The Association of American Medical Colleges and the Association of Medical School Psychologists: Finding Psychology’s Place in Academic Medicine

This paper highlights the role of the Association of Medical School Psychologists (AMSP) as a bridge between academic medicine and psychology. AMSP’s affiliation with Division 12 of the American Psychological Association is discussed, but the primary focus is AMSP’s affiliation with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the AAMC’s Council of Academic Societies (CAS). The history, structure, activities, and goals of AAMC and CAS are examined. AMSP’s affiliation with AAMC is important for psychologists in medical schools and academic medical centers, and for psychology in general, because AAMC is the major voice of academic medicine in the US. AAMC activities affect medical education at all levels, as well as research and health services at academic medical centers, and health care policy at the national level. AMSP’s dual affiliation with AAMC’s CAS and APA’s Society of Clinical Psychology will increase psychology’s visibility and influence in academic medical centers and enhance the two-way flow of ideas and information between academic medicine and psychology.     

Scented memories of literature

This study examined the effects on recall of story details of congruity or incongruity between the hedonic valence of literary texts and odours inhaled while reading them. During the reading session, 24 undergraduates (12 males and 12 females) read two passages involving positive subject matter and two with negative subject matter while sniffing pleasant or unpleasant odours in a within-subject fully counterbalanced design. Subjects rated their experience of each text on eleven 7-point scales. During the test session 48 hours later, subjects read a two-word title associated with each of the passages and inhaled the odour that was paired with it in the reading session. They also rated their experience on six of the scales that had been used during the reading session. Results showed that hedonic congruence between the passage and the odour fostered enhanced recall during the test session. The combination of positive subject matter and positive odour was reflected in more accurate recall of character details, while pairing negative subject matter and negative odour resulted in more accurate recall of setting details. Regression analysis showed that overall recall accuracy was increased by identifying with the characters in the stories and for passages that were found pleasing and personally meaningful. Consistent with the literature on implicit learning involving odours, recall accuracy varied inversely with perceived odour intensity. Implicit learning involving odours and literary passages is therefore fostered by unity in the reading experience.     

American pragmatism as a guide for professional ethical conduct for engineers

The ethical choices faced by engineers today are increasingly complex. Competing and conflicting ethical demands from clients, communities, employees, and personal objectives combine to suggest that engineers employ ethical approaches that are adaptive yet grounded in three concrete professional circumstances: first, that engineers apply unique professional skills in the service of a client, subject to protecting the public interest; second, that engineers advance the state of knowledge of their professional field through reflection, research, and sharing experience in journals and conferences, and third, that they develop new professionals by active mentoring. This paper examines five features of American pragmatism and suggests that its emphasis on specific, context-based ethical decision making can assist engineers in a postmodern setting. In particular, it considers the venues of interpersonal ethical choices, institutional ethical conflicts, and social choices that have ethical components. Pragmatism suggests that in such a complex ethical climate, there is a need for the co-evolution of judgment and action, for individual reflective judgment in particular situations, and for ceasing to search for a single, immutable principle for ethical choice. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

Analyzing anger: how to make people mad

Does simple displeasure cause anger without appraisals or agency attributions? The authors offer 8 observations: (a) Appraisal theory also predicts that displeasure promotes anger, (b) An emotion of frustration can be usefully distinguished from anger, (c) Aggressive reactions to norm violations among animals suggest that they too distinguish bad behavior from bad outcomes, (d) Attributions to agency are perceptual and automatic in social situations, (e) It is tenuous to argue that agency attributions are enacted in angry aggression, but absent in anger elicitation. (f) The contextualized meanings of expressive movements, rather than movements themselves, elicit emotion, (g) Expressions may be better seen as constituents than as causes of emotions, (h) Cognitive components of emotion generally come before, not after, eliciting events.     

A four-fold humanity: Margaret Mead and psychological types

Beginning in 1933, while working in New Guinea, Margaret Mead developed her so-called squares hypothesis. Mead never published its terms, though she made a brief comment on it in her autobiography, Blackberry Winter (1972), and the arguments found in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) and the research leading to Balinese Character (Bateson & Mead, 1942) bore its imprint. Beginning with William McDougall's distinction between temperament (innate predispositions) and character (learned organization of habit), Mead articulated a morphological approach to the interplay between biology and culture that yielded four primary and four intermediary personality types. Under specified but not inevitable circumstances, the conscious choices of a given people could render one or another of these types characteristic or predominantly stable within their population, giving each of the other types a definite relation to the dominant type and thereby the cultural ethos of its society. Persons of each type followed a developmental path specific to their type different both from that of other types and in its manifestations given the various relations of the individual's type to the dominant type. Mead's hypothesis was, therefore, a vision of the unity and diversity of a single human species as well as an approach to the differing psychological positioning of individuals in cultures. In examining Mead's hypothesis, this essay also takes up Mead's debts to several leading psychologists (McDougall, C. G. Jung, and Erik Erikson), and (provisionally) how her vision differed from that of Ruth Benedict.     

Change in cognitive capabilities in the oldest old: the effects of proximity to death in genetically related individuals over a 6-year period

Change in cognitive abilities was assessed over a 6-year period in a sample of monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twin pairs (N = 507 individuals), aged 80 and older (mean age = 83.3 years: SD = 3.1). who remained nondemented over the course of the study. Latent growth models (LGMs) show that chronological age and time to death are consistent predictors of decline in measures of memory, reasoning, speed, and verbal abilities. Multivariate LGM analysis resulted in weak and often negative correlations among rates of change between individuals within twin pairs, indicating greater differential change within twin pairs than occurs on average across twin pairs. These findings highlight several challenges for estimating genetic sources of variance in the context of compromised health and mortality-related change.     

Longitudinal analysis of flexibility and reorganization in early adolescence: a dynamic systems study of family interactions

A dynamic systems (DS) approach was used to study changes in the structure of family interactions during the early adolescent transition period. Longitudinal observational data were collected in 5 waves prior to, during, and after the transition. Boys (n = 149 families) were videotaped problem solving with their parents at 9-10 years old and every 2 years thereafter until they were 18 years old State space grids (a new DS method) were constructed for all families across all waves. Two variables indexing the variability of the family interactions were derived from the grids. As hypothesized, the DS variables revealed a significant quadratic effect related to a peak in variability at 13-14 years of age.     

Testing different interpretations for the mistaken belief that rays exit the eyes during vision

Research has shown that children and adults believe that emissions from the eye occur during the act of vision. Such beliefs are similar to ancient extramission theories of perception. In Study 1, the authors tested the idea that extramission beliefs might stem from people's thinking about what might occur during vision as opposed to what is necessary for seeing. Training participants to think about what is necessary for vision, however, had no effect on extramission responses. The results of Study 2 indicated that emphasizing the idea of visual input led to a decline in extramission responses and supported the hypothesis that extramission notions stem from the outer-oriented phenomenology of vision.