SELF-OBJECTIFICATION, RISK TAKING, AND SELF-HARM IN COLLEGE WOMEN

Objectification theory proposes that the objectification of women's bodies causes women to self-objectify, adopting an outsider's view of themselves. Engaging in a high amount of self-objectification is thought to place women at increased risk for mental health problems such as body dissatisfaction and depression. It was hypothesized that self-objectification would contribute to negative body regard and depression, which would increase participation in risk-taking and self-harmful behaviors. Structural equation modeling was used to test a model of risk for self-harm based upon objectification theory in a sample of 391 college women. Results indicate that the model provided a good fit to the data, but only the paths from self-objectification to negative body regard, negative body regard to depression, and depression to self-harm were significant. Implications of these findings for objectification theory and our understanding of self-harm in women are discussed.     

Paraconsistency And Dialogue Logic Critical Examination And Further Explorations

The first part of this paper presents asympathetic and critical examination of the approachof Shahid Rahman and Walter Carnielli, as presented intheir paper The Dialogical Approach toParaconsistency. In the second part, possibleextensions are presented and evaluated: (a) top-downanalysis of a dialogue situation versus bottom-up, (b)the specific role of ambiguities and how to deal withthem, and (c) the problem of common knowledge andbackground knowledge in dialogues. In the third part,I claim that dialogue logic is the best-suitedinstrument to analyse paradoxes of the Sorites type.All these considerations lead to philosophicallyrelevant observations concerning principles of charityon the one hand, and compactness on the other.     

The aftereffects of ventriloquism: generalization across sound-frequencies

Exposure to synchronous but spatially discordant auditory and visual inputs produces, beyond immediate cross-modal biases, adaptive recalibrations of the respective localization processes that manifest themselves in aftereffects. Such recalibrations probably play an important role in maintaining the coherence of spatial representations across the various spatial senses. The present study is part of a research program focused on the way recalibrations generalize to stimulus values different from those used for adaptation. Considering the case of sound frequency, we recently found that, in contradiction with an earlier report, auditory aftereffects generalize nearly entirely across two octaves. In this new experiment, participants were adapted to an 18 degrees auditory-visual discordance with either 400 or 6400 Hz tones, and their subsequent sound localization was tested across this whole four-octave frequency range. Substantial aftereffects, decreasing significantly with increasing difference between test and adapter frequency, were obtained at all combinations of adapter and test frequency. Implications of these results concerning the functional site at which visual recalibration of auditory localization might take place are discussed.     

Temporal references in dreams and autobiographical memory

In an attempt to determine whether temporal references identified in dreams follow the same temporal distributions as those documented for autobiographical memories, 28 younger women (18-35 years of age) and 30 older women (60-77 years of age) kept a home dream diary for 1 week and then slept 1 night in the laboratory for rapid eye movement sleep dream collection. The following morning, they identified temporal references in their dreams and produced a sample of autobiographical memories using the semantic cuing method. For both groups, there was a linear decrease in temporal references identified in dreams and autobiographical memories with increased remoteness for the last 30 years. As predicted, for the older group, there were similar cubic trends reflecting a disproportionately higher number of both temporal references identified in dreams and autobiographical memories from adolescence/early adulthood compared with adulthood and childhood. The results support the notion of continuity between waking and dreaming memory processes.     

Might We Practice What We'ved Preached? Thoughts on the Special Issue Papers

Commentary on the papers of the special issue identifies and discusses four themes: 1) strategies to bridge the gap between science and practice, 2) sources of community science questions of interest, 3) choice and quality of methods, and 4) epistemology and useful language for community science. The commentary identifies some limitations in the models proposed by the special issue authors, and proposes renewed attention to ecology, context and process in community change initiatives, calling for a common set of community level measures as one strategy to advance a community centered science agenda.     

Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) Profiles of Male Veterans With Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; L. C. Morey, 1991) is a promising tool for the assessment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but few studies have examined the PAI profiles of individuals with the diagnosis. In this study, the PAI was administered to 176 combat veterans with PTSD. Results showed significant elevations on scales measuring depression, somatic complaints, anxiety, anxiety-related disorders, schizophrenia, and negative impression management. The Traumatic Stress subscale was the highest point in the mean score profile and was moderately correlated with several established measures of PTSD. Veterans with and without comorbid major depression differed on PAI scales assessing depression, anxiety, and warmth. Analysis of two-point codetypes for the PAI and the MMPI-2 revealed substantial heterogeneity in symptom endorsement on both instruments, suggesting that there may be no clear PTSD profile on either instrument. Results provide a reference point for future work with the PAI in PTSD samples.     

Semantic similarity and immediate serial recall: Is there an effect on all trials

In immediate serial recall, items are better recalled when they are all drawn from the same semantic category. This is usually accounted for by a two-stage retrieval-based framework, in which, at recall, long-term knowledge is used to reconstruct degraded phonological traces. The category shared by list items would serve as an additional retrieval cue restricting the number of recall candidates. Usually, the long-term search set is not defined, but some authors have suggested an extended search set and others a restricted set that is composed of the most recently presented items. This was tested in an experiment in which participants undertook an immediate serial recall task either alone or under articulatory suppression with either semantically similar or dissimilar lists. A trial-by-trial analysis revealed that, in both quiet and suppression conditions, items from similar lists were better recalled on all the trials, including the first one. In addition, there was no interaction between semantic similarity and trial, indicating that the effect of similarity was of similar size on all the trials. The results are best interpreted within a proposal suggesting an extended long-term search set.     

Changing the tune: the structure of the input affects infants' use of absolute and relative pitch

Sequences of notes contain several different types of pitch cues, including both absolute and relative pitch information. What factors determine which of these cues are used when learning about tone sequences? Previous research suggests that infants tend to preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, while other types of input elicit relative pitch use by infants. In order to ask whether the structure of the input influences infants’ choice of pitch cues, we presented learners with continuous tone streams in which absolute pitch cues were rendered uninformative by transposing the tone sequences. Under these circumstances, both infants and adults successfully tracked relative pitches in a statistical learning task. Implications for the role played by the structure of the input in the learning process are considered.     

Combining Pharmacotherapy with cognitive-behavioral interventions for obsessive-compulsive disorder

This paper reviews the evidence-based literature concerning the efficacy and effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), drug treatment and their combination for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). After a brief outline of the seminal studies, the state of the art is presented with reference to the consensual recommendations proposed in the last 10 years. Management of OCD rests on potent selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and CBT, used separately, sequentially, or concurrently. A hierarchical model for clinical decision-making is reported. With greater severity of OCD, it is recommended to add medications. However, the response rate is still too low in many patients, and some patients remain refractory to any kind of treatment. This stresses the importance of joint efforts of psychological and biological teams to develop new treatments.     

Can practice overcome age-related differences in the psychological refractory period effect?

Can dual-task practice remove age-related differences in the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect? To answer this question, younger and older individuals practiced 7 blocks of a PRP design, in which Task 1 (T1) required a vocal response to an auditory stimulus and Task 2 (T2) required a manual response to a visual stimulus (Experiment 1). The results showed that practice did not reduce, but rather increased, age-related differences in PRP interference. Using the trained individuals, the introduction of a less complex new T1 (Experiment 2) or a less complex new T2 (Experiment 3) with the task previously practiced reduced the PRP interference but only in older adults. The authors propose that older adults suffer from a large task-switch cost that is more sensitive to task complexity than to the amount of practice.