Did I turn off the gas? Reality monitoring of everyday actions

Failing to remember whether we performed, or merely imagined performing, an everyday action can occasionally be inconvenient, but in some circumstances it can have potentially dangerous consequences. In this fMRI study, we investigated the brain activity patterns, and objective and subjective behavioral measures, associated with recollecting such everyday actions. We used an ecologically valid “reality-monitoring” paradigm in which participants performed, or imagined performing, specified actions with real objects drawn from one of two boxes. Lateral brain areas, including prefrontal cortex, were active when participants recollected both the actions that had been associated with objects and the locations from which they had been drawn, consistent with a general role in source recollection. By contrast, medial prefrontal and motor regions made more specific contributions, with supplementary motor cortex activity being associated with recollection decisions about actions but not locations, and medial prefrontal cortex exhibiting greater activity when remembering performed rather than imagined actions. These results support a theoretical interpretation of reality monitoring that entails the fine-grained discrimination between multiple forms of internally and externally generated information.     

Managerial motivational profiles: Composition,antecedents, and consequences

Using a person-centered approach, we identified managers' (N = 321) motivational profiles and tested a model of the antecedents and consequences of these profiles. The profiles were based on four motivational types delineated by self-determination theory (i.e., external, introjected, identified, intrinsic). Latent profile analysis revealed six distinct motivational profiles. One of these was a self-determined profile (high identified and intrinsic motivation, moderately low introjected motivation, and low external motivation). Four other profiles combined average levels of external motivation with either very low, low, moderately low, or high internal (i.e., introjected, identified, and intrinsic) motivation. The final profile involved moderately high levels of all four motives. The antecedents of profile membership examined were perceived supervisor support and perceived organizational politics. The career-related outcomes of profile membership were work attitudes and promotability. The self-determined and high internal motivation profiles were associated with the most favorable work attitudes, followed by the moderately high motivation profile. The low internal motivation profiles were associated with the least favorable attitudes. Promotability did not differ across the profiles. With respect to the antecedents, low levels of supervisor support and high levels of politics increased the odds that a manager would exhibit profiles that were less desirable than the self-determined profile. Our findings provide initial information about managers' motivational profiles, as well as the antecedents and consequences of these profiles. Further, these results demonstrate the promise of a person-centered approach for advancing motivation research and management development.     

INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE PERPETRATED BY COLLEGE WOMEN WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF A HISTORY OF VICTIMIZATION

Using a longitudinal design, the current study explored intimate partner violence perpetration among 1,300 college women within the context of one's history of physical and sexual victimization across 4 years of college. Structural equation modeling indicated that sexual victimization does not predict concurrent use of women's intimate partner violence but does predict subsequent use of women's intimate partner violence during the later years of college. In contrast, physical victimization is associated positively with concurrent use of women's intimate partner violence but is negatively associated with subsequent use of women's intimate partner violence for women. Furthermore, the negative relationship of victimization to subsequent perpetration primarily is due to those with high levels of victimization histories. The present study provides the first model of intimate partner violence within the context of victimization history using longitudinal data. The findings indicate that women's intimate partner violence perpetration is not context-free, but rather is influenced by their own physical and sexual victimization histories.     

Conducting and interpreting canonical correlation analysis in personality research: a user-friendly primer

The purpose of this article is to reduce potential statistical barriers and open doors to canonical correlation analysis (CCA) for applied behavioral scientists and personality researchers. CCA was selected for discussion, as it represents the highest level of the general linear model (GLM) and can be rather easily conceptualized as a method closely linked with the more widely understood Pearson r correlation coefficient. An understanding of CCA can lead to a more global appreciation of other univariate and multivariate methods in the GLM. We attempt to demonstrate CCA with basic language, using technical terminology only when necessary for understanding and use of the method. We present an entire example of a CCA analysis using SPSS (Version 11.0) with personality data.     

Pro-norm and anti-norm deviance within and between groups

Participants evaluated other individuals who deviated in either an anti- or pro-normative direction relative to normative members. In Study 1, in-group gender-normative members were rated more positively than deviant members. The pro-norm deviant was viewed as more attractive than the anti-norm deviant. In Study 2 anti-norm in-group deviants were evaluated more negatively than anti-norm out-group deviants even though both held identical attitudes. In both studies, despite objective equivalence, pro-norm deviance was perceived as less "atypical" than anti-norm deviance. Judgments and reactions to deviance depend on group membership and the direction of deviance, not just its magnitude. Evaluations of deviants are also related to perceivers' identification with their own group. These findings are consistent with our model of subjective group dynamics.     

Children's serial recall errors: implications for theories of short-term memory development

Three experiments examined developmental changes in serial recall of lists of 6 letters, with errors classified as movements, omissions, intrusions, or repetitions. In Experiments 1 and 2, developmental differences between groups of children aged from 7 to 11 years and adults were found in the pattern of serial recall errors. The errors of older participants were more likely to be movements than were those of younger participants, who made more intrusions and omissions. The number of repetition errors did not change with age, and this finding is interpreted in terms of a developmentally invariant postoutput response inhibition process. This interpretation was supported by the findings of Experiment 3, which measured levels of response inhibition in 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds by comparing recall of lists with and without repeated items. Response inhibition remained developmentally invariant, although older children showed greater response facilitation (improved correct recall of adjacent repeated items). Group differences in the patterns of other errors are accounted for in terms of developmental changes in levels of output forgetting and changes in the efficiency of temporal encoding processes.     

