The development of awareness of stuttering in preschool children

The development of awareness of stuttering and of fluent speech in preschool children was examined by means of an instrument designed for this purpose. The measure employs a videotape of two identical puppets, one of whom stutters. Twenty stuttering children and twenty normally fluent children were followed for three visits over two years. The effects of group, age, and severity on the awareness score over the three visits were investigated. Results indicated statistical significance for experimental versus control groups, for older versus younger subgroups, and between the first and second, and first and third visits. Differences in stuttering severity were not associated with statistically significant differences in awareness scores. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Can test list context manipulations improve recognition accuracy in the DRM paradigm?

Only test-based manipulations can be used to help people distinguish accurate from false memories once events have been encoded. In two experiments we examined how the type of studied words (weak vs strong associates, or less vs more memorable associates) and nonstudied lure words (related vs unrelated lures) on the test list affect recognition accuracy in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. False recognition of critical lures decreased substantially in the related-lure context, but so did correct recognition of studied words. False recognition was little affected by the studied-word manipulations. In general, participants claimed to recognise critical lures as often as weak associates or less memorable studied words but less often than either strong associates or more memorable studied words. The test-list context affected how participants classified their recognition experiences but it did not systematically change their overall memory accuracy.     

Petition and contemplation in Maimonides’ conception of prayer

Maimonides’ statements on prayer pose considerable challenges to interpreters who seek to find his work a unified and coherent philosophy of religion. It is especially difficult to see how his advocacy of a silent meditation that follows intellectual comprehension of divine matters can be harmonized with his thoroughly ritualized approach to the daily supplicatory prayer of Jewish liturgy. Yet, it is the purpose of the following pages to outline an interpretation of Maimonides’ philosophy of religion according to which supplicatory prayer and intellectual meditation are not disparate spiritual phenomena, but complementary dimensions of a distinctive form of ethical‐intellectual worship.     

There are many ways to be rich: Effects of three measures of semantic richness on visual word recognition

Previous studies have reported that semantic richness facilitates visual word recognition (see, e.g., Buchanan, Westbury, & Burgess, 2001; Pexman, Holyk, & Monfils, 2003). We compared three semantic richness measures--number of semantic neighbors (NSN), the number of words appearing in similar lexical contexts; number of features (NF), the number of features listed for a word's referent; and contextual dispersion (CD), the distribution of a word's occurrences across content areas-to determine their abilities to account for response time and error variance in lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. NF and CD accounted for unique variance in both tasks, whereas NSN accounted for unique variance only in the lexical decision task. Moreover, each measure showed a different pattern of relative contribution across the tasks. Our results provide new clues about how words are represented and suggest that word recognition models need to accommodate each of these influences.     

How eye movements affect unpleasant memories: support for a working-memory account

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing can reduce ratings of the vividness and emotionality of unpleasant memories-hence it is commonly used to treat posttraumatic stress disorder. The present experiments compared three accounts of how eye movements produce these benefits. Participants rated unpleasant autobiographical memories before and after eye movements or an eyes stationary control condition. In Experiment 1, eye movements produced benefits only when memories were held in mind during the movements, and eye movements increased arousal, contrary to an investigatory-reflex account. In Experiment 2, horizontal and vertical eye movements produced equivalent benefits, contrary to an interhemispheric-communication account. In Experiment 3, two other distractor tasks (auditory shadowing, drawing) produced benefits that were negatively correlated with working-memory capacity. These findings support a working-memory account of the eye movement benefits in which the central executive is taxed when a person performs a distractor task while attempting to hold a memory in mind.     

Review of: Julian Huxley, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Evolution: The Modern Synthesis—The Definitive Edition</Emphasis>, with a New Forward by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller. MIT Press, 2010

Julian Huxley’s 1942 book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis is an historically important book which remains well worth reading. In this review I focus on Huxley’s debt to Richard Goldschmidt and Cyril Darlington. I discuss the conceptions of the genome developed by Goldschmidt and Darlington and their continuing relevance.     

Professionalism: A Competency Cluster Whose Time Has Come

Despite the burgeoning literature on professionalism in other health professions, psychology lags behind in the level of attention given to this core competency. In this article, we review definitions from other health professions and how they address professionalism. Next, we review how this competency evolved within health service psychology (HSP), and we propose a definition. We offer an approach for assessing professionalism within HSP. Consideration is given to strategies and methods for providing effective education and training in this multifaceted competency. Finally, recommendations are made for creating a culture of professionalism within HSP and honoring psychology’s social contract with multiple publics.     

Trainees with Competence Problems in the Professionalism Domain

Increasingly, professionalism has been recognized as a core competency for health service professionals and is the domain in which vexing competence problems are observed in trainees. We begin by describing manifestations of problems of professionalism in accord with the values that fall within the rubric of this multifaceted construct. We provide an approach for evaluating problems of professionalism and discuss intervention for trainees with mild, moderate, or severe problems in this domain. We propose implications for training focused on enhancing the culture of programs; bolstering the education, guidance, and mentoring provided related to professionalism; and encouraging best practices for addressing trainees with problems of professionalism. We conclude by sharing ideas about defining professionalism, identifying problems of professionalism, strengthening our approach to assessing professionalism and intervening when problems are evident, developing strategies for preventing professionalism problems, and ensuring that psychologists take seriously their responsibility to address professionalism concerns with colleagues.     

Remembering is in the details: effects of test-list context on memory for an event

We examined how recognition judgements for a set of event details are influenced by the relative difficulty of the other details included on the test. Participants viewed a crime event and then assigned remember/know judgements to details on a recognition test. In Experiment 1, details of medium difficulty were more likely to be classified as remembered when mixed with hard details rather than easy details. Similarly, in Experiment 2, medium details presented in blocked format were more likely to be classified as remembered when preceded by a block of hard details rather than a block of easy details.The test-list context thus appears to influence how participants define remembering. In Experiment 3, informing participants of the relative difficulty of the upcoming block of details eliminated the blocking effect. Implications for accounts of remember/know judgements and for conducting memory interviews are discussed.