Cultural myopia: The need for a corrective lens

The Office for Civil Rights on May 25, 1970, issued a Memorandum to school districts designed to prohibit discrimination against national origin minority children which results from a failure school districts to the recognize the differing linguistic characteristics and cultural identify of such children in the planning and operation of education programs. Specifically, the Memorandum prohibits the assignment of children to classes for the mentally retarded on the basis of criteria which essentially measure or evaluate English language skkills. A task group was appointed by the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to develop educational policy to implement this antidiscrimination provision.This task group recommended that additional policies be developed by the Office for Civil Rights to notify adequately school districts and members of the general public of the types of discriminatory practices that might be occuring and to set forth model procedures which school districts could follow in an effort to eliminate discriminatory practices which might currently exist. This paper discusses those procedures recommended by the committee.     

Olfaction and emotion: The case of autobiographical memory

This study investigated (1) the influence of verbal and conceptual processing on the retrieval and phenomenological evaluation of olfactory evoked memories, and (2) whether the experienced qualities of retrieved information are affected by olfactory exposure per se. Seventy-two older adults were randomized into one of three cue conditions (odor only, name only, or odor name) and asked to relate any autobiographical event for the given cue. The results indicated that semantic knowledge of an odor's name significantly affects the age distribution of memories such that the memory peak in childhood observed for odors only was attenuated. Also, experiential factors such as pleasantness and feelings of being brought back in time were lower when odors were presented with their respective names. Olfactory evoked memories were associated with a higher emotional arousal that could not be accounted for by the perceptual stimulation alone. Taken together, the overall pattern of findings suggests that retrieval of olfactory evoked information is sensitive to semantic and conceptual processing, and that odor-evoked representations are more emotional than memories triggered by verbal information.     

Sex-role orientation as related to psychological and physiological responses during achievement and orthostatic stress

The Bem sex-role inventory was used to select, from an Irish student population, females and males who differed with regard to feminine and masculine personality characteristics. Four groups were established for each sex: (1) subjects with low scores in both femininity and masculinity, i.e., undifferentiated subjects; (2) subjects with high scores in both femininity and masculinity, i.e., androgynous subjects; (3) subjects with high scores in femininity and low scores in masculinity; (4) subjects with high scores in masculinity and low scores in femininity. The Cattell 16 PF scale showed that the undifferentiated groups were more reserved and detached and more cautious and taciturn than the androgynous groups. Each subject was exposed to mental stress in one session and orthostatic stress in another session. Mental stress was induced by five different intellectual performance tests. Males and females differed significantly only on a test of perceptual speed, with females performing better than males, as expected. The group of androgynous females was superior to all other groups on four of the five performance tasks. The group of androgynous males was not superior in terms of objective performance but reported feeling more confident andThis collaboration was made possible by a twinning grant to Dr. John Cullen and Professor Marianne Frankenhaeuser from the European Training Programme in Brain and Behaviour Research, European Science Foundation. Financial support was also obtained by grants from the Swedish Medical Research Council (Project No. 997) and the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. satisfied with their performance than most other groups, particularly the undifferentiated males. Blood pressure and heart rate were significantly elevated in all groups during both stress conditions. Heart rate was significantly higher in the high-femininity and androgynous females than in the other female groups.     

Life Satisfaction in Persons with Late Effects of Polio

To assess satisfaction with life as a whole and with ten domains of life satisfaction in Swedish persons with late effects of polio, to describe the relationship with sex, age, marital status, use of mobility aids and self-perceived needs of instrumental support, and to compare the level of life satisfaction with a Swedish reference sample. A cross-sectional study of 160 persons with verified late effects of polio answered a postal questionnaire including the Life Satisfaction Questionnaire (LiSat-11). A majority were to some degree satisfied with life as a whole and with all the ten domains of life satisfaction. Satisfaction with life as whole was not related to any of the sociodemographic or disability related factors and these factors had few relations to the ten domains of life satisfaction. The respondents were significantly less satisfied with life as a whole and with vocation, leisure, sexual life, activities of daily living, and somatic and psychological health compared to the Swedish reference sample, but were significantly more satisfied with economy and contacts with friends. Men and women with late effects of polio, regardless of age, marital status or disability, can experience a reduced life satisfaction. This emphasises the need to identify potential gaps between these persons’ aspirations and achievements in life and carry out appropriate rehabilitation interventions to enhance their life satisfaction.     

