Weeds on the Ruins: Agency,Compromise Formation,and the Quest for Intersubjective Truth

Using Kundera's metaphor of “weeds on the ruins” to examine the impact of organized destruction of memory on the survival of a people, this paper explores the role of symptoms in negotiating a relational “compromise formation” by tracing their evolution as signifiers of previously dissociated intersubjective knowledge. It suggests that recent theorizing on the mutual constitution of agency and intersubjectivity creates the possibility of resurrecting the dramatic tension that characterized dual drive theory by relocating that tension between the desire to know (oneself, the Other) and the destruction of that desire. To do so, the paper contemplates an internally consistent lens for reconciling the terrain of deficit and dissociation with that of conflict by offering a process-oriented view of agency as “drive” that is rooted between subjective and material contexts. Finally, the paper explores the quest for intersubjective truth as offering a means of living beyond the ubiquity of compromise formation.     

Resource depletion does not influence prospective memory in college students

This paper reports an experiment designed to investigate the potential influence of prior acts of self-control on subsequent prospective memory performance. College undergraduates (n = 146) performed either a cognitively depleting initial task (e.g., mostly incongruent Stroop task) or a less resource-consuming version of that task (e.g., all congruent Stroop task). Subsequently, participants completed a prospective memory task that required attentionally demanding monitoring processes. The results demonstrated that prior acts of self-control do not impair the ability to execute a future intention in college-aged adults. We conceptually replicated these results in three additional depletion and prospective memory experiments. This research extends a growing number of studies demonstrating the boundary conditions of the resource depletion effect in cognitive tasks.     

Attitudes towards credit and finances among college students in China and the United States

Although there is growing concern about the issue of credit card debt among college students in China, little research has examined attitudes to money and debt among that group. The present study compared financial self‐confidence, perceived financial wellbeing, attitudes to debt, and parent education about money and debt in 410 college students from the US and China. Although college students in China reported fewer credit cards and less debt, they also reported lower levels of financial self‐confidence and financial wellbeing. In both cultures, delay of gratification and parental education predicted both self‐confidence and financial wellbeing.     

Control of Integrated Task Sequences Shapes Components of Reaching

Reaching toward an object usually consists of a sequence of elemental actions. Using a reaching task sequence, the authors investigated how task elements of that sequence affected feedforward and feedback components of the reaching phase of the movement. Nine right-handed adults performed, with their dominant and nondominant hands, 4 tasks of different complexities: a simple reaching task; a reach-to-grasp task; a reach-to-grasp and lift object task; and a reach-to-grasp, lift, and place object task. Results showed that in the reach-to-grasp and lift object task more time was allocated to the feedforward component of the reach phase, while latency between the task elements decreased. We also found between-hand differences, supporting previous findings of increased efficiency of processing planning-related information in the preferred hand. The presence of task-related modifications supports the concept of contextual effects when planning a movement.     

Justice to Nature and to the Disadvantaged

This article argues against using the practice of discounting and shows that both the time preference and the opportunity cost of capital arguments, put forward to justify discounting, are in conflict when we take the holistic approach to the environment. Both the time preference and the opportunity cost concepts are the tools to support the institution of interest. Using a hierarchical systems approach it is argued that in order to save the super hierarchical system (biosphere as a whole in our case) the contemporary economic system has to renew so that the humanity and global ecosystem may persist.     

The Relationship of Korean Students’ Age and Years of English-as-a-Foreign-Language Exposure with English-Reading Ability: A Cross-Age Study

The differences in spelling error features among learning disabled and normal students spelling instructionally on four grade levels of achievement were investigated. The categories of errors were determined by invented spelling research. The results indicated that the ranking of error features for each group were significantly correlated, and that the range of individual variation about the mean group pattern of spelling error variables was highly similar at each level of achievement. The findings are congruent with the theory of developmental word knowledge and support the position that learning disabled and normally achieving children acquire specific aspects of English orthography in highly similar progressions.     

READING IS NOT A GUESSING GAME‐THE GREAT DEBATE REVISITED

The present study describes preschool read-alouds in terms of the types of texts to which children are exposed. The methods involved analyzing the genre and instructional foci of 426 titles read by 13 teachers throughout an entire academic year. Additionally, associations between teacher characteristics and texts teachers read in their classrooms were examined. Findings indicated that (a) narrative texts were the dominate genre read-aloud; (b) children's exposure to alphabet books, nursery rhymes, books featuring math concepts, and multicultural content occurred at generally low rates; and (c) few significant associations exist between quantity of books read and teacher characteristics.     

Conditional Associative Learning of Spatial and Object Information in Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

The present study assessed frontostriatal mediated memory functions in children with ADHD (N = 12) and healthy control participants (N = 12) using two tests of conditional associative learning (i.e., object and spatial) that shared similar stimulus-response association structures but that differed in terms of the demands placed upon strategic processes. Children with ADHD displayed normal performance on the object learning task but were impaired on the spatial learning task that placed greater demands on internally derived strategic processes. Secondary analyses further indicated that this strategic processing impairment cannot be attributed specifically to perseverative or working memory errors but rather appears to be related to a more general inability to maintain a high degree of consistency in responding across trials. Although the results of this study must be interpreted in light of the small sample sizes, they suggest that ADHD does not produce a basic deficit in acquiring stimulus-response associations previously shown to be associated with basal ganglia dysfunction. Rather, these findings suggest that the impaired conditional associative learning performance of children with ADHD is attributable to deficits in strategic processes previously been found to be dependent upon the integrity of the prefrontal cortex.     

Reviews

Lois Raynor: The Adopted Child Comes of Age. National Institute of Social Services Library No. 