Helping the heart grow fonder during absence: Daydreaming about significant others replenishes connectedness after induced loneliness

People are known to engage in behaviours aimed at replenishing social connectedness after their sense of belonging is threatened. We explored whether the mental strategy of daydreaming about significant others could have similar effects by acting as an imaginary substitute when loved ones are unavailable. Following a loneliness induction, participants (N = 126) were asked to either daydream about a significant other, daydream about a non-social scenario or complete a control task. Social daydreamers showed significantly increased feelings of connection, love and belonging compared to non-social daydreamers and control participants. Consistent with the proposition that social daydreaming replenished connectedness, social daydreamers also behaved more pro-socially and expressed less of a desire to interact with others after daydreaming. These findings demonstrate that through imagination, social daydreaming can replenish connectedness providing a potential strategy for enhancing socio-emotional well-being.     

The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex "Frontal Lobe" tasks: a latent variable analysis

This individual differences study examined the separability of three often postulated executive functions-mental set shifting ("Shifting"), information updating and monitoring ("Updating"), and inhibition of prepotent responses ("Inhibition")-and their roles in complex "frontal lobe" or "executive" tasks. One hundred thirty-seven college students performed a set of relatively simple experimental tasks that are considered to predominantly tap each target executive function as well as a set of frequently used executive tasks: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Tower of Hanoi (TOH), random number generation (RNG), operation span, and dual tasking. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the three target executive functions are moderately correlated with one another, but are clearly separable. Moreover, structural equation modeling suggested that the three functions contribute differentially to performance on complex executive tasks. Specifically, WCST performance was related most strongly to Shifting, TOH to Inhibition, RNG to Inhibition and Updating, and operation span to Updating. Dual task performance was not related to any of the three target functions. These results suggest that it is important to recognize both the unity and diversity of executive functions and that latent variable analysis is a useful approach to studying the organization and roles of executive functions.     

8080 port addressing with the C/80 compiler

This paper deals with Intel 8080 port addressing with the C/80 compiler. Specifically, two assembly language routines designed for the C/80 are described.     

Using the Michigan State University Family Therapy Questionnaire for Training

The development of the Michigan State University Family Therapy Questionnaire (MSU/FTQ) is described and a case example given of its use as a training tool. The MSU/FTQ is a relatively exhaustive list of 74 generic, structural, strategic, brief, and trans-generational family therapy interventions culled from the literature and translated into layperson's language. The marital and family therapy client uses it to provide feedback about the effectiveness of therapy by assessing those things theorists consider important about behavior maintenance and systemic change, indicating whether or not specific interventions occurred and their importance.     

Creating a safe place for growth in supervision

When people are afraid, learning is inhibited. In too many disturbed families, institutional settings, rigid organizations, and some supervision groups, a feeling of emotional safety is missing. The first step in teaching, supervising, or therapy is the necessity to provide a safe environment. The author suggests a model applicable to any supervision group, work group, organization, classroom, or family. A group model, specifically applied to the relationship between family therapy students or interns and supervisors, suggests ways to enhance growth by minimizing fear.     

Pastoral care and administration

The desire to be a spiritual leader is a worthy goal for ministers. Misunderstanding of such leadership leads to errors: failure to face the realities of structure and organization in administration or cynicism about any relation between spiritual and organizational work. Pastoral care is not a substitute for administration. Yet, the perspective of pastoral care suggests insights that can help the pastor understand the dynamics of administrative experience.     

What church administration can learn from the secular world

Conclusion In many ways, it could be argued that the Reformation was a fight for a theology of administration. Whether one is speaking of Luther in relation to the Pope or Calvin and the Anabaptists, tremendous attention was given to the administrative relationships.In our day, we need to recover the awareness of the Reformers that the way we organize our structures perhaps says more about ourreal theology than the sermons we preach. Church order is, in this sense, the heart of the approach to theology. There is evidence that business is beginning to take order seriously. There is equal evidence that the church, too, is beginning to ask the real questions. Unless the church is to be just in the ghetto, or business is to lose the benefit of disciplined questions about meaning, we cannot say that the church and business can be in dialogue. We can say that theymust be.Formerly, Pastor of Larchmont Avenue Church Larchmont, New York     

Simple reaction time with markovian evolution of gaussian discriminal processes

If the discriminal distributions of signal-detectability theory evolve in time according to a normal Markov process, they can be characterized by Brownian motion generalized with a constant bias determined by signal strength. If the process is stopped at the first occurrence of a preset criterion displacement, the resulting latency distribution provides a model for the central component of simple reaction time. Discussed are properties of the distribution which should be useful in obtaining experimental predictions from neural-counting assumptions, and in relating reaction times to basic variables of the theory of signal-detectability.This paper was written while the author was on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan, supported by U.S.P.H.S. Training grant T01-MH-7417-07.     

Analysis of variance with Fourier analysis of coherent data

Like orthogonal polynomials, the sine and cosine components used in Fourier analysis are orthogonal under summation over equally spaced points. Therefore, they can be used in the same way as orthogonal polynomials are used with analysis of variance. They are usually used on records consisting of sequences of observations taken equally spaced in time. Analysis of variance can be performed on replicated records. The most straightforward cases occur under the following conditions: (1) The phenomenon is periodic, (2) the phenomenon is coherent (synchronized) over the various replicates, (3) the record length is an integral multiple of the fundamental period, and (4) the phenomenon is not buried too deeply in noise. Two numerical examples are examined that satisfy these conditions. Planning is illustrated for a case that violates Conditions 3 and 4.     

The degree of control exerted by phobic and non-phobic verbal stimuli over the recognition behaviour of phobic and non-phobic subjects

Four groups of subjects comprised of one control group, two analogue phobic groups and one clinical phobic group were exposed to a dichotic listening experiment in which they were required both to shadow one message to the exclusion of the other and recognize the occurrence of target words appearing in both the attended and rejected messages. Target words were either phobic-relevant or neutral. It was found that the clinical phobic group recognized significantly more target words than any of the other groups. This difference was due to their superior recognition of phobic-relevant targets from the rejected message. The results were interpreted within a combined framework of Staats's (1968, 1975) social behaviour theory and the Rescorla and Wagner (1972) model of classical conditioning.