Effects of Right- and Left-Hemisphere Damage on Understanding Conversational Implicatures

Processing of implicatures was examined in 27 right-brain-damaged (RBD) and 31 left-brain-damaged (LBD) stroke patients with focal lesions using a new implicatures battery (IB) as part of an exploration of the neural basis and modularity of natural language pragmatics. Following Grice, we sampled implicatures of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Verbal implicatures consisted of two-sentence conversational vignettes which are literally problematic. Nonverbal implicatures consisted mostly of famous paintings that are literally problematic (e.g., Magritte's "Le Domain d'Arnheim"). The patient has to identify and solve the problem. To compare with performance on the IB, patients also received a Hebrew adaptation of Gardner and Brownell's Right Hemisphere Communication Battery, a new test of basic speech acts (verbal and nonverbal assertions, questions, requests, and commands), a Hebrew version of the Western Aphasia Battery, and standardized neuropsychological tests. Both LBD and RBD patients were significantly impaired in implicature processing relative to age-matched normal controls. In general, both patient groups showed weak correlations of implicatures with extents of lesions in left perisylvian language area or its right-hemisphere (RH) homolog. However, performance of LBD and RBD patients on the IB revealed different patterns of correlations with other pragmatic, language, and nonlanguage tests. In LBD patients, there was a greater association between performance on verbal and nonverbal implicatures and between performance on implicatures and basic speech acts than in RBD patients. Given the different modes in which right-and left-hemisphere (LH) damage affect the processing of conversational implicatures, it remains to be discovered how the two hemispheres interact to process natural language pragmatics in the normal brain in real time.     

The wounded male persona and the mysterious feminine in the poetry of James Wright: a study in the transformation of the self

James Wright's work is multilayered. Taken as a whole, which Annie Wright's beautiful compilation, Above the River, allows one to do, Wright's poems (as well as his masterful "prose poems") have a pattern akin to a mythic cycle. "Mythemes" (Lévi-Strauss, 1979) recur as dialectic opposites from one poem to another, whether the abandoned male and mysterious woman, humankind and nature, blindness and seeing, secrets and revelation. Suggestive and symbolic forms such as birds, horses, earth, sky, the destitute, rivers, and adolescence weave themselves throughout in inner and outer "landscapes" of images and experiential moments. There is a frequent shift of "gestalts" between the inner world and external reality. Such a "blooming, buzzing confusion" of internal and external referents might appear to be psychotic and imply a loss of "reality testing." Chassaguet-Smirgel (1988), citing Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as an example, contended that the artist narrowly averts psychosis by transforming it into a work of art. Surrealists, for whom the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was an important figure (cf. Sarup, 1992, pp. 17-27), elevated psychosis to the status of art, and Wright has been considered to be a surrealistic poet, although he himself denied such an affiliation. Hall (Wright, 1990, Introduction, pp. xxiii-xxxvii) suggests that Wright, in addition to an extensive history of alcoholism, from which he seemed to recover towards the end of his life, suffered from a major mental illness, which included episodes of severe depression, hospitalizations, and at least one suicide attempt. The severity of the asceticism and the extreme damage to the self in some Wright's work suggests their roots in early traumatic experiences. (A terribly damaged yet heroic personage, whose disfigurement perhaps symbolizes the poet's trauma, is "Hook" [ATR, pp. 315-316], about a man who gives his last few cents to the poet with a hook replacing his amputated hand.) Not enough is known about Wright's childhood to attempt to reconstruct such a trauma, and a definitive biography is long overdue. (Wright died in 1980). However, the concept of "soul murder" as used by Shengold (1989) with respect to psychological trauma does seem pertinent. For example, Wright's powerful identification with the downtrodden, and especially with certain murderers (Doty, Judas) echoes the paranoiac Schreber's identification with his abusive father as "soul murderer": "I, myself, have been 'represented' as the one who had committed soul murder" (Shengold, 1989, p. 22, quoting Schreber). Certainly, the theme of damage to the self is prominent in Wright, and the poet's striving for reparation, restitution, and the restoration of lost goodness is not only characteristic of Melanie Klein's "depressive position" (Segal, 1980, pp. 76-89), which she saw as a normal developmental process, but also of the character structures of profoundly traumatized individuals. In addition, the rapid, "leaping" shifts of imagery in Wright's poems bear some resemblance to the shifts in mood and the dissociated and "autohypnotic" states (Shengold, 1989, pp. 138-154) of posttraumatic stress and related disorders. However much that may be the case, Wright's work moves toward healing and integration, and forces us to reconsider the psychoanalytic shibboleth that all that represents a lack of distinctiveness between self and other is pathological. This assumption denies the richness of that part of the psyche which originates in the symbiotic union of mother and infant. Wright's work does not so much force us to doubt our own perceptions of reality as it gently yet forthrightly guides us into other realms where feeling and thought are in dialogue, where the uniquely human and the universal mythos converge, and where--perhaps most importantly--possibility and transformation are imminent. The abandoned male persona and the mysterious feminine are part of that world, that cosmos, that Wright has cr