It-Scale for Children and Draw-A-Person Test: 30 Feminine vs. 25 Masculine Boys

Thirty feminine and twenty-five masculine boys, aged 4-10, were administered the It-Scale for Children and the Draw-a-Person Test. A feminine boy was defined by his preference for the dress, games, toys, role, and companionship of girls, and the stated wish to be a girl.

Results on both tests differed significantly for the two groups. Feminine boys scored similarly to published norms for girls, while masculine boys scored similarly to published norms for boys.     

Dissertation experiences of doctoral graduates from professional psychology programs

Worldwide, dissertation experiences are acknowledged to be challenging endeavors for students and the faculty members who advise them, and dissertation completion continues to be a concern when seeking to improve overall doctoral graduation rates. Although a number of factors have been associated with completion rates across disciplines, further research is needed within professional psychology graduate programs to understand overall student dissertation experiences. In this USA-based investigation, a mixed-method design was used to examine the experiences of 25 professional psychology doctoral graduates’ dissertation experiences, 12 of which were self-identified as positive and 13 as negative. Participants with positive experiences typically had supportive relationships with their dissertation chairs and committee members, which enhanced their research confidence and professional development. Participants with negative dissertation experiences typically had difficult relationships with dissertation chairs and committee members, which was associated with immediate and long-lasting negative consequences for participants’ professional growth and emotional well-being. The advisory working alliance was stronger for graduates with positive than negative experiences, although research attitudes and self-efficacy beliefs were not different between the two groups.     

Does Guilt Motivate Prayer?

We recruited 110 college students for an experimental investigation of the role of guilt in motivating religious behavior. We induced guilt in half of the participants before asking all subjects to indicate their current interest in prayer. Overall, participants in the guilt condition were more interested in praying, but this effect was not observed among those high in grandiose narcissism. Our findings make a contribution not only to the study of the role that emotions have in motivating religious behavior, but also to the study of narcissists’ susceptibility to guilt.     

Working memory consolidation is abnormally slow in schizophrenia

This study reports evidence that patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a slowing of working memory (WM) consolidation, which is the process of transforming transient perceptual representations into durable WM representations. Sixteen schizophrenia patients and 16 healthy control participants performed a task measuring the visual WM consolidation rate in a change-detection paradigm. A target display containing 3 colored squares was followed by a variable delay of 17-483 ms, a pattern mask, and then a test stimulus. This pattern mask does not interfere with perception but disrupts WM consolidation. Control participants reached no-mask performance by 250 ms, indicating completed WM consolidation, whereas patients failed to reach no-mask performance by 483 ms. Slowed consolidation may play an important and largely unrecognized role in schizophrenia.     

Impaired control of visual attention in schizophrenia

To investigate attentional impairment in schizophrenia, the authors examined the performance of 22 patients with schizophrenia and 16 healthy control subjects in 4 visual search tasks that varied in perceptual requirements and in the need for precise attentional control. The rate of search was slowed in the patients in all tasks. However, the degree of slowing was largest in tasks requiring precise attentional control and smallest in tasks that were perceptually difficult but required less attentional control. This pattern of results indicates that the primary impairment of attention in schizophrenia lies in the control of attention and not in the selection processes that operate once attention has been directed to an object.     

Body-part metaphors: a cross-cultural survey of the perception of translatability among Americans and Japanese

What kinds of linguistic resources do people utilize when they try to translate metaphors into a foreign language? This investigation of the perception of translatability of body-part metaphors examined the effects of the following factors: the similarity between the human body part and the metaphorical expression (e.g., "eye" in "electric eye") in appearance and function; the frequency of the use of the metaphor in the native language; and the perceived distance between the first language and the target language. The results of a survey of American (n = 151) and Japanese (n = 116) university students showed that both Similarity in Appearance and Similarity in Function correlated positively with Translatability, while the effect of the former was stronger than the latter. Frequency correlated positively with Translatability for the Americans, although the correlation was weaker when the target language is "distant" (Japanese or Chinese) than when the target language is "close" (Spanish). Among the Japanese, Frequency did not correlate with translatability regardless of the target language.     

Gender differences in orthographic, verbal, and compositional fluency: Implications for assessing writing disabilities in primary grade children

Measures of oral verbal fluency (word finding), written orthographic fluency (alphabet task), and written composition (narrative and oral expository) were administered to 300 children (50 girls and 50 boys each in the first, second, and third grades). Both oral verbal fluency and written orthographic fluency correlated significantly with the number of words (fluency) and the number of clauses (microorganization) in the compositions, but boys performed significantly better than girls on oral verbal fluency and girls performed significantly better than boys on written orthographic fluency. Girls consistently outperformed boys on the number of words and the number of clauses produced in narrative and expository composition. Thus, in beginning writing, orthographic fluency may be relatively more important than verbal fluency and boys may be at greater risk for writing disabilities. However, more boys were identified as having a disability in composition when absolute criteria (lowest 5% of normal distribution) were used, but about the same number of boys and girls were identified as having a disability in composition when relative criteria (significant discrepancy between Verbal IQ and compositional skill, based on the Mahalanobis statistic) were used. School psychologists are encouraged to use standardized measures of othographic, verbal, and compositional fluency to identify primary grade children needing early intervention to prevent more severe writing disabilities.     

A dark talent: silence in analysis

This paper is presented jointly by two analysts who have worked with patients whose silence stretched over years. They taxed our professional selves and our therapeutic repertoire of responses and techniques to the limit. Partly in response to these experiences, each analyst found herself needing to talk with another who could verify disturbing countertransference reactions from the standpoint of similar experience. The patients' (largely silent) attacks on analysis and their inability to use it conventionally constellated the need in us to talk, in an effort to relieve projected anxiety. Our conversations provided some containment of the destructive fantasies which we found developing in response to lack of verbal interaction with our patients. Unlike patients who project into an analyst in the unconscious hope of finding containment, silent patients project the need for containment, which they then disavow, leaving the analyst carrying the need, and feeling helpless, baffled and undermined in their therapeutic identity (Colman, private communication). In keeping with the theme of this conference, we found that our collaboration about what chronic analytic silence may mean helped to counteract its destructive effect on the analyst-patient relationship     

On regulating what is known: A way to social epistemology

This paper lays the groundwork for normative-yet-naturalistic social epistemology. I start by presenting two scenarios for the history of epistemology since Kant, one in which social epistemology is the natural outcome and the other in which it represents a not entirely satisfactory break with classical theories of knowledge. Next I argue that the current trend toward naturalizing epistemology threatens to destroy the distinctiveness of the sociological approach by presuming that it complements standard psychological and historical approaches. I then try to reassert, in Comtean fashion, the epistemologist's credentials in regulating knowledge production. Finally, I consider how social epistemology may have something exciting and relevant to say about contemporary debates in the theory of knowledge.A version of this paper appears as chapter one of Fuller (1988). My warmest thanks goes to Fred Schmitt, who saved me from many unclarities and howlers, as well as provided many probing remarks and criticisms with which I have barely begun to grapple.