‘As in a theatre’: scientific spectacle in Bacon's New Atlantis

Essay review of Reclaiming Reality, by Roy Bhaskar, London: Verso, 1989, 218 pages, pb £10.95.     

Reasons to attend college among ethnically diverse college students

A survey of 713 ethnically diverse university freshmen (463 Latino, 167 Asian American, 54 African American, 29 European American) assessed reasons for attending college, ethnic identity, family interdependence, and college adjustment. Results revealed three reasons for attending college not reported in previous research: to help one's family, to prove one's self-worth, and because of encouragement. Attending college to help the family was stronger among students from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds. Ethnic identity and family interdependence contributed positively to some reasons for attending college, but did not mediate ethnic differences; with cultural factors and socioeconomic status included as predictors, ethnic minority students still gave greater importance to family oriented motives than did European Americans. Career/personal and humanitarian motives contributed positively to college adjustment.     

Correlates of tattoos and reference groups

520 college students from a public university in the southwest were questioned to examine correlations between having a tattoo and the presence of tattoos among their family and friends. Tattoos among both friends and family were positively correlated with respondents' having a tattoo. The magnitude of friends' influence was about double the influence of family.     

Jonah: His Story,Our Story; His Struggle,Our Struggle: Commentary on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

The Book of Jonah, one of the best known of the biblical tales, is much more than a children's fable about a man and a whale. This brief narrative about a prophet who refuses to be a prophet is our story—how we too often give in to our nature which pulls us toward resentment, parochialism, and narrowness, too often avoid what we need to face within ourselves and our responsibilities, too often are crippled by our inability to transcend our anger and forgive. After examining Aviva Zornberg's analysis of the Book of Jonah in which she argues that the message, like the latent dream à la Freud, is obscure, I argue that the meaning of the Book of Jonah is clear. Psychic unity requires that we face our objects—God and conscience, Nineveh and storm and mother, self and other—struggle with them, stare at them, allow them to breathe and live in the same room. As God, Jonah's “psychoanalyst,” argues, it is only then that we can find our way to where His analysand Jonah never quite arrives—forgiveness of the self and of the other.     

Toward Meaningful Noise Research

The present review considers a series of studies of noise conducted in collaboration with Dr. Michel Loeb. This review attempts to provide a theoretical perspective as well as to summarize the most important findings of those studies. The work reviewed shows that noise effects interact with other variables, such that a noise effect on one sex is reversed for the other, and is also reversed at different times of the day. A second experiment confirmed this finding with a different arithmetic task. Further work indicated parallels between noise and fatigue, with aftereffects depending upon both work and noise. The final experiment repeated some of these findings with a different task battery of information processing tasks while showing that noise effects further depend on the meaningfulness of the noise background.     

Age Differences in Coping Resources and Satisfaction With Life Among Middle-Aged,Young-Old,and Oldest-Old Adults

The authors examined age differences in perceived coping resources and satisfaction with life across 3 older-adult age groups (45-64, 65-74, and 75 years and older). The 98 participants represented healthy, socially active, community-residing adults. Group comparisons were made on 12 individual coping scales, and an overall coping resource effectiveness score was computed. No significant differences were found for 11 of the coping resources or for overall coping resource effectiveness. Similar consistencies in life satisfaction were found across the 3 age groups. The findings indicate that (a) for healthy adults, the oldest old cope at least as effectively as their younger counterparts, despite their likelihood of encountering increased levels of stress; and (b) psychologically, old age may be viewed as a time of resilience and fortitude.     

Reactive Inhibition Theory and Intertrial Correlations

From certain theoretical properties of Hull’s reactive inhibition and from the known modest reliability of reminiscence measures, it follows that intertrial correlations among psychomotor test scores should be higher under distributed-practice conditions than under massed-practice conditions. This proposition was tested in a conventional practice distribution paradigm involving 168 Caucasian subjects. Bartlett’s test for the homogeneity of covariance matrices confirmed the prediction, and a sign test for matched correlation pairs showed that correlations in the distributed practice mode were significantly more often higher than those in the massed practice mode. These results refute the prevailing view that intertrial correlations are invariant with respect to practice distribution, and they strengthen the credibility of Hull’s principle of reactive inhibition.