Field independence, academic orientation, and achievement

The Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) of field independence was administered to 203 Jamaican sixth form (pre-university) students pursuing advanced-level (A-level) courses with either an arts or a science emphasis. The science-emphasis group obtained significantly higher scores on the GEFT than the arts-emphasis group. In addition, field independence was found to be important for the A-level success of students, regardless of whether they pursued arts- or science-emphasis courses. The implication of this finding to education at advanced level is discussed.     

Leaving whom? Motherless families: problems of termination for the female family therapist

The issue of planned termination is seldom addressed by family therapists. Given the goals and assumptions of most family work the concept may indeed be irrelevant, but there are circumstances where it is necessary not only to understand the principles of planned termination, but the factors in client, family and therapist which can make it difficult to terminate at all. This may be the case where a female therapist has been working with a family where father is the single parent (motherless family): the family may experience itself as incomplete and attempt to draw the therapist into the family to fill the gap left by mother and marital partner, and pari passu the therapist may assume that the family cannot well cope without her. Some strategies for resolving the problems of termination which may arise from such assumptions are described.     

Représentations des chefs cuisiniers quant à leur activité de management : entre performance et prévention des risques

This article aims to analyze the determinants of the chefs’ management activity in terms of their constraints and resources related in particular to their working conditions. This analysis makes it possible to determine postures relating to the management of chefs turned to both the health of their brigade and the performance of their service. In order to carry out this study, 20 chefs were interviewed via individual interviews with projective cards from the DIXIT game. The thematic type qualitative analysis carried out identifies several common characteristics between the leaders interviewed in the way of managing a brigade such as managerial skills, the importance attributed to the notion of team, the restoration of a positive image of the profession and business constraints. It is also shown that chefs are lacking training in the management side of their business. Finally, the results will be discussed with regard to the collective activity within the brigades and its effect on their professional identity.     

The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French

The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically feminine, or neutral. Two response conditions were used. In the determiner condition, children indicated the gender class by orally providing the determiner un or une marked for gender. In the picture condition, responses were given by pointing to the picture of a Martian-like female or male person that would be best called by each spoken pseudoword. Results indicated that as young as 3 years, children associated the determiner corresponding to the ending bias at greater than chance levels. Ending-consistent performance increased from 3 to 9 years of age. Moreover, from 4 years of age onward, sensitivity to endings affected categorization. Starting at that age, pictures were selected according to endings at greater than chance levels. This effect also increased with age. The discussion deals with the mechanisms of language acquisition and the relation between language and cognition.     

Sequence and priming in 15 month-olds' reactions to brief arm restraint: evidence for a hierarchy of anger responses

Brief, gentle arm restraint is widely used in experimental studies of children's anger, but the pattern of responses generated by such restraint has been incompletely described. We now describe a hierarchy of responses within trials as well as an escalation across trials that have both methodological and theoretical significance. Mothers of 87 15-month olds prevented them from playing with a toy by restraining their arms on two consecutive 30 sec trials. Physical struggling was the first and most frequent response; children who struggled were significantly more likely to vocalize, and those who vocalized were significantly more likely to show facial expressions of anger. The children's responses became more probable, rapid, and intense during Trial 2 restraint. Overall, the hierarchy was orderly enough to meet criteria for Guttman scalability. The particular sequence observed suggests situational, as opposed to bio-energetic, ordering of responses. Methodologically, the two trial paradigm is a simple, ecologically valid model for studying anger escalation that parallels the "attack priming" of aggression in other species. The magnitude and persistence of anger priming may provide novel measures of anger regulation. Theoretically, the existence of an orderly response hierarchy is consistent with previous observations suggesting that, within a situational context, the sequential appearance of specific behaviors may indicate progressive increases in anger intensity.     

A Social Justice Approach to Measuring Bystander Behavior: Introducing the Critically Conscious Bystander Scale

Sex Roles - Researchers studying bystander behavior in the context of sexual violence are informed by the five-step process of bystander intervention that was described by Latané and Darley...     

Contextualised behavioural measurements of personality differences obtained in behavioural tests and social observations in adult capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella)

We applied a new framework for behavioural research on personality differences in 26 adult tufted capuchin monkeys. Using the Behavioural Repertoire x Environmental Situations Approach, we generated systematically 20 non-lexical emic personality constructs that have high ecological validity for this species. For construct operationalisation, we obtained 146 contextualised behavioural measures repeatedly in 15 experimental situations and 2 group situations using computerised and video-assisted methods. A complete repetition after a 2–3-week break within a 60-day period yielded significant test–retest reliability from individual-oriented and variable-oriented viewpoints at different levels of aggregation. In accordance with well-established findings on cross-situational consistency, internal consistency was only moderate. This new and important finding highlights fundamental differences between behavioural approaches and judgment-based approaches to personality differences.     

Diphones-fr: A French database of diphone positional frequency

The aim of this article is to describe a database of diphone positional frequencies in French. More specifically, we provide frequencies for word-initial, word-internal, and word-final diphones of all words extracted from a subtitle corpus of 50 million words that come from movie and TV series dialogue. We also provide intra- and intersyllable diphone frequencies, as well as interword diphone frequencies. To our knowledge, no other such tool is available to psycholinguists for the study of French sequential probabilities. This database and its new indicators should help researchers conducting new studies on speech segmentation.