Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: effects of social status and speaking

Human visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of time looking at the people in the videos, and in particular at their eyes and faces. The social status of the people in the clips had been rated by their peers in the group task, and this status hierarchy strongly predicted where eye-tracker participants looked: high-status individuals were gazed at much more often, and for longer, than low-status individuals, even over short, 20-s videos. Fixation was temporally coupled to the person who was talking at any one time, but this did not account for the effect of social status on attention. These results are consistent with a gaze system that is attuned to the presence of other individuals, to their social status within a group, and to the information most useful for social interaction.     

Further examination of discriminated functional communication

One child with developmental disabilities was taught to mand for attention by saying "excuse me." Treatment effects were extended to multiple training contexts by teaching the participant to attend to naturally occurring discriminative stimuli through differential reinforcement of communication during periods of the experimenter's nonbusy activities (e.g., reading a magazine). Results are discussed in terms of future research on the generalization and maintenance of functional communication in the natural environment.     

Grief Therapy and the Reconstruction of Meaning: From Principles to Practice

Viewed from a constructivist perspective, grieving is a process of reconstructing a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss. Although most people successfully navigate bereavement and retain or return to pre-loss levels of functioning, a significant proportion struggle with protracted grief, and are unable to find meaning in the wake of an unsought transition. For these individuals, constructivist therapists have a number of strategies at their disposal that foster meaning making and help clients reestablish a coherent self-narrative that integrates the loss, while also permitting their life story to move forward along new lines. After reviewing theory and evidence that scaffolds this constructivist conceptualization, this article draws on excerpts of therapy with two bereaved clients to illustrate how narrative retelling, therapeutic writing, a focus on metaphorical language, and the use of visualization can all be viable strategies in helping individuals reconstruct meaning in the wake of bereavement.     

School profiles of at-risk student concentration: Differential growth in oral reading fluency

The present study provides a data-driven approach to identifying groups of schools based on the concentration of at-risk students the school serves. The percentage of English language learners, minority students, and students eligible for free or reduced priced lunch were used as indicators in a latent profile analysis of 569 schools. The goal of the present study was to determine whether school-level average student reading performance varied as a function of the groups identified in the latent profile analysis. To do so, groups extracted by the latent profile analysis were used as school-level predictors of growth in oral reading fluency, which was modeled at the within-student level of a three-level hierarchical growth curve model. Oral reading fluency was measured at four points during the year in a large cross-sectional sample of first-, second-, and third-grade students. Results indicated that schools were able to be classified into four distinct groups based on their concentrations and types of at-risk students. Further, in all three grades, there were significant differences between the four identified groups observed in average reading fluency scores at the beginning of the year, the end of the year, and growth during the year indicating that groups based on school-concentration of at-risk students were significantly related to average student achievement in reading ability.     

Investing in Success: Key Strategies for Building Quality in After-School Programs

This paper examines the relation between the implementation quality of after-school literacy activities and student reading gains. The data are from an evaluation of a multi-site after-school program in California in which continuous program quality improvement strategies were implemented to improve the delivery of a new balanced literacy program. Strategies included: (1) targeted staff training throughout the year, (2) regular observations and coaching of staff, and (3) the use of data to measure progress. Programs struggled to successfully implement these strategies early in the initiative, but gradually improved the quality and consistency of their use. Program quality, as measured through observations, also increased. Results suggested that the size of student reading gains were positively correlated with the quality of literacy programming provided by each instructor.     

Women’s preference of therapist based on sex of therapist and presenting problem: An analog study

An analog study was conducted to examine differences in women’s preference for and anticipated comfort self-disclosing to hypothetical therapists of different sexes based on the type of hypothetical presenting problem. The impact of general level of self-disclosure was also examined. Participants included female college students (n?=?187). Anticipated comfort self-disclosing to male or female therapist was rated by subjects when presented with therapists of each sex with the same qualifications. Women preferred and reported higher levels of anticipated comfort self-disclosing to a female therapist. The type of hypothetical presenting problem and general level of self-disclosure also impacted anticipated comfort self-disclosing. There was an interaction between general level self-disclosure and the sex of therapist on anticipated comfort self-disclosing. General level of self-disclosure only impacted anticipated comfort self-disclosing when the therapist was male. This information is relevant for therapists or organizations that provide psychosocial services to women. Organizations may want to inquire about a client’s preferences about sex of therapist beforehand and, if possible, cater to the client’s preference.     

