The Families and Democracy Project

The Families and Democracy Project moves family therapists and other professionals into the community via a critique of traditional provider/consumer models of family services, a set of principles about the civic engagement of families in partnership with professionals, and a set of public practices for working on community problems. We describe the Families and Democracy model and three specific projects. We distinguish the model from traditional hierarchical and collaborative models of working with families. And we discuss lessons we have learned, and our plans to take this work to its next developmental stage.     

Smiling and relative status in news photographs

To test the hypothesis that lower social status is associated with more smiling, the authors used newspaper photographs and their associated news stories as the basis for scoring the smiling and relative social status of the 2 individuals in each photograph. Independent raters judged smiling and 5 dimensions of relative status for 496 individuals in 248 newspaper photographs. There was no relation between status and smiling, although status and smiling were both related to other variables such as gender, age, and story valence. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that there is no generalized relation between smiling and status.     

Correlations for organizational,nonorganizational, and intrinsic religiosity with social support among intercollegiate athletes

The present study was a preliminary examination of the correlations among organizational, nonorganizational, and intrinsic religiosity and social support as measured by the Duke Religion Index and the Nonsupport scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory for 105 intercollegiate athletes (51 women). Scores among these measures were not correlated (-.05 to -.14).     

The dynamics of intention retrieval and coordination of action in event-based prospective memory

Event-based prospective memory requires responding to cues in the environment that are associated with a previously established intention. Some researchers believe that intentions reside in memory with an above baseline level of activation, a phenomenon called the intention superiority effect. The authors of this study predicted that intention superiority would be masked by additional cognitive processes associated with successful event-based prospective memory. These additional processes include noticing the cue, retrieving the intention, and coordinating intention execution with the ongoing activity. In 3 experiments, intention superiority was demonstrated by faster latencies to the ongoing activity on failed prospective trials and the existence of the additional processes was demonstrated by slower latencies on successful trials. This study demonstrates the importance of investigating the microstructure of the cognitive components involved with processing and responding to an event-based prospective memory cue.     

Overt and covert object-based attention

To examine the role of perceptual object representations in the control of eye movements and attention, a pair of experiments adapted the object-cuing paradigm of Egly, Driver, and Rafal (1994) to require eye movements. Displays were pairs of adjacent rectangles, each containing two characters. Observers were asked to make a speeded judgment of a target character’s orientation, and a cue was provided prior to target/distractor onset to indicate the target’s likely location. Gaze-contingent presentation of target and distractors was used to demand overt scanning of displays. Eye movements during task performance evinced two forms of object-based effects. First, saccades following fixation on an invalidly cued item were more likely to be made within the cued rectangle than between rectangles. Second, saccades within the cued rectangle were preceded by shorter dwell times than saccades between rectangles. Extrafoveal processing of stimuli within the cued rectangle, however, was not facilitated, suggesting that covert attention was not allocated more densely within the cued than within the uncued object.     

The demands of an ongoing activity influence the success of event-based prospective memory

Four experiments were conducted to evaluate whether event-based prospective memory would be sensitive to the concurrent demands of the ongoing activity in which intention-related cues were embedded. In Experiments 1 and 2, random alternation between two judgments in the ongoing task reduced prospective memory as compared with having a single task throughout. In Experiment 3, participants' making two binary judgments on every trial resulted in worse prospective memory than did their making single four-alternative judgments. In Experiment 4, participants' making two related judgments resulted in better prospective memory than did their making two unrelated judgments. The results are consistent in spirit with a production rule account of the processing resources that are available when intention-related cues are encountered. Therefore, event-based prospective memory can inversely covary with the cognitive demands of the ongoing activity.     

Postmodernism Versus Modernism: Rethinking Theoretical Tensions in Social Gerontology

The interconnection of social theory to social aspects of aging has grown in recent years. The theoretical movement entitled structured dependency, couched in social class analysis, has tended to ignore an understanding of aging identity, the body, cultural representations of aging, and positive images of aging, all of which are central features of an emerging postmodern paradigm in gerontological theory. This article argues that the concept of gender can form a useful bridge, a continuity, between structured dependency and postmodernism in theoretical gerontology. Unfortunately, the compartmentalization of these two conceptual approaches has made their links difficult to forge. This article attempts to take a first step in this direction by highlighting the way postmodern ideas can be used to understand a modernist issue—gender in a gerontological context. Also, focusing on the aging body as a primary form of analysis generates some novel insights into the importance of both the theoretical understanding and cultural representations of the body.     

Primary care physicians attitude toward diagnosis and treatment of late-life depression

Underdiagnosis and undertreatment of late-life depression is common, especially in primary care settings. To help assess whether physicians attitude and confidence in diagnosing and managing depression serve as barriers to care, a total of 176 physicians employed in 18 primary care groups were administered surveys to assess attitudes towards diagnosis, treatment, and management of depression in elderly patients, (individuals over 65 years of age). Logistic regression was performed to assess the association of physician characteristics on attitudes. Nearly all of the physicians surveyed felt that depression in the elderly was a primary care problem, and 41% reported late-life depression as the most common problem seen in older patients. Physicians were confident in their ability to diagnose and manage depression, yet 45% had no medical education on depression in the previous three years. Physicians confidence in their ability to diagnose, treat, and manage depression, and their reported adequacy of training, do not appear to correspond to the amount of continuing medical education in depression, suggesting that physician overconfidence may potentially be serving as a barrier to care.     

Word Frequency Effects on the Processing of Subject–Verb Number Agreement

This paper examines the role of word frequency in the computation of subject–verb number agreement. Previous research in both production and comprehension has demonstrated that processing difficulties can arise in sentence structures containing a singular subject noun followed by a plural distractor noun, as in The key to the cabinets.¨ A whole sentence reading task was employed to determine whether the relative frequency with which the distractor noun appears in its singular or plural form would affect the degree of processing difficulty experienced by readers. Results suggest that the agreement process is, indeed, sensitive to this factor and this finding is compatible with activation-based accounts of the implementation of number agreement.     

Key Word Index Volume 4

Other Index

Key Word Index Volume 4