Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

The GRIMS. A psychometric instrument for the assessment of marital discord

Research in marital therapy has been disadvantaged by the lack of a good, short and recent psychometric questionnaire to objectively assess the state of a marriage for research, demographic and clinical purposes. The Golombok Rust Inventory of Marital State (GRIMS) is a companion questionnaire to the Golombok Rust Inventory of Sexual Satisfaction (GRISS), and concentrates on aspects other than the sexual in a dyadic relationship between two adults living together. It is a 28 item psychometrically constructed inventory designed to produce a single scale along which changes in a marriage may develop as marital therapy progresses. It has been shown to be valid for this purpose, and to have a good reliability.     

Proactive interference plays a role in the word-length effect

The word-length effect is the advantage that lists of short words show over lists of long words in immediate recall. Typically, the word-length effect is used as strong support for decay-based theories of immediate retention. However, the present two experiments show that the traditional word-length effect emerges only after several trials in an experimental session, a result reminiscent of earlier findings in distractor-based short-term forgetting experiments. These results suggest that any complete account of the word-length effect will need to consider a role for proactive interference.     

The use of the occupational stress indicator (OSI) in factory workers in China

The purpose of the study was to investigate occupational stress among Chinese factory workers (N=342), from three cities of South East China, using the shortened version of the Occupational Stress Indicator (OSI)-2. The results showed that the reliabilities and predictive validity of the OSI-2 subscales and other subscales used for the study were reasonably high. Quite a high percentage of workers perceived high work pressure. The main sources of stress were intrinsic to the job; and the coping strategies that were most frequently used to tackle stress were “control” methods. In addition, “satisfaction on environmental condition” seemed to be a common predictor for job satisfaction, and mental and physical well-being. The logical relationships between job satisfaction, mental well-being and physical well-being in Chinese workers have provided support to the findings obtained in Western countries.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Stimulus-independent thought depends on central executive resources

Stimulus-independent thoughts (SITs) are streams of thoughts and images unrelated to immediate sensory input. Four experiments examined the contribution of aspects of working memory to production of SITs. In Experiments 1 and 2, interventions that were targeted on, respectively, phonological and visuospatial components of working memory both interfered with production of SITs, but there was evidence that these tasks also made demands on central executive resources. Experiments 3 and 4 specifically examined the hypothesis that production of SITs and control of nonproceduralized tasks both depend on central executive resources, and so should show mutual interference. In Experiment 3, prior practice on pursuit rotor and memory tasks reduced the interference with SITs from concurrent task performance. In Experiment 4, randomness within a task involving random-number generation was less when SITs were being produced concurrently than it was when they were not. The results suggest that production of SITs depends on central executive resources.     

Reflexive research and the grounding of analysis: Social psychology and the psy-complex

This paper is concerned with reflexivity in research, and the way research is grounded in the operations of the psy-complex in social psychology. A central argument is that qualitative research in general, and a focus on reflexivity in particular, requires theoretical grounding. Distinctions are drawn between ‘uncomplicated subjectivity’, ‘blank subjectivity’ and ‘complex subjectivity’; and the analytic device of the ‘discursive complex’ is described. It is argued that such theoretical grounding can usefully draw on developments in discourse analytic, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic social research. The opposition between objectivity and subjectivity is deconstructed, and psychoanalytic conceptual reference points for an understanding of the discursive construction of complex subjectivity in the context of institutions are explored with particular reference to the location of the researcher in the psy-complex. The paper discusses the reflexive engagement of the researcher with data, and the construction of the identity of the researcher with reference to professional bodies. An analysis of a document produced by the British Psychological Society is presented to illustrate conceptual issues addressed in the first sections. This illustrative analysis is designed to show how the material is structured by a series of six discursive complexes, and that the institutional structure facilitates, and inhibits, certain forms of action and reflection.