A cross-modal weapon focus effect: The influence of a weapon's presence on memory for auditory information

To examine whether a weapon's presence impairs witnesses' memory for auditory information (as it impairs memory for visual information), we conducted two experiments in which undergraduates watched one version of a videotape depicting a male target who held either a weapon or a neutral object and conversed with a female character. The semantic content of his remarks was either easy or difficult to comprehend. The weapon's presence did not affect voice identification accuracy or memory for the target's vocal characteristics (e.g., pitch, loudness, speech rate) but did worsen memory for semantic content in the Difficult Comprehension condition. Our results can be explained by multiple resource models of attention, which propose separate resource “pools” for different sensory modalities.     

A sub-process view of working memory capacity: Evidence from effects of speech on prose memory

In this article we outline a “sub-process view” of working memory capacity (WMC). This view suggests that any relationship between WMC and another construct (e.g., reading comprehension) is actually a relationship with a specific part of the WMC construct. The parts, called sub-processes, are functionally distinct and can be measured by intrusion errors in WMC tasks. Since the sub-processes are functionally distinct, some sub-process may be related to a certain phenomenon, whereas another sub-process is related to other phenomena. In two experiments we show that a sub-process (measured by immediate/current-list intrusions) is related to the effects of speech on prose memory (semantic auditory distraction), whereas another sub-process (measured by delayed/prior-list intrusions), known for its contribution to reading comprehension, is not. In Experiment 2 we developed a new WMC task called “size-comparison span” and found that the relationship between WMC and semantic auditory distraction is actually a relationship with a sub-process measured by current-list intrusions in our new task.     

Father and daughter: Identification with difference—a contribution to gender heterodoxy

This paper reinterprets the historical problem of penis envy, that is, the girl's wish to be masculine, in terms of a developmental need to identify with father. Many of the problems posed by earlier analyses of femininity can be clarified by recognizing that before the girl “turns”; to the oedipal father as love object, she looks to the rapprochement father for identification. Identification is not merely an internal structure, it is a relationship in which the subject recognizes herself or himself in the other. In rapprochement, love of the father, who symbolically represents the outside world, takes the place of the practicing toddler's “love affair with the world.”; This identificatory love of the father, initially noticed in boys by Freud and later authors, is often frustrated by the father's absence or inability to recognize the daughter. This frustrated longing takes the penis as its symbol of likeness. The pre‐oedipal over‐inclusive phase of identification with the other sex parent is not superceded by the oedipal constellation, but is integrated with it. Thus identification becomes an important basis of the love of the other: it is not so much the opposite of object love as an important precursor and ongoing constituent of it. Case material illustrates the multiple possibilities of identificatory love and use of phallic symbolism to represent them.     

Attachment to God,Spiritual Coping,and Alcohol Use

We examined the effect of emotional God attachment on undergraduates' alcohol use generally and for coping purposes and whether spiritual coping styles (collaborative, deferring, and self-directing) drive this effect. As hypothesized, people who feel secure in their emotional relationship with God use significantly more deferring, more collaborative, and less self-directing coping styles than people who feel anxious-ambivalent in their emotional relationship to God. Anxious-ambivalents use significantly more deferring, more collaborative, and less self-directing coping than people who feel disengaged from God (avoidants). Secures use alcohol significantly less than anxious-ambivalents, who use alcohol significantly less than avoidants. The effect of God attachment on general alcohol use was mediated by the use of self-directing (but not deferring or collaborative) spiritual coping style.