MMPI characteristics of professional prostitutes: a cross-cultural replication

The personality characteristics of 41 professional prostitutes in Brussels, Belgium, were examined using either a French- or a Flemish-language version of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). A comparison group of 96 nonprostitute women was recruited from among employees of an international airline. Age differences within the prostitute group were also examined. In some contrast to prior research findings, the prostitute group was significantly more deviant on several indicators of psychopathology. Also, older prostitutes were more deviant than younger ones. An appreciable number of the women in this profession are in need of psychological treatment.     

Is supernatural belief unreliably formed?

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - I criticize 5 arguments for the conclusion that religious belief is unreliably formed and hence epistemically tainted. The arguments draw on...     

Attentive processing of threat and adult attachment: a dot-probe study

We examined selective attention to threat stimuli as a function of individual differences in adult attachment. Participants completed a dot-probe task in which a general threat word, attachment-related threat word, general positive or attachment-related positive word was presented together with a neutral word. Results showed that attachment anxiety and avoidance were associated with an attentional bias away from attachment threat words. This attentional avoidance effect was best predicted by the interaction between attachment anxiety and avoidance and not by their unique main effects. The findings are discussed in terms of attachment theory and its relation to attentional biases observed in psychopathology.     

Desire for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in palliative cancer care.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the attitudes of terminally ill individuals toward the legalization of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and to identify those who would personally desire such a death. DESIGN: In the Canadian National Palliative Care Survey, semistructured interviews were administered to 379 patients who were receiving palliative care for cancer. Patients who expressed a desire for physician-hastened death were followed prospectively. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Attitudes toward the legalization of euthanasia or PAS were determined, as was the personal interest in receiving a hastened death. Demographic and clinical characteristics were also recorded, including a 22-item structured interview of symptoms and concerns. RESULTS: There were 238 participants (62.8%) who believed that euthanasia and/or PAS should be legalized, and 151 (39.8%) who would consider making a future request for a physician-hastened death. However, only 22 (5.8%) reported that, if legally permissible, they would initiate such a request right away, in their current situations. This desire for hastened death was associated with lower religiosity (p=.010), reduced functional status (p=.024), a diagnosis of major depression (p<.001), and greater distress on 12 of 22 individual symptoms and concerns (p<.025). In follow-up interviews with 17 participants, 2 (11.8%) showed instability in their expressed desire. CONCLUSION: Among patients receiving palliative care for cancer, the desire to receive euthanasia or PAS is associated with religious beliefs; functional status; and physical, social, and psychological symptoms and concerns. Although this desire is sometimes transitory, once firmly established, it can be enduring.     

On the nature of the affective priming effect: Effects of stimulus onset asynchrony and congruency proportion in naming and evaluative categorization

In line with the hypothesis that affective priming of evaluative categorization responses is based on processes that operate at a response selection stage, it has been observed that increasing the proportion of congruent trials brings about increased affective priming effects at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) in the evaluative categorization task. In the present study, we orthogonally manipulated the congruency proportion (.25, .50, and .75) and the SOA (0, 200, and 1,000 msec) in the evaluative categorization task and a naming task. Results showed that at both short and long SOAs, the affective priming effect in the evaluative categorization task was influenced by the congruency proportion. In contrast, affective priming effects in the naming task were unaffected by the congruency proportion at short SOAs. This pattern of results provides corroborating evidence for the hypotheses (1) that different processes underlie the affective priming effect in the evaluative categorization task and the naming task and (2) that valenced stimuli can automatically preactivate the memory representations of other, affectively related stimuli.     

The multiple vigilance test

The multiple vigilance test is a 30-min signal detection task designed to assess performance. Sixty target and 180 nontarget stimuli are presented with random interstimulus intervals ranging from 4 to 11 sec. Subjects respond by pressing the spacebar (or microswitch in an alternate version of the program) when they see the masking pattern transformed into the target. This vigilance test is used in conjunction with measures of physiological sleepiness (Multiple Sleep Latency Test) and subjective sleepiness (Stanford Sleepiness Scale). This behavioral information concerning manifest sleepiness provides a more complete picture of a subject’s state of alertness. The assessment of vigilance during long, monotonous, nonstimulating tasks is clinically important in patients with disorders of sleep and arousal.     

Word associations: Norms for 1,424 Dutch words in a continuous task

This study describes the collection of a large set of word association norms. In a continuous word association task, norms for 1,424 Dutch words were gathered. For each cue, three association responses were obtained per participant. In total, an average of 268 responses were collected for each cue. We investigated the relationship with similar procedures, such as discrete association tasks and exemplar generation tasks. The results show that the use of a continuous task allows the study of weaker associations in comparison with a discrete task. The effects of the continuous tasks were investigated for set size and the availability characteristics of the responses, measured through word frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability. Finally, we compared our findings to those of a semantically constrained version of the association task in which participants generated responses within the domain of a semantic category. Results of this comparison are discussed. The Appendix cited in this article is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Driven from distraction: how infants respond to parents' attempts to elicit and re-direct their attention

This experiment examined how parents' verbal and non-verbal behavioral cues cause infants to shift and share attention within environments where many objects compete for infants' attention. Fifteen- and 21-month-old infants played with toys while their parent periodically shifted attention to a distal object within a larger array. Parents' attention-shifts were indicated by a change in direction of gaze, a pointing gesture, and/or verbalizations. Verbalizations were either attention-eliciting or attention-directing. In some trials parents covered their eyes to occlude line-of-gaze. Both ages seldom followed simple gaze shifts, but frequently followed gaze with-points or gaze-with-directing verbalizations. Attention-eliciting verbalizations increased infants' looks to the parent. Gaze occlusion reduced infants' responses to directing verbalizations. Responses to eliciting verbalizations increased with age. Infant receptive vocabulary did not predict attention-sharing, even when parents named objects (i.e., directing verbalizations). Implications for development of attention-sharing, language and understanding of visual attention are discussed.