American Indian Secondary School Students' Preferences for Counselors

Researchers examined the importance of similar ethnicity and the preference for a counselor of the same sex among American Indian secondary school students.     

Volatile Reasons

I argue for the existence of a category of practical reasons which I call ‘Deliberation-Volatile Reasons’ or ‘DVRs’. DVRs have the distinguishing feature that their status as reasons for action is diminished when they are weighed in deliberation by the agent. I argue that DVRs are evidence of ‘deliberative blind spots’. I submit that an agent manifests a peculiar kind of practical irrationality in so far as she endeavours to find a deliberative path to what she has reason to do, when the discovery of such a path renders the destination inaccessible.     

Intuitively detecting what is hidden within a visual mask: Familiar–novel discrimination and threat detection for unidentified stimuli

Recognition without identification is the finding that, among recognition test items that go unidentified (as when a word is unidentified from a fragment), participants can discriminate those that were studied from those that were unstudied. In the present study, we extended this phenomenon to the more life-like situation of discriminating known from novel stimuli. Pictures of famous and nonfamous faces (Exp. 1), famous and nonfamous scenes (Exp. 2), and threatening and nonthreatening images (Exp. 3) were filtered in order to impede identification. As in list-learning recognition-without-identification paradigms, participants attempted to identify each image (e.g., whose face it was, what scene it was, or what was in the picture) and rated how familiar the image seemed on a scale of 0 (very unfamiliar) to 10 (very familiar). Among the unidentified stimuli, higher familiarity ratings were given to famous than to nonfamous faces (Exp. 1) and scenes (Exp. 2), and to threatening than to nonthreatening living/animate (but not to nonliving/nonanimate) images (Exp. 3). These findings suggest that even when a stimulus is too occluded to allow for conscious identification, enough information can be processed to allow a sense of familiarity or novelty with it, which appears also to be related to the sense of whether or not a living creature is a threat. That the sense of familiarity for unidentified stimuli may be related to threat detection for living or animate things suggests that it may be an adaptive aspect of human memory.     

Information underpinning anticipation of goal-directed throwing

We identified the information used to anticipate throw direction in handball. In two experiments, we examined how anticipation performance is affected when the information from one of five body areas (right arm, shoulders, hips, trunk, or total throw side) was either neutralized or decoupled from the motion of other body segments. In the first experiment, performance was significantly reduced when information from the throwing arm was neutralized, irrespective of skill levels. Skilled participants were negatively affected when the shoulders, hips, and trunk were neutralized, whereas less-skilled participants showed trends toward improvement under identical conditions. In the second experiment, partially disrupting relative motion via decoupling was not enough to reduce the anticipation performance among skilled participants to chance levels, whereas less-skilled participants lost their ability to anticipate in three conditions. Our findings suggest that skilled and less-skilled participants employ different information extraction strategies, yet information from the throwing arm is critical to anticipation for both groups. The two experiments suggest that relative motion mediated by both the absolute displacement trajectories of individual marker locations and their relative timings are important in informing anticipation, irrespective of skill level.     

Understanding the relationship between posttraumatic stress disorder and trauma cognitions: The impact of thought control strategies

Several models of PTSD suggest that dysfunctional beliefs play an important role in the maintenance of PTSD. This study examined whether thought control strategies intermediated in the relationship between PTSD and dysfunctional cognitions. It was hypothesized that PTSD would be positively associated with dysfunctional cognitions and that negative thought control strategies (worry and self-punishment) would partially account for this relationship. These maladaptive strategies were predicted to be associated with increased levels of PTSD and more trauma-related beliefs. Additionally, it was predicted that positive thought control strategies (social control and reappraisal) would be associated with decreased levels of PTSD and fewer trauma-related beliefs. Finally, because the literature supports distraction as both an adaptive and a maladaptive thought control strategy, no a priori hypothesis was made. Results support worry and self-punishment as maladaptive intervening variables in the association between PTSD and dysfunctional cognitions, resulting in greater levels of PTSD and trauma cognitions. Social control and distraction emerged as adaptive strategies, resulting in lower levels of PTSD and trauma cognitions, while reappraisal showed no relationship with PTSD severity. Although the results are cross-sectional, continued focus on the effects of thought control strategies as meditational maintenance variables over time appears warranted.