Somnambulism and the law: A review

Scientific study of sleep has shown that sleepwalking and night terrors occur in stage 4 sleep. Both run in families, and are precipitated by various specific trigger factors. Behavior can be complex and purposeful and frequently may lead the sleeper into danger. Murder and assault while asleep do rarely occur, and the aggressive acts can appear purposeful, directed, and coordinated. Sleepwalking in the United Kingdom is considered a sane automatism and a successful plea of not guilty leads to an acquittal. Therefore, sleepwalking should only be accepted as a defense by forensic psychiatrists after establishing beyond reasonable doubt that the characteristics of a sleepwalking episode are present. The law on automatism in England is muddled and requires revision.     

Resilience and career adaptability: Qualitative studies of adult career counseling

Global economic recession is exerting extreme pressures not only on individuals attempting to move into and through labor markets, but also on those providing support for such transitions. Resilience and career adaptability are increasingly relevant, yet despite being present in the literature for some time, these concepts have been under-represented in the vocational psychology literature. This article represents a contribution to redressing this balance by focusing on their potential to make positive contributions both to clients of career counseling and to practitioners delivering these services. Drawing on data from four qualitative studies conducted in England, Norway and the Republic of Ireland from 2003 to 2012, these concepts are examined, together with their complementarity for career counseling practice. The article also discusses the role, status and conduct of qualitative research as well as the importance of the researcher/participant relationship in qualitative research investigations.     

Multiple imitation mechanisms in children

Four studies using a computerized paradigm investigated whether children's imitation performance is content-specific and to what extent dependent on other cognitive processes such as trial-and-error learning, recall, and observational learning. Experiment 1 showed that 3-year-olds could successfully imitate what we call novel cognitive rules (e.g., first → second → third), which involved responding to 3 different pictures whose spatial configuration varied randomly from trial to trial. However, these same children failed to imitate what we call novel motor-spatial rules (e.g., up → down → right), which involved responding to 3 identical pictures that remained in a fixed spatial configuration from trial to trial. Experiment 2 showed that this dissociation was not due to a general difficulty in encoding motor-spatial content, as children successfully recalled, following a 30-s delay, a new motor-spatial sequence that had been learned by trial and error. Experiment 3 replicated these results and further demonstrated that 3-year-olds can infer a novel motor-spatial sequence following observation of a partially correct and partially incorrect response-a dissociation between imitation and observational learning (or emulation learning). Finally, Experiment 4 presented 3-year-olds with "familiar" motor-spatial sequences that involved making a linear response (e.g., left → middle → right) as well as "novel" motor-spatial sequences (e.g., right → up → down) used in Experiments 1-3 that were nonlinear and always involved a change in direction. Children had no difficulty imitating familiar motor-spatial sequences but again failed to imitate novel motor-spatial sequences. These results suggest that there may be multiple, dissociable imitation learning mechanisms that are content-specific. More importantly, the development of these imitation systems appears to be independent of the operations of other cognitive systems, including trial and error learning, recall, and observational learning.     

Cultural regulatory fit and strategies for coping with unsuccessful outcomes

The present research seeks to explain cross‐cultural differences in two strategies for coping with unsuccessful outcomes (consideration of multiple options and persistence) through regulatory fit, a development of the self‐regulation theory. We propose that, because of regulatory fit, eager consideration of multiple options is more encouraged in promotion‐focused cultures, whereas vigilant persistence is more encouraged in prevention‐focused cultures (a culture‐strategy regulatory fit). In addition, if an incentive is introduced to motivate the use of these strategies, a gain‐framed incentive is more effective in promotion‐focused cultures whereas a loss‐framed incentive is more effective in prevention‐focused cultures (a culture‐incentive regulatory fit). The hypotheses for the culture‐strategy fit (Study 1) and the culture‐incentive fit (Study 2) were both supported, with samples of Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs (in both studies), and Hong Kong Chinese (in Study 1). Taken together, the findings contribute to the understanding of cross‐cultural differences in coping with unsuccessful outcomes and suggest the existence of cultural regulatory fit. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

See your friends close and your enemies closer: social identity and identity threat shape the representation of physical distance

Three studies demonstrated that collective identity and identity threat shape representations of the physical world. In Study 1, New York Yankees fans estimated Fenway Park, the stadium of a threatening out-group (but not Camden Yards, the stadium of a neutral out-group) to be closer than did non-Yankees fans. In Study 2, the authors manipulated identity threat among people affiliated (or not) with New York University (NYU). When Columbia University was portrayed as threatening to NYU, NYU affiliates estimated Columbia as closer than did non-affiliates, compared with when Columbia was nonthreatening. In Study 3, Americans who perceived more symbolic threats from Mexican immigration estimated Mexico City as closer. Collective identification with the in-group moderated effects of threat on distance estimations. These studies suggest that social categorization, collective identification, and identity threat work in concert to shape the representations of the physical world.     

Evaluation is a Dynamic Process: Moving Beyond Dual System Models

Over the past few decades, dual attitude/process/system models have emerged as the dominant framework for understanding a wide range of psychological phenomena. Most of these models characterize the unconscious and conscious mind as being built from discrete processes or systems: one that is reflexive, automatic, fast, affective, associative, and primitive, and a second that is deliberative, controlled, slow, cognitive, propositional, and more uniquely human. Although these models serve as a useful heuristic for characterizing the human mind, recent developments in social and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the human evaluative system, like most of cognition, is widely distributed and highly dynamic. Integrating these advances with current attitude theories, we review how the recently proposed Iterative Reprocessing Model can account for apparent dual systems as well as discrepancies between traditional dual system models and recent research revealing the dynamic nature of evaluation. Furthermore, we describe important implications this dynamical system approach has for various social psychological domains.     

The six types of nonbelief: a qualitative and quantitative study of type and narrative

Extensive research has been conducted in exploration of the American religious landscape; however, only recently has social science research started to explore nonbelief in any detail. Research on nonbelief has been limited as most research focuses on the popularity of the religious “nones” or the complexities of alternative faith expressions such as spirituality. Through two studies, one qualitative and one quantitative, this research explored how nonbelievers’ self-identify. Study 1 (the qualitative study) discovered that individuals have shared definitional agreement but use different words to describe different types of nonbelief. Through thematic coding, a typology of six different types of nonbelief was observed. Those are Academic Atheists, Activist Atheist/Agnostics, Seeker Agnostics, Antitheists, Non-Theists, and the Ritual Atheists. Study 2 explored the empirical aspects of these types related to the Big Five Domain, Ryff Psychological Well-Being, Narcissistic Personality Inventory, Multidimensional Anger Inventory, Rokeach Dogmatism Scale, and intersections related to religious and spiritual ontology.     

Non-Linguistic Grammar Learning by 12-Month-Old Infants: Evidence for Constraints on Learning

ABSTRACT

Infants acquiring their native language are adept at discovering grammatical patterns. However, it remains unknown whether these learning abilities are limited to language, or available more generally for sequenced input. The current study is a conceptual replication of a prior language study, and was designed to ask whether infants can track phrase structure-like patterns from nonlinguistic auditory materials (sequences of computer alert sounds). One group of 12-month-olds was familiarized with an artificial grammar including predictive dependencies between sounds concatenated into strings, simulating the basic structure of phrases in natural languages. A second group of infants was familiarized with a grammar that lacked predictive dependencies. All infants were tested on the same set of familiar strings vs. novel (grammar-inconsistent) strings. Only infants exposed to the materials containing predictive dependencies showed successful discrimination between the test sentences, replicating the results from linguistic materials, and suggesting that predictive dependencies facilitate learning from nonlinguistic input.