The NSSI Paradox: Discussing and Displaying NSSI in an Online Environment

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is commonly shared online. In the offline world, secrecy is a sign of “real” or authentic self-injury; therefore, openly sharing NSSI in the online context could be considered a paradoxical behavior. We explored how users of an online NSSI site negotiated this apparent paradox. Contrary to our expectations, contributing text and photographs to an online site did not appear to compromise authentic identity. We suggest this was because they were presented in the form of an anonymous public display, which meant that posters could maintain their (secret) identity as individuals who genuinely engage in NSSI.     

Integration of audio‐visual information for spatial decisions in children and adults

In adults, decisions based on multisensory information can be faster and/or more accurate than those relying on a single sense. However, this finding varies significantly across development. Here we studied speeded responding to audio‐visual targets, a key multisensory function whose development remains unclear. We found that when judging the locations of targets, children aged 4 to 12 years and adults had faster and less variable response times given auditory and visual information together compared with either alone. Comparison of response time distributions with model predictions indicated that children at all ages were integrating (pooling) sensory information to make decisions but that both the overall speed and the efficiency of sensory integration improved with age. The evidence for pooling comes from comparison with the predictions of Miller's seminal ‘race model’, as well as with a major recent extension of this model and a comparable ‘pooling’ (coactivation) model. The findings and analyses can reconcile results from previous audio‐visual studies, in which infants showed speed gains exceeding race model predictions in a spatial orienting task (Neil et al., 2006) but children below 7 years did not in speeded reaction time tasks (e.g. Barutchu et al., 2009). Our results provide new evidence for early and sustained abilities to integrate visual and auditory signals for spatial localization from a young age.     

The influence of spatial pattern on visual short-term memory for contrast

Several psychophysical studies of visual short-term memory (VSTM) have shown high-fidelity storage capacity for many properties of visual stimuli. On judgments of the spatial frequency of gratings, for example, discrimination performance does not decrease significantly, even for memory intervals of up to 30 s. For other properties, such as stimulus orientation and contrast, however, such “perfect storage” behavior is not found, although the reasons for this difference remain unresolved. Here, we report two experiments in which we investigated the nature of the representation of stimulus contrast in VSTM using spatially complex, two-dimensional random-noise stimuli. We addressed whether information about contrast per se is retained during the memory interval by using a test stimulus with the same spatial structure but either the same or the opposite local contrast polarity, with respect to the comparison (i.e., remembered) stimulus. We found that discrimination thresholds got steadily worse with increasing duration of the memory interval. Furthermore, performance was better when the test and comparison stimuli had the same local contrast polarity than when they were contrast-reversed. Finally, when a noise mask was introduced during the memory interval, its disruptive effect was maximal when the spatial configuration of its constituent elements was uncorrelated with those of the comparison and test stimuli. These results suggest that VSTM for contrast is closely tied to the spatial configuration of stimuli and is not transformed into a more abstract representation.     

The interpretation of ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence context

Many trimorphemic words are structurally and semantically ambiguous. For example, unlock-able can either be un-lockable (cannot be locked) or unlock-able (can be unlocked). Which interpretation is preferred and whether the preceding sentence context affects the initial interpretation is not clear from prior research. The present experiment embedded ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence contexts, manipulated whether or not preceding context disambiguated the meaning, and examined the pattern of fixation durations on the ambiguous word and the remainder of the text. The results indicated that the unlock-able interpretation was preferred; moreover, preceding context did not exert a significant effect until the eyes had initially exited from the target word.     

Working Alliance as a Moderator of the Impact of Mentoring Relationships Among Academically At‐Risk Students

This study examined the role of the working alliance between teacher mentors and student protégés on protégés' academic functioning. High‐risk students (n = 25) participated in an educational program involving a major mentoring component (experimental group) and were matched on academic records, gender, and study program with 25 students who did not participate (control group). Students in the experimental group who agreed with their mentors that their working alliance was productive (i.e., agreement on goals, positive bonding) were more likely than were other mentored students and students in the control group to improve their academic competence, participation in class, tendency to seek help from teachers, and academic perseverance. Results are discussed in line with relationship‐based processes operating in mentoring relationships.