Working memory abilities and children's performance in laboratory analogues of classroom activities

Laboratory analogues of classroom activities on which children with low working memory skills have been observed to perform very poorly were developed and employed in two studies. In Study 1, 5‐ and 6‐year‐old completed one task involving recalling spoken sentences and counting the numbers of words, and another task involving the identification of rhyming words in spoken poems. Poorer performance of low than average working memory children was obtained on the recall measure of both tasks. In Study 2, 5‐ and 6‐year‐old children heard spoken instructions involving the manipulation of a sequence of objects, and were asked either to perform the instructions or repeat them, in different conditions. The accuracy of performing but not repeating instructions was strongly associated with working memory skills. These results indicate that working memory plays a significant role in typical classroom activities that involve both the storage and mental manipulation of information. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Catch 22: the inflammatory nature of insight

I will describe a man I saw in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a history of serious drug abuse and violent psychotic episodes. At the start of therapy my patient had little capacity to tolerate the anxiety, depression or the inevitable frustrations involved in facing reality. Over time and with the support of the therapy he was able to increase his capacity for self observation noticing the way he withdrew from the world of shared reality into psychotic states of mind in order to avoid painful feelings of rage, humiliation and shame. In the book ‘Catch 22?, Joseph Heller described the paradox of pilots who wish to claim insanity in order to avoid fatal flying missions, while the authorities maintain that in claiming insanity to avoid suicidal missions the individual demonstrates a sane awareness of the insanity of the missions! This insight is deemed to be evidence of the individual’s sanity and consequently their plea of insanity is denied. In this paper, I will show how Mr. A’s developing capacity for reflective functioning lead to a ‘Catch 22’ as the insight he needed as part of the process of recovery threatened to overwhelm him with depressing realities about the extent of his illness.     

Commentary

A critique and discussion of the six papers offered in this volume is provided. Links to prior traditions in outcome and process research from the past are made. In addition the author reviews the somewhat negative reception of clinicians to empirical research and indicates the opinion that such attitudes have been to the detriment of our scientific status and public trust.     

I,me, mine: Automatic attentional capture by self‐related stimuli

Drawing on decades of research suggesting an attentional advantage for self‐related information, researchers generally assume that self‐related stimuli automatically capture attention. However, a literature review reveals that this claim has not been systematically examined. We aimed to fill in this dearth of evidence. Following a feature‐based account of automaticity, we set up four experiments in which participants were asked to respond to a target preceded by a cue, which was self‐related or not. In Experiment 1, larger cuing effects (faster reaction times to valid versus invalid trials) were found with a participant's own name compared with someone else's name. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results with unconscious cues. Experiment 3 suggested that these effects are not likely driven by familiarity. In Experiment 4, participants experienced greater difficulties from having their attention being captured by their own compared with someone else's name. We conclude that attentional capture by self‐related stimuli is automatic in the sense that it is unintentional, unconscious, and uncontrolled. Implications for self‐regulation and intergroup relations are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Working with transference phenomena in group supervisory sessions

Conclusion Through this paper, I have tried to explore and illustrate the dynamics of the supervisory experience, in terms not so much of the content particulars as the subtle shifts in the interpersonal meanings of communication processes. Birdwhistell (1) has even gone so far as to suggest that individuals do not communicate; they engage in or become part of communication. He may move, or make words ... but he does not communicate. He may see, he may hear, smell, taste, or feel—but he does not communicate. In other words, he does not originate communication; he participates in it. In a parallel fashion, supervasion is not a simple linear model of student presentation followed by supervisor's intervention, leading to student's further presentation or pause for questioning of what the supervisor meant.Supervision, in my view, is a system that is only to be comprehended on a transactional level. Future research in this area would do well to investigate just how the student analyst projects his counter-transference reactions with patients as transference projections onto the supervisory group, and how the induced reactions in the listeners (the supervisory group) can be used to recapture in very vivid fashion the atmosphere surrounding the analyst and the patient in session together. The answer to these questions would help to clarify some of the existing theoretical confusion regarding internalization, identifications, and introjections. This approach of participating leadership and the free use of the process emerging in the supervisory session helps to dispel the omnipotent parental transference image, and seems to lead to increased empathy, responsiveness, perceptivity and intuition in trainees.     

Response competition: a major source of interference in a tactile identification task.

Two experiments investigated the ability of subjects to identify a moving, tactile stimulus. In both experiments, the subjects were presented with a target to their left index fingerpad and a nontarget (also moving) to their left middle fingerpad. Subjects were instructed to attend only to the target location and to respond "1" if the stimulus moved either to the left or up the finger, and to respond "2" if the stimulus moved either right or down the finger. The results showed that accuracy was better and reaction times were faster when the target and nontarget moved in the same direction than when they moved in different directions. When the target and nontarget moved in different directions, accuracy was significantly better and reaction times were significantly faster when the two stimuli had the same assigned response than when they had different responses. The results provide support for the conclusion that movement information is processed across adjacent fingers to the level of incipient response activation, even when subjects attempt to focus their attention on one location on the skin.     

Negative triangles: simple geometric shapes convey emotional valence

It has been suggested that downward pointing triangles convey negative valence, perhaps because they mimic an underlying primitive feature present in negative facial expressions (Larson, Aronoff, and Stearns, 2007). Here, we test this proposition using a flanker interference paradigm in which participants indicated the valence of a central face target, presented between two adjacent distracters. Experiment 1 showed that, compared with face flankers, downward pointing triangles had little influence on responses to face targets. However, in Experiment 2, when attentional competition was increased between target and flankers, downward pointing triangles slowed responses to positively valenced face targets, and speeded them to negatively valenced targets, consistent with valence-based flanker compatibility effects. These findings provide converging evidence that simple geometric shapes may convey emotional valence.