The impact of communal-mastery versus self-mastery on emotional outcomes during stressful conditions: a prospective study of Native American women

Past research has examined the stress resiliency of individuals high in sense of personal-mastery. However, it has been theorized that within more collectivist cultures, a sense of shared efficacy, which we call communal-mastery, may be more central to people's resiliency in the face of challenging life circumstances. We compared the impact of sense of self-mastery (i.e., I am the key to my success) to that of communal-mastery (i.e., I am successful by virtue of my social attachments) in a prospective study among a group of rural 103 Native American women residing on Indian Reservations in Montana. We found that women high in communal-mastery experienced less increase in depressive mood and anger, especially when faced with high stress circumstances, than women who were low in communal-mastery. In addition, the beneficial impact of communal-mastery was found to be more effective than self-mastery for these women.     

Ordinary physical punishment: is it harmful? Comment on Gershoff (2002)

E. T. Gershoff (2002) reviewed processes that might mediate and contexts that might moderate the associations between corporal punishment (CP) and child behaviors and provided an account of the methodological weaknesses of the research reviewed in her meta-analyses. In this examination of Gershoff, the authors argue that the biases and confounds in the meta-analyses further limit any causal inferences that can be drawn concerning the detrimental "effects" of CP on associated child behaviors. The authors suggest that undesirable child outcomes are associated with CP because the construct marks inept harsh parenting and conclude that although the harmful effects of physical abuse and other extreme punishments are clear, a blanket injunction against spanking is not justified by the evidence presented by Gershoff.     

Personally familiar proper names are relatively successfully processed in the human right hemisphere; or, the missing link

Responding to our abstract in Brain and Language (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 1999), which proposed that famous proper nouns are successfully processed in both cerebral hemispheres, Schweinberger, Landgrebe, Mohr, and Kaufmann (2001) claimed that the "link" between personal names and the right hemisphere is "illusory." Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001) further described six experimental studies in which LVF/RH recognition of famous proper nouns was influenced by task conditions and stimulus familiarity. Here presenting two more experiments performed to explore the refutation presented by Schweinberger et al., this article confirms an ability of the right hemisphere to recognize famous proper nouns and explains why appropriate stimulus development and task conditions are essential in furthering our understanding of the role of the right hemisphere in processing personal relevance.     

Effect of speech task on intelligibility in dysarthria: a case study of Parkinson's disease

This study assessed intelligibility in a dysarthric patient with Parkinson's disease (PD) across five speech production tasks: spontaneous speech, repetition, reading, repeated singing, and spontaneous singing, using the same phrases for all but spontaneous singing. The results show that this speaker was significantly less intelligible when speaking spontaneously than in the other tasks. Acoustic analysis suggested that relative intensity and word duration were not independently linked to intelligibility, but dysfluencies (from perceptual analysis) and articulatory/resonance patterns (from acoustic records) were related to intelligibility in predictable ways. These data indicate that speech production task may be an important variable to consider during the evaluation of dysarthria. As speech production efficiency was found to vary with task in a patient with Parkinson's disease, these results can be related to recent models of basal ganglia function in motor performance.     

Partner Violence, Social Support, and Distress Among Inner-City African American Women

This study examined the role of social support in the partner violence–psychological distress relation in a sample of African American women seeking medical care at a large, urban hospital (n = 138). Results from bivariate correlational analyses revealed that partner violence was related to lower perceived social support and greater psychological distress, and lower social support was related to more distress. Furthermore, findings based on path analysis indicated that low levels of social support helped account for battered women's increased distress. Findings point to the need for service providers to screen for partner violence in nontraditional sites, such as hospital emergency rooms, and to address the role of social support resources in preventive interventions with African American battered women.     

Sexual deviations as conditioned behaviour: A hypothesis

While it has been frequently suggested that sexual deviations are learned, the learning has usually been thought of as taking place during one traumatic experience. From a study of 45 sexual deviants, the authors believe that it is often a much more gradual process occurring during masturbation to a memory, which need not have been sexually stimulating at the time of the initial experience and which often alters with the passage of time. The hypothesis is illustrated from case histories of pedophilia, exhibitionism, homosexuality, voyeurism and transvestism. The implications for both aversive treatment of deviations and positive conditioning to normal sex are considered.     

Asymmetric interference between sex and emotion in face perception

Previous research with speeded-response interference tasks modeled on the Garner paradigm has demonstrated that task-irrelevant variations in either emotional expression or facial speech do not interfere with identity judgments, but irrelevant variations in identity do interfere with expression and facial speech judgments. Sex, like identity, is a relatively invariant aspect of faces. Drawing on a recent model of face processing according to which invariant and changeable aspects of faces are represented in separate neurological systems, we predicted asymmetric interference between sex and emotion classification. The results of Experiment 1, in which the Garner paradigm was employed, confirmed this prediction: Emotion classifications were influenced by the sex of the faces, but sex classifications remained relatively unaffected by facial expression. A second experiment, in which the difficulty of the tasks was equated, corroborated these findings, indicating that differences in processing speed cannot account for the asymmetric relationship between facial emotion and sex processing. A third experiment revealed the same pattern of asymmetric interference through the use of a variant of the Simon paradigm. To the extent that Garner interference and Simon interference indicate interactions at perceptual and response-selection stages of processing, respectively, a challenge for face processing models is to show how the same asymmetric pattern of interference could occur at these different stages. The implications of these findings for the functional independence of the different components of face processing are discussed.     

Even zombies Can be Surprised: A Reply to Graham And Horgan

In their paper “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” (2000), George Graham and Terence Horgan argue, contrary to a widespread view, that the so- called Knowledge Argument may after all pose a problem for certain materialist accounts of perceptual experience. I propose a reply to Graham and Horgan on the materialist’s behalf, making use of a distinction between knowing what it’s like to see something F and knowing how F things look.     

Perspectives and research on the positive and negative implications of having multiple racial identities

Much attention has been directed toward understanding the impact having a multiracial background has on psychological well-being and adjustment. Past psychological research has focused on the challenges multiracial individuals confront in defining a racial identity. The implication is that these challenges lead to outcomes that are psychologically detrimental. However, evidence to support this assertion is mixed. The authors review qualitative and quantitative empirical research examining multiracial individuals' identity development, depression, problem behaviors, peer relationships, school performance, and self-esteem, finding support for detrimental outcomes only in studies sampling clinical populations. Studies on nonclinical samples find that multiracial individuals tend to be just as well-adjusted as their monoracial peers on most psychological outcomes. Earlier assertions of maladjustment may have been due to reliance on qualitative research that sampled clinical populations. Other implications and future research are discussed.     

Especial skills: their emergence with massive amounts of practice

Differing viewpoints concerning the specificity and generality of motor skill representations in memory were compared by contrasting versions of a skill having either extensive or minimal specific practice. In Experiments 1 and 2, skilled basketball players more accurately performed set shots at the foul line than would be predicted on the basis of the performance at the nearby locations, suggesting considerable specificity at this distance. This effect was replicated even when the lines on the court were obscured (in Experiment 2). However, the effect was absent when jump shots were executed in Experiment 3. The authors argue that massive levels of practice at 1 particular member of a class of actions produce specific effects that allow this skill to stand out from the other members of the class, giving it the status of an especial skill. Various theoretical views are proposed to account for the development of these skills.