Media use, face-to-face communication, media multitasking, and social well-being among 8- to 12-year-old girls

An online survey of 3,461 North American girls ages 8-12 conducted in the summer of 2010 through Discovery Girls magazine examined the relationships between social well-being and young girls' media use--including video, video games, music listening, reading/homework, e-mailing/posting on social media sites, texting/instant messaging, and talking on phones/video chatting--and face-to-face communication. This study introduced both a more granular measure of media multitasking and a new comparative measure of media use versus time spent in face-to-face communication. Regression analyses indicated that negative social well-being was positively associated with levels of uses of media that are centrally about interpersonal interaction (e.g., phone, online communication) as well as uses of media that are not (e.g., video, music, and reading). Video use was particularly strongly associated with negative social well-being indicators. Media multitasking was also associated with negative social indicators. Conversely, face-to-face communication was strongly associated with positive social well-being. Cell phone ownership and having a television or computer in one's room had little direct association with children's socioemotional well-being. We hypothesize possible causes for these relationships, call for research designs to address causality, and outline possible implications of such findings for the social well-being of younger adolescents.     

Parallel Group Treatment of Pre-School Children and Their Mothers

Object relations concepts are applicable in children's group psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The author attempts to explore and delineate areas in which developmental conflicts in object relations, emotional deprivations, traumas, and family pathologies are recapitulated in the group, and how the manifestations of pathologies can be rectified by the process and formation of the group and the role of the therapist as a “new object” in the management of individual and group transferences. Clinical examples are presented.     

Assessing MMPI Constructs Through the Measurement of Response Latencies

Responses to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) were assessed with respect to their relevance to schema theory. The relation between scores on self-reported personality dimensions and the speed of processing test items associated with each dimension was examined. With previously derived factor analytic content scales, negative correlations were obtained between scale scores and mean latencies for endorsing relevant items, and positive correlations were found between scale scores and mean latencies for rejecting relevant items. A similar analysis completed on the traditional clinical scales revealed no such pattern. Results were interpreted as supporting the conceptualization of item responding as a content-based, schema-relevant process.     

Lamenting the Golden Age: Love,Labour and Loss in the Collective Memory of Scientists

Abstract

Academic science is often described as having a moral economy underpinned by curiosity, creativity and a love of the subject. It is also described as having a political economy tied to national programmes for socio-economic growth. According to many writers, in recent decades those moral and political economies have become disconnected through greater managerial, audit and commercial practices pervading the academy. Classic ideals of professional norms and ethos have been eroded in these new economically incentivised environments. Biomedical scientists working at a major UK university echoed these sentiments, lamenting a lost ‘golden age’ of science characterised by intellectual freedom, serendipitous discovery and a love of doing science. In practice, their lamentation serves as a myth and expresses a key tension in pursuing science as a job and as a vocation. Playing a performative role in scientists' own self-understanding, the myth not only underwrites scientific identity, but also supports research management by demarcating ‘science’ from the practices that manage, measure and commercialise it. The ‘golden age’ emerges as a significant explanatory narrative in contemporary science. It embodies a moral economy that is detached from its institutional contexts, and thus unable to resolve the inequalities and tensions produced through the political economy that relies on it.     

Modeling the effects of repetitions, similarity, and normative word frequency on old-new recognition and judgments of frequency

Judgments of frequency for targets (old items) and foils (similar; dissimilar) steadily increase as the number of times a target is studied increases, but discrimination of targets from similar foils does not steadily improve, a phenomenon termed registration without learning (D. L. Hintzman & T. Curran, 1995; D. L. Hintzman, T. Curran, & B. Oppy, 1992). The present experiment explores this phenomenon with words of differing normative word frequency. The retrieving-effectively-from-memory model (REM; R. M. Shifrrin & M. Steyvers, 1997, 1998) predicts that low-frequency words will be better recognized than high-frequency words because low-frequency words have more distinctive memory representations. A corollary of this assumption predicts that the typical recognition word-frequency effect will be disrupted when similar foils are tested. These predictions were confirmed, but to fit both the recognition and the judgment-of-frequency data, the authors used a "dual-process" extension of the REM model.     

Do response time limitations counteract the effect of faking on personality inventory validity?

Different models of lying on personality scales make discrepant predictions on the association between faking and item response time. The current research investigated response time restriction as a method for reducing the influence of faking on personality scale validity. In 3 assessment simulations involving 540 university undergraduates responding to 2 common, psychometrically strong personality inventories, no evidence emerged to indicate that limiting respondents' answering time can attenuate the effects of faking on validity. Results were interpreted as failing to support a simple model of personality test item response dissimulation that predicts that lying takes time. Findings were consistent with models implying that lying involves primitive cognitive processing or that lying may be associated with complex processing that includes both primitive responding and cognitive overrides.     

Unexpected findings in a study of visual perception during the naturalistic near-death out-of-body experience

A study (Holden, 1988) of visual perception during the naturalistic near-death out-of-body experience (nND OBE), that aspect of the NDE in which the experiencer seems to view normal physical surroundings from a vantage point outside the physical body, yielded some unexpected findings that contradicted or augmented previous research. The majority of respondents were able to estimate the duration of the nND OBE; a sizable proportion reported delay of recall of the nND OBE; and the vast majority reported receptivity to subsequent verification of nND OBE perceptions. Each of these findings is discussed relative to previous research and analyzed in light of the limitations of the current study. Implications for further research are discussed.     

A confirmatory evaluation of the profile of mood states: Convergent and discriminant item validity

The Profile of Mood States was administered to samples of 182 college males, 179 college females, and 257 prison inmates. College males and females did not differ significantly from each other in terms of scale elevation but differed from prison inmates on all scales except Fatigue-Inertia. The college samples differed from the published normative college samples, suggesting the importance of using local norms. A confirmatory item factor analysis suggested convergent item validity with the scoring key and similarity of structure across samples. Discriminant item validity, however, suggested that a smaller number of mood scales would offer a more justifiable interpretation of this inventory.This study was supported by the Alberta Hospital Edmonton, the Solicitor General of Canada, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant 410-80-0576-XI.