Sex and age-related anxiety in a community sample of Norwegian adolescents

The first aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of anxiety and DSM-related anxiety symptom-clusters among adolescents (13-19 years of age) in middle Norway. A second aim was to examine the developmental trajectories of anxiety symptoms for boys and girls during adolescence. In a cross-sectional study, 1,802 students in junior high schools and high schools in the Mid-Norway Health Region filled out a questionnaire (a response-rate of 77%) including the SCARED self-report form (Birmaher et al., 1997) during one school hour. In line with findings of previous studies, girls reported higher anxiety-levels than did boys. A large gender-specific increase in anxiety in 14-15-year-old girls was also found. Apart from this age-specific effect, the results indicated a general reduction in anxiety during adolescence for all symptom groups except generalized anxiety and school phobia. The high anxiety levels in girls aged 13 to 14 years implicate a need for caution by clinicians because such high anxiety levels may be mistaken for the existence of an anxiety disorder. The rapid increase in anxiety symptoms among girls in early adolescence may reflect a heightened sensitivity in this age group, and may have implications for when to implement secondary prevention programs.     

Social outcomes in childhood brain disorder: a heuristic integration of social neuroscience and developmental psychology

The authors propose a heuristic model of the social outcomes of childhood brain disorder that draws on models and methods from both the emerging field of social cognitive neuroscience and the study of social competence in developmental psychology/psychopathology. The heuristic model characterizes the relationships between social adjustment, peer interactions and relationships, social problem solving and communication, social-affective and cognitive-executive processes, and their neural substrates. The model is illustrated by research on a specific form of childhood brain disorder, traumatic brain injury. The heuristic model may promote research regarding the neural and cognitive-affective substrates of children's social development. It also may engender more precise methods of measuring impairments and disabilities in children with brain disorder and suggest ways to promote their social adaptation.     

The Role of Individual Differences in the Accuracy of Confidence Judgments

Generally, self-assessment of accuracy in the cognitive domain produces overconfidence, whereas self-assessment of visual perceptual judgments results in under-confidence. Despite contrary empirical evidence, in models attempting to explain those phenomena, individual differences have often been disregarded. The authors report on 2 studies in which that shortcoming was addressed. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 520) completed a large number of cognitive-ability tests. Results indicated that individual differences provide a meaningful source of overconfidence and that a metacognitive trait might mediate that effect. In further analysis, there was only a relatively small correlation between test accuracy and confidence bias. In Experiment 2 (N = 107 participants), both perceptual and cognitive ability tests were included, along with measures of personality. Results again indicated the presence of a confidence factor that transcended the nature of the testing vehicle. Furthermore, a small relationship was found between that factor and some self-reported personality measures. Thus, personality traits and cognitive ability appeared to play only a small role in determining the accuracy of self-assessment. Collectively, the present results suggest that there are multiple causes of miscalibration, which current models of over- and underconfidence fail to encompass.     

Models of high-dimensional semantic space predict language-mediated eye movements in the visual world

In the visual world paradigm, participants are more likely to fixate a visual referent that has some semantic relationship with a heard word, than they are to fixate an unrelated referent [Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language. A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 813-839]. Here, this method is used to examine the psychological validity of models of high-dimensional semantic space. The data strongly suggest that these corpus-based measures of word semantics predict fixation behavior in the visual world and provide further evidence that language-mediated eye movements to objects in the concurrent visual environment are driven by semantic similarity rather than all-or-none categorical knowledge. The data suggest that the visual world paradigm can, together with other methodologies, converge on the evidence that may help adjudicate between different theoretical accounts of the psychological semantics.     

A chronometric study of mental addition in profoundly deaf children

In attempting to account for inferior mathematical attainment among deaf children of all ages, some researchers have proposed that observed deficits may be partly the result of an absence of vocalization and subvocalization in the acquisition and execution of arithmetic by the deaf. When performing mental arithmetic, hearing children, it is claimed, rely on covert counting mechanisms based on internalized speech, while their deaf counterparts, due to a lack of articulatory prowess, are unable to utilize such mechanisms and instead are forced to adopt other less effective methods based on associative retrieval of arithmetical facts from long-term memory. The present study sought to throw light on these assertions. Ten prelingually profoundly deaf 12-13-year-olds, and 10 hearing controls were required to solve the 100 simple addition combinations. Analysis of response times revealed strong similarities between the two groups, with all children appearing to employ mechanisms based on covert counting. Implications of the present results are discussed in the light of previous findings.