Suicide among psychologists and a proposal for the American Psychological Association

The response of the American Medical Association and of the American Psychiatric Association to suicide among their members is contrasted with the response of the American Psychological Association. It is suggested that an association should be concerned with suicide among its members and two proposals are suggested.     

Detection of intraword and interword letter repetition: A test of the word unitization hypothesis

Do words, as familiar units or gestalts, tend to swallow up and conceal their letter components (Pillsbury, 1897)? Letters typically are detected faster and more accurately in words than in nonwords (i.e., scrambled collections of letters), and in more frequent words than in less frequent words. However, a word advantage at encoding, where the representation of the string is formed, might compensate for, and thus mask, a word disadvantage at decoding and comparison, where the component letters of the representation are accessed and compared with the target letter. To better reveal any such word disadvantage, a task was used in this study that increased the amount of letter processing. Subjects judged whether a letter was repeated within a six-letter word or a nonword (Experiment 1; intraword letter repetition) or was repeated between two adjacent unrelated six-letter words or nonwords (Experiment 2; interword letter repetition). Contrary to Pillsbury's word unitization hypothesis, both types of letter repetition (intraword and interword) were detected faster and just as accurately with words as with nonwords. In Experiment 2, however, interword letter repetition was detected less accurately on common words (but not on rare words or third-order pseudowords) than on the corresponding nonwords. Thus, although the familiar word does not deny access to its own component letters, it does make their comparison with letters from other words more difficult.     

Visual discrimination deficits of reading-disabled children: Sex artifact?

Several theorists have suggested that deficits in visual discrimination play an etiological role in the development of reading deficits in children who are diagnosed as learning-disabled. Supporting this theory, a number of studies have shown that disabled readers make more errors on visual discrimination tasks than do good readers. The present study, however, suggests that those findings may have been due to a sex-difference artifact. Thirty-six 8- and 9-year-old good readers and reading-disabled children of both sexes responded to 40 matching items under untimed conditions. Males made more errors than females, but overall, reading-disabled children made no more errors than good readers. These findings, along with a reanalysis of previous studies, suggest that because reading disabilities are more common in males, evidence construed as supporting a visual discrimination hypothesis may have been an artifact of a sex difference in studies in which sex was not controlled.     

Attentional control settings modulate susceptibility to the induced Roelofs effect

When a visible frame is offset laterally from an observer's objective midline, the subjective midline is pulled toward the frame's center, causing the frame and any enclosed targets to be misperceived as being shifted somewhat in the opposite direction. This illusion, the Roelofs effect, is driven by environmental (bottom-up) visual cues, but whether it can be modulated by top-down (e.g., task-relevant) information is unknown. Here, we used an attentional manipulation (i.e., the color-contingency effect) to test whether attentional filtering can modulate the magnitude of the illusion. When observers were required to report the location of a colored target, presented within an array of differently colored distractors, there was a greater effect of the illusion when the Roelofs-inducing frame was the same color as the target. These results indicate that feature-based attentional processes can modulate the impact of contextual information on an observer's perception of space.     

Dimensions of impulsiveness

A factor-analysis of 95 items concerned with impulsivity identified eight major components, namely, concentration, decision-making, thinking, money, excitement, temper, future orientation, and complexity.     

Islam and suicide

Suicide and homicide rates of a sample of 72 nations were associated with a cluster of social variables related to economic development but not with a cluster related to the proportion of Islamic adherents.