Forgetting and redintegration of consonants and vowels in pseudoword lists

Immediate recall of phonemes was studied in a pseudoword span task. Finnish participants recalled lists of increasing length, consisting of C(consonant)V(vowel)CVCV pseudowords. The lists were made up from pools of 12 pseudowords. There were three types of lists. In the non-redundant lists the items were unpredictable combinations of consonants and vowels. In consonant-redundant lists, all items had the consonant frame /t/_/s/_/l/. In vowel-redundant lists, all items had the vowel frame _/u/_/e/_/o/. Unlike redundant last syllables in a previous experiment, neither consonant nor vowel redundancy helped list recall. Instead, a harmful phonological similarity effect was apparent in the vowel-redundant case but not the consonant-redundant case. A phoneme-level analysis of recall showed that consonants were recalled better in consonant-redundant lists and vowels were recalled better in vowel-redundant lists compared to non-redundant lists. Vowels appeared to be more important for discrimination between items, with redundancy resulting in confusions. The consequences of phoneme-level forgetting and redintegration for item- and list-level recall are discussed.     

Tic-Tac-Toe performance as a function of maturational level of retarded adolescents and nonretarded children

Two groups of retarded adolescents, differing from each other primarily in IQ (and mental age), were compared with two groups of nonretarded children, differing from each other in chronological age (and mental age), on a modified tic-tac-toe game. The mental ages of the retarded and nonretarded groups were approximately the same. It was found that the slope of performance improvement with increasing maturational level was the same for both subject groups, but the performance of the retarded adolescents was approximately 1.5 years behind mental age expectations, as derived from the performance levels of the normal children. These findings support previous suggestions of a major retardate deficit in tasks requiring logical foresight.     

Are family therapists listening to the young? A psychological perspective*

This paper sets out to examine the family therapist's relationship to young children from a psychological perspective. Earlier contributions to the literature regarding the involvement of children in family sessions are reviewed briefly. Aspects of attachment theory and Piaget's theory of cognitive development are considered in terms of their implications for family therapy. It is argued that family therapists should be mindful of parents’ responsibilities for meeting their children's needs, particularly their need to experience predictability and to have a coherent story about their lives. The importance of exploring the effects of adult choices on the children is also emphasized.     

Hand Position and Response Assignment Modulate the Activation of the Valence‐Space Conceptual Metaphor

Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., good is up ‐bad is down and good is right ‐bad is left ). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants’ hands while responding to the task—regardless of the location of their dominant hand—facilitates the judgment of positive and negative‐valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor–congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context.     

Parenting adult children – invisible ties that bind?

This paper presents the authors' ideas about parenting adult children, describes some of the results of a larger qualitative research study and explores possible implications for practice. The study is based on in‐depth analyses of narratives from interviews of a non‐clinical population of parents of adult children. It represents part of an ongoing study to develop an understanding of an under‐researched area of family life.     

DISORDERED EATING, ACCULTURATION, AND TREATMENT-SEEKING IN A COMMUNITY SAMPLE OF HISPANIC, ASIAN, BLACK, AND WHITE WOMEN

The purpose of this study was to examine disordered eating, acculturation, and treatment-seeking in a community sample of Hispanic, Asian, Black, and White women. Participants were 118 women with disordered eating (49 Hispanic, 21 Asian, 23 Black, and 25 White) and 118 healthy controls. Interviews were conducted to assess eating and weight-related behaviors, psychiatric symptoms, acculturation, and health care usage. Results indicated that the four ethnic groups were equally likely to present behavioral symptoms of bulimia, anorexia, or a binge-eating disorder. Hispanics were the most likely to use diuretics, and Black women were the most likely to use laxatives. Despite psychological distress among the eating disorder group, only a small percentage had received treatment during the past year; the eating disorder group was more likely than the controls to report that they had been denied treatment. More acculturated individuals were more likely to suffer from eating problems, and among the eating disorder group, less acculturated individuals were less likely to have received treatment.     

Arguing about tobacco and its effects on social representations

This study analysed the influence of social debate (group discussion) on previously held antagonistic social representations about tobacco. In the first phase of our study, we contacted 130 subjects in order to know what type of social representations they held. Two representations were found: a ‘psychopathological’ representation and a ‘critical’ one. After obtaining these results, and in a second phase, we randomly divided 100 subjects into 10 discussion groups, whilst another 30 subjects were assigned to the control condition (non-discussion group). The group discussion (social debate) led to a convergence of previously held representations. Debate emerged as a mechanism which could reduce the distance between groups who hold previously opposing representations.     

Brief training in mindfulness may normalize a blunted error-related negativity in chronically depressed patients

The error-related negativity (ERN), an evoked-potential that arises in response to the commission of errors, is an important early indicator of self-regulatory capacities. In this study we investigated whether brief mindfulness training can reverse ERN deficits in chronically depressed patients. The ERN was assessed in a sustained attention task. Chronically depressed patients (n = 59) showed significantly blunted expression of the ERN in frontocentral and frontal regions, relative to healthy controls (n = 18). Following two weeks of training, the patients (n = 24) in the mindfulness condition showed a significantly increased ERN magnitude in the frontal region, but there were no significant changes in patients who had received a resting control (n = 22). The findings suggest that brief training in mindfulness may help normalize aberrations in the ERN in chronically depressed patients, providing preliminary evidence for the responsiveness of this parameter to mental training.