Being a candidate: its impact on analytic process

Despite its crucial importance to psychoanalytic training, the control analysis has received surprisingly little scrutiny by psychoanalytic writers. How the candidate's training influences analytic process--a critical feature of the control analysis--is examined. In keeping with previous contributions, it is found that the candidate's training experience does indeed influence analytic process. It is argued, however, that focusing on the influence of training itself, as some authors have done, moves discussion away from the meanings of training for each candidate and from how these meanings bear on the interplay of transference and countertransference in the control analysis. Detailed case examples illustrate how one candidate's experience of training was drawn into his control analyses in the form of enactments, supporting the conclusion that attention to the particular ways in which training influences each candidate's analytic work is critical to the candidate's psychoanalytic education.     

Negative,infinite, and hotter than infinite temperatures

We examine the notions of negative, infinite and hotter than infinite temperatures and show how these unusual concepts gain legitimacy in quantum statistical mechanics. We ask if the existence of an infinite temperature implies the existence of an actual infinity and argue that it does not. Since one can sensibly talk about hotter than infinite temperatures, we ask if one could legitimately speak of other physical quantities, such as length and duration, in analogous terms. That is, could there be longer than infinite lengths or temporal durations? We argue that the answer is surprisingly yes, and we outline the properties of a number system that could be employed to characterize such magnitudes.     

Collecting and analyzing on-line protocols from novice programmers

Methodology for collecting and analyzing on-line protocols from novice programmers is described. On-line protocols are copies of all syntactically correct programs that students have written using an interactive computer system. Since the number of on-line protocols collected is quite large, we have developed a computer program, called the Bug Finder, which can auto-matically identify semantic and pragmatic bugs in subjects’ programs. In this paper, we describe the theory upon which the Bug Finder is built and provide an example of the Bug Finder in operation.     

Motivational determinants of reading comprehension: A comparison of French,Caucasian–American,and African–American adolescents

The relationships between adolescents' reading comprehension and their metacognitive knowledge and self-system beliefs were studied in three groups of subjects: French nationals, Caucasian Americans, and African Americans. Subjects were tested on measures of reading comprehension, metacognitive knowledge about reading processes, attributional beliefs, and academic self-concept. Correlation and regression analyses indicated cultural differences in the predictors of reading comprehension among the three groups. For French and Caucasian Americans, reading comprehension scores were related to metacognitive knowledge, academic self-concept, and attributions of success to ability. However, metacognition and motivational beliefs were mostly unrelated to comprehension performance for African Americans. Results are discussed in terms of verification of a model of motivational influences on performance, of cultural and ethnic group differences in beliefs, and the implications for generalizability of research results.     

Working memory in older subjects: Dealing with ongoing and stored information in language comprehension

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the role of aging in working memory (WM), or at least the part involved in language comprehension, e.g., a double function of processing the ongoing information and keeping in memory the product of this processing. Young and older subjects were asked to simultaneously detect incongruities in sentences and keep increasing longer series of words (3, 4, or 5) in memory. The difficulty of incongruity detection was manipulated by variation of the number of intervening words (0, 6, or 12) between two critical words. Incongruity detection was assumed to be linked to the processing of information function of working memory. The concurrent mnemonic load consisted of material previously processed, and was assumed to be linked to the storage function of WM. Results showed that an increment in incongruity-detection difficulty led to a greater decrement in accuracy in older than in young subjects, indicating an impairment in the information-processing function. On the other hand, an increment in concurrent mnemonic load led to a slightly smaller decrement in accuracy in older subjects. Furthermore, fewer words from this mnemonic load were recalled in older subjects. It is suggested that older subjects are impaired in coping with both requirements of the task, and tend to sacrifice the storage of information recently processed to devote their resources to the immediate processing component of the task. These results are discussed in relation to their implications for language comprehension.     

Measuring and modeling facial affect

In recent years, researchers in computer science and human-computer interaction have become increasingly interested in characterizing perception of facial affect. Ironically, this applied interest comes at a time when the classic findings on perception of human facial affect are being challenged in the psychological research literature, largely on methodological grounds. This paper first describes two experiments that empirically address Russell’s methodological criticisms of the classic work on measuring “basic emotions,” as well as his alternative approach toward modeling “facial affect space.” Finally, a user study on affect in a prototype model of a robot face is reported; these results are compared with the human findings from Experiment 1. This work provides new data on measuring facial affect, while also demonstrating how basic and more applied research can mutually inform one another.     

The Effect of Crowding on Human Task Performance1

In a series of three experiments, groups of people performed tasks under varying conditions of density. The tasks ranged from very simple to complex, from rote memory to a test of creativity. Subjects worked on the tasks for 4 hours at a time for two or three successive days. There were no significant effects of density on performance, nor any consistent trends.     

Attachment-related differences in perceptions of an initial peer interaction emerge over time: Evidence of reconstructive memory processes in adolescents

This study examined whether attachment, assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1996) was linked to how adolescents reconstructed their memory for an initial interaction with an unfamiliar peer. Adolescents (N = 189, 62% female) completed a 10-min laboratory task with a student whom they did not know. Immediately following this task, adolescents rated their perceptions of the interaction. Adolescents completed the same perception measure 2 weeks later. Although adolescents classified as secure and insecure on the AAI did not differ in how they perceived unfamiliar peers initially, attachment-related differences emerged over time. Insecure adolescents remembered the interactions as less positive and more negative and also reported being treated with greater hostility than they had initially reported 2 weeks earlier. In contrast, secure adolescents' memories for the negative aspects of the interaction and for hostile treatment remained stable, although, like insecure adolescents, they remembered the conflicts as being less positive than initially reported. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).