Familiarity enhances visual working memory for faces

Although it is intuitive that familiarity with complex visual objects should aid their preservation in visual working memory (WM), empirical evidence for this is lacking. This study used a conventional change-detection procedure to assess visual WM for unfamiliar and famous faces in healthy adults. Across experiments, faces were upright or inverted and a low- or high-load concurrent verbal WM task was administered to suppress contribution from verbal WM. Even with a high verbal memory load, visual WM performance was significantly better and capacity estimated as significantly greater for famous versus unfamiliar faces. Face inversion abolished this effect. Thus, neither strategic, explicit support from verbal WM nor low-level feature processing easily accounts for the observed benefit of high familiarity for visual WM. These results demonstrate that storage of items in visual WM can be enhanced if robust visual representations of them already exist in long-term memory.     

Racial Identity Development in Middle School: A Case for School Counselor Individual and Systemic Intervention

In middle school, counselors should promote optimal development as students navigate the formative stage of puberty. A search for identity is an important developmental task in early adolescence, but school counselors often neglect racial identity development. Through an actual case of an 8th‐grade student, both individual and systemic strategies that can promote racial identity development are highlighted.     

Happiness in shrinking cities in Germany

After decades of urban growth, modern societies now face an increasing number of shrinking cities. What is the impact on the inhabitants of shrinkage of their city? Negative effects dominate in the public discourse, but does growth or shrinkage really matter for the livability in urban environment? In this paper, I take stock of the effect on subjective well-being in present day Germany. Overall satisfaction with life appears not to be lower in shrinking cities and satisfaction with several domains of life even higher. This is not because inhabitants are unaware of the situation of their city, since they appear to be more concerned about job-chances and crime.     

The Developmental Mentoring Relationship Between Academic Women

This exploratory study focused on the needs and attributes that female doctoral students, during their academic and professional careers, seek in mentoring relationships with female faculty. Two domains—personal and professional—were identified as essential components in the developmental mentoring relationship. As a result, the Rheineck Mentoring Model was created.     

Reclaiming Embodiment within Critical Psychology: A Material‐Discursive Analysis of the Menopausal Body

Social and Critical Psychology have been accused of ‘disembodying’ the discipline through the negation of embodied experience. In contrast, Bio‐Medicine and Biological Psychology focus on the body, within a realist framework. A material‐discursive approach, and a critical‐realist epistemology, is proposed as a way forward to examine embodiment in a socio‐cultural context, wherein the materiality of the body is recognised, but always mediated by culture, language, and subjectivity. As a case example, women's experience of embodied change at menopause is examined. The bio‐medical positioning of the menopausal body as the site of disease, distress, and debilitation, necessitating medical management, is contrasted with women's reports of minimal distress, and effective negotiation of midlife changes. Cultural context, relational factors and the positioning of embodied changes as symptoms, or as natural, are key factors determining women's coping. This material‐discursive approach thus allows us to ‘re‐embody’ psychology and move beyond the mind–body divide.     

A Factor Structure of Wellness: Theory,Assessment, Analysis,and Practice

The Wheel of Wellness, a theoretical model of well‐being, incorporates 16 dimensions of healthy functioning that can be assessed using the Wellness Evaluation of Lifestyle (WEL; J. E. Myers, T. J. Sweeney, & J. M. Witmer, 1998). A series of studies are reported concerning the development and validation of the WEL based on a large database. In the current study, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the items and scales revealed 5 primary factors of well‐being (Creative, Coping, Social, Essential, and Physical) and 1 superordinate factor identified as “Wellness.”     

Post‐September 11th Perspectives on Religion,Spirituality, and Philosophy in the Personal and Professional Lives of Selected REBT Cognoscenti: A Response to My Colleagues

This is a discussion and evaluation of the views of the authors of the article “Post‐September 11th Perspectives on Religion, Spirituality, and Philosophy in the Personal and Professional Lives of Selected REBT Cognoscenti.” Several of the authors are shown to endorse most of the main principles and practices of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) but also to hold some of its important views on unconditional self‐acceptance and unconditional other‐acceptance lightly and inconsistently.