International career articles: A content analysis of four journals across 34 years

This study included a review and content analysis of international career articles published in four major U.S. vocational/career journals over a 34-year time period. Three hundred and twenty-six articles were identified, constituting 2.4% of the total number of articles published in these journals during this time. The results showed an increasing number of international career articles being published over time and that most of them are empirically based, with adult professionals as the most common sample type. The two most common content areas identified were Career Issues Related to a Specific Culture, Country, or Population and Academic and Vocational Attitudes. Further, a substantial amount of these publications originated from institutions in Israel. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.     

Black Women and White Women: Do Perceptions of Childhood Family Environment Differ?

INTRODUCTION: Few studies have examined racial differences in perceptions of childhood. Little is known about how Blacks perceive their own families, particularly the family environment that they experienced in childhood. METHODS: A community sample of 290 women (55% White, 45% Black) from two-parent families, heterogeneous in age and social class, was examined using a self-administered questionnaire, including the Family Environment Scale (FES), followed by a focused interview. Siblings were used as collateral informants. RESULTS: The psychometric properties of the FES showed remarkably little variation by race: The internal scale reliability, correlations between scales, and factor structures were quite similar. Although both White and Black women reported good childhood family environments, Black women when compared with White women rated their families of origin as more cohesive, organized, and expressive, and lower in conflict. Sibling responses corroborated these findings. DISCUSSION: This study addresses a gap in the research literature and provides important evidence of strengths in Black family relationships as reported by a community sample of women. The psychometric properties of the FES, found to be strong for families of both races, lends support to our findings and those of other researchers who have used this measure.     

Remembering object position in the absence of vision: egocentric, allocentric, and egocentric decentred frames of reference

In three experiments we examined whether memory for object locations in the peri-personal space in the absence of vision is affected by the correspondence between encoding and test either of the body position or of the reference point. In particular, the study focuses on the distinction between different spatial representations, by using a paradigm in which participants are asked to relocate objects explored haptically. Three frames of reference were systematically compared. In experiment 1, participants relocated the objects either from the same position of learning by taking as reference their own body (centred egocentric condition) or from a 90 degrees decentred position (allocentric condition). Performance was measured in terms of linear distance errors and angular distance errors. Results revealed that the allocentric condition was more difficult than the centred egocentric condition. In experiment 2, participants performed either the centred egocentric condition or a decentred egocentric condition, in which the body position during the test was the same as at encoding (egocentric) but the frame of reference was based on a point decentred by 90 degrees. The decentred egocentric condition was found to be more difficult than the centred egocentric condition. Finally, in experiment 3, participants performed in the decentred egocentric condition or the allocentric condition. Here, the allocentric condition was found to be more difficult than the decentred egocentric condition. Taken together, the results suggest that also in the peripersonal space and in the absence of vision different frames of reference can be distinguished. In particular, the decentred egocentric condition involves a frame of reference which seems to be neither allocentric nor totally egocentric.     

Beliefs in Equality for Women and Men as Related to Economic Factors in Central and Eastern Europe and the United States

Do economic indicators predict the general level of support for gender equality? This question was investigated in a sample of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, a region that has been undergoing rapid economic changes since the early 1990s. In this overall sample of male and female college students from ten countries, including the United States as a comparison, the predicted association between stronger beliefs in gender role egalitarianism and positive economic factors was generally supported. Also, consistent with other research, women were more in support of gender equality than men were. There was no support for a predicted trend in less support for gender equality over the time period of the present study.     

Morris B. Parloff (1918-2011)

