Chewing on it can chew you up: effects of rumination on triggered displaced aggression

Ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood of displaced aggression following a minor annoyance (trigger). In Study 1, provoked participants who ruminated for 25 min were more aggressive toward a fumbling confederate than were distracted participants. Provocation-induced negative affect was positively related to aggression but only among those who ruminated. Study 2 conceptually replicated Study 1 and also found that the more negatively people reacted to the trigger, the more likely the trigger was to increase displaced aggression. Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by using an 8-hr rumination period. All 3 studies suggest that ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood that a minor triggering annoyance will increase displaced aggression.     

Attention control and ability level in a complex cognitive skill: Attention shifting and second-language proficiency

In this study, we investigated the relationship between attention control and proficiency in a complex cognitive skill. The participants were English-French bilinguals with varying degrees of second-language (French) proficiency. Proficiency was operationalized as efficiency of lexical access in an animacy judgment task, as reflected in the coefficient of variability of response time adjusted for first-language performance on the same task. Attention control was operationalized as the shift cost obtained in a linguistic version of the alternating runs task-switching paradigm. Hierarchical regression revealed that, overall, attention control accounted for 59% of the variance of proficiency and that second-language attention control alone accounted for 32% of the unique variance of proficiency, indicating a high degree of skill domain (second language) specificity in the relationship between attention control and proficiency. The results speak to issues regarding the development of expertise, second-language acquisition, and a cognitive linguistic approach to language and attention.     

Attentional blink differences between adolescent dyslexic and normal readers

The goal of this study was to evaluate the possibility that dyslexic individuals require more working memory resources than normal readers to shift attention from stimulus to stimulus. To test this hypothesis, normal and dyslexic adolescents participated in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation experiment (Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). Surprisingly, the result showed that the participants with dyslexia produced a shallower attentional blink than normal controls. This result may be interpreted as showing differences in the way the two groups encode information in episodic memory. They also fit in a cascade-effect perspective of developmental dyslexia.     

Spatial location judgments: a cross-national comparison of estimation bias in subjective North American geography

We examined alternate explanations for distortions in the subjective representation of North American geography. One explanation, based on physical proximity, predicts that bias in location estimates should increase with the distance from a participant's home city or region. An alternative is that biases arise from combining accurate and inaccurate beliefs about the cities and the superordinate regions to which they belong, including beliefs that may have social or cultural origins. To distinguish these, Canadians from Alberta and Americans from Texas judged the latitudes of cities in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The Texans' estimates of Mexican locations were 16" (approximately 1,120 miles) more biased than their estimates of Canadian locations that were actually about 840 miles farther away. This finding eliminates proximity as a primary source of geographic biases and underscores the role of categorical beliefs as an important source of biased judgments.     

Perceptions of cotherapists as a function of therapist sex roles and observer sex roles

These two studies examined how therapist sex-role behaviors and subject sex roles influence perceptions of cotherapists conducting marital therapy. As hypothesized, ratings of therapist competence, strength, and impact varied directly with verbal dominance. Contrary to expectations, this effect was not stronger for female therapists than for male therapists. However, verbally dominant females were seen as less in charge than verbally dominant males. Reversal of traditional instrumental and expressive sex-role styles was more salient for male therapists than for females. Nontraditional therapist sex-role styles were seen as providing a greater learning experience than traditional styles. As predicted, androgynous subjects rated male and female therapists equal in competence and strength, and were equally comfortable with each. Sex-typed males and females demonstrated a preference for the female therapist, rating her higher in competence and strength. These studies suggest that cotherapists' attention to the models they present should encompass sex-role behaviors and styles.An earlier draft of this article was presented as a paper at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, August 1978.     

Freedom to play,dream and think

The intention in this paper is to study what we mean when we say that play is a mediator of an inner psychic world. The internal scene becomes furnished with your own impressions from the external world. The passions and the experiences from within have no forms of their own and will use the forms in time and space in external reality. An inner object world will be created, and thus far it is the same process as it is for the creation of the dream image and its furniture. In play, there is a circular movement: the furnishings from the inner world intrude into external reality; the external form and the form of the inner object create a double exposure. We look at the object in the room with a binocular view. The experience from psychoanalysis with three children is presented to give different perspectives on the internal movements inherent in play and playing.     

Relationship Between Graphical Device Comprehension and Overall Text Comprehension for Third-Grade Children

This study examined relationships between reading comprehension, known predictors of reading comprehension (i.e., cognitive flexibility, fluency, reading motivation and attitude, vocabulary), and graphical device comprehension. One-hundred fifty-six third graders completed assessments of known predictor variables and an assessment tapping comprehension of graphical devices commonly found in age-appropriate informational texts: captioned pictures, insets, surface diagrams, cross-sectional diagrams, flow charts, timelines, and tables. Graphical device comprehension was strongly correlated with reading comprehension, r_s = 0.49, p (one-tailed) < 0.01. Regression analyses, including known and new variables, revealed that graphical device comprehension accounted for 12.81% of the resulting standardized model predicting general reading comprehension.     

An Evaluation of the Effects of Graphic Aids in Improving Decision Accuracy in a Continuous Treatment Design

Educators, school psychologists, and other professionals must evaluate student progress and decide to continue, modify, or terminate instructional programs to ensure student success. For this purpose, progress-monitoring data are often collected, plotted graphically, and visually analyzed. The current study evaluated the impact of three common formats for visual analysis (scatter plots, scatter plots with trend lines, and scatter plots with trend and aim lines) on the decision accuracy of 52 novice analysts. All participants viewed 18 time-series graphs that depicted student growth on a continuous metric (e.g., oral reading fluency). Participants rated each graph as depicting substantial progress, minimal progress, or no progress. The magnitude of the true slope for each graph was fixed to 3.00 (substantial progress), 0.75 (minimal progress), or 0 (no progress). Inferential analyses were used to determine the probability of a participant correctly identifying different magnitudes of trend in the presence of different visual aids (no visual aid, trend line, and trend line with aim line). The odds of correctly identifying trend were influenced by visual aid (p < .01) and trend magnitude (p < .01). The addition of a trend line resulted in a sharp increase in the probability of making a correct decision. Graphs depicting minimal progress reduced the probability of a correct decision.     

Canon law and communion

Abstract

This paper was originally delivered, at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the Meeting of the Primates of the Anglican Communion, held at Kanuga, North Carolina, USA, in March 2001 and was first published in Ecclesiastical Law Journal 6 (2002). The paper examines the moral and juridical experiences of Anglicans concerning order and discipline, and then moves to an analysis of the ways in which the legal systems of particular Anglican Churches contribute to global communion. It also proposes ways in which shared principles may be induced from the profound similarities between the laws of Anglican Churches, and how these represent a ius commune of the Anglican Communion. The paper has since led to a Consultation of Anglican Legal Advisers at Canterbury in March 2002, and their acceptance that there are principles of canon law common to the churches of the Communion. This was endorsed by the Primates’ Meeting at Canterbury in April 2002 which suggested these canonical principles may represent the fifth instrument of Anglican unity.