayal of material culture in Caldecott Award children's books published between 1937 and 1989. Analyses of illustrations found that a larger proportion of female characters was shown using household artifacts, and a larger proportion of male characters was depicted using nondomestic production artifacts. Contrast analyses revealed no change over time in the proportions of female characters portrayed using household and production artifacts. Children's exposure to this representation may result in gender-linked modeling effects on preferences and skills related to technology and other material culture.Portions of this research were presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Society, June 21, 1992, San Diego, CA. The authors wish to thank Loretta Rieser-Danner, Leigh Shaffer, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

RECONFIRMATION OF THE SHORT-TERM STORAGE CONCEPT

Abstract— Recent research questions the existence of a short-term storage mechanism capable of holding limited information temporarily Specifically, serial-recall results with a through-list distractor (TLD) procedure, in which a distracting task is interposed between list Items as well as between the list and recall period, generally resemble the results of immediate-recall procedures The present study, however, reconfirms the utility of short-term storage by demonstrating an important difference between immediate and TLD recall A word-length effect, or advantage for lists of shorter words (which minimize short-term forgetting during spoken recall), did not occur with a TLD procedure.     

Acquiring complex partial orderings in comparison with acquiring similar-sized linear orderings

The acquisition of a 14-term partial ordering was compared with the acquisition of a 14-term linear ordering. Learning the partial ordering was found to be more difficult because of two factors: (1) Subjects do not appear to have in their knowledge systems a prototype or rule for representing a long list of comparative relations as a partial ordering structure, and (2) the partial ordering must be presented so that some of the adjacently presented premises do not contain a common element. When these two factors were controlled, the partial ordering was as easy to learn as the linear ordering. It was also found that subjects learning the partial ordering showed no evidence of a serial position learning curve, whereas subjects learning the linear ordering showed some tendency to produce a serial position learning curve.     

Ear asymmetries on a selective attentional task

To ascertain whether there are ear-hemisphere asymmetries of selective attention, signal stimuli (tonal sequences) were presented monaurally with and without complex maskers (music and speech). The right ear-left hemisphere was more disrupted by language maskers; the left ear-right hemisphere was more disrupted by music maskers. These results suggest that there are hemispheric asymmetries of selective attention and that the ear hemisphere that usually processes a class of stimuli has greater difficulty filtering out those stimuli than does the nonspecialized hemisphere.     

Children as witnesses: A comparison of lineup versus showup identification methods

The goal of this study was to compare children's and adults eyewitness identification accuracy when presented with an array of possible suspects (‘lineup’) versus one suspect (‘showup’). Kindergarten children and adults were shown a slide show of a staged theft and subsequently asked whether, of the photo or photos shown them, the perpetrator was present or not. Children were more likely than adults to identify the perpetrator correctly when that suspect was present in the lineup or showup. Children were also more likely than adults to make an incorrect identification of another person when the perpetrator's photo was not present in the lineup or showup. Because false positive identification errors are more difficult to detect with the showup than the lineup, use of the showup may be less appropriate with child witnesses than with adults due to children's greater tendency to make positive identifications.