Morris B. Parloff was considered an elder statesman in the field of psychotherapy research, and his wisdom and stewardship were of enormous benefit to several generations of psychotherapy researchers. Parloff received his bachelor's degree from Western Reserve University (1940), a degree in psychiatric social work from the University of Chicago (1942), and a doctorate in psychology from Western Reserve University (1953). Parloff spent most of his career (from 1953 until his retirement in 1983) as a researcher and administrator at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). He was also on the senior faculty of the Washington School of Psychiatry, taught or consulted at a number of universities, and maintained a private practice of psychotherapy. In the NIMH intramural program, Parloff was chief of the Section on Personality in the Laboratory of Psychology. There he conducted a major longitudinal study on the personality characteristics of adolescent and adult scientists. In the NIMH extramural program, he served as chief of the Psychotherapy and Behavioral Intervention Section in the Clinical Research Branch (1972-1980), after which he became chief of the new Psychosocial Treatments Research Branch. Throughout his career, from his pioneering teaching and research on group psychotherapy through his 30 years at NIMH, Parloff provided researchers and practitioners with a broad understanding of the field of psychotherapy research, the complexity of its subject matter, and its relationship to the "real world." Often ahead of others in the field, Parloff dealt with many topics that retain their importance today, including the need to carefully define criteria for improvement in psychotherapy, the transmission of values in psychotherapy, the concepts of the placebo and of common factors in psychotherapy research, and the role of the patient-therapist relationship (in both individual and group therapy) and its impact on the outcome of therapy. Starting with a 1979 article in the American Psychologist ("Can Psychotherapy Research Guide the Policymaker? Vol. 34, pp. 296-306), Parloff wrote extensively about the relationship among practitioners, psychotherapy researchers, and policymakers. To promote the systematic use of clinical trials and address methodological issues in the field, Parloff obtained support to fund the first NIMH multisite collaborative outcome study in the field of psychotherapy. He and the first author (I. E.) then designed and launched the NIMH Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Program. This study would serve as a model for future collaborative research by independent investigators. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Dissociating prelexical and postlexical processing of affective information in the two hemispheres: effects of the stimulus presentation format

Using a lexical decision task, the authors investigated whether brain asymmetries in the detection of emotionally negative semantic associations arise only at a perceptually discriminative stage at which lexical analysis is accurate or can already be found at crude and incomplete levels of perceptual representation at which word-nonword discrimination is based solely on guessing. Emotionally negative and neutral items were presented near perceptual threshold in the left and right visual hemifields. Word-nonword discrimination performance as well as the bias to classify a stimulus as a "word" (whether or not it actually is a word) were assessed for a normal, horizontal stimulus presentation format (Experiment 1) and for an unusual, vertical presentation format (Experiment 2). Results show that while the two hemispheres are equally able to detect affective semantic associations at a prelexical processing stage (both experiments), the right hemisphere is superior at a postlexical, perceptually discriminative stage (Experiment 2). Moreover, the findings suggest that only an unusual, nonoverlearned stimulus presentation format allows adequate assessment of the right hemisphere's lexical-semantic skills.     

The influence of belief that a car crashed on witnesses' estimates of civilian and police car speed

The authors performed 2 experiments investigating the influence of the belief that a vehicle crashed on witnesses' estimates of the vehicle's speed. In Experiment 1, participants saw a video of a civilian car being driven, after which they were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions. The 1st group was told that the vehicle subsequently crashed; the 2nd group was not told that the vehicle crashed. The results indicted no differences between the 2 groups on a number of factors, including estimates of the vehicle's speed. Experiment 2 was identical except that the video showed a police car using flashing lights and sirens. Participants who had been told that the car had crashed overestimated speed, the likelihood of a crash, and the likelihood of someone being killed. Participants who were not told that the vehicle crashed estimated the speed of the vehicle accurately. Confidence in their estimates of speed was not significantly different between the 2 groups. Results are discussed with regard to police investigations of road accidents.     

Course of relational and non-relational recognition memory across the adult lifespan

Human recognition memory shows a decline during normal ageing, which is thought to be related to age-associated dysfunctions of mediotemporal lobe structures. Whether the hippocampus is critical for human general relational memory or for spatial relational memory only is still disputed. The human perirhinal cortex is thought to be critically involved in non-relational memory, but another view postulates hippocampal involvement in both relational and non-relational memory. Investigating whether there is a differential impact of ageing on these memory processes may shed further light into these issues. Thus, in the present study, 106 healthy adults performed three recognition memory tasks in a consecutive age groups design involving a range from age 20 to 76. This allowed the separate assessment of spatial and nonspatial relational memory as well as non-relational memory. Both spatial and nonspatial relational memory declined in the 66-76 yr group. This pattern is consistent with the presumed course of hippocampal changes across normal ageing and points to the hippocampal role in relational memory in general. An impairment of non-relational memory commenced earlier in the 51-65 yr group. This finding is discussed in relation to perceptual/attentional mediation of memory and its potential brain correlates in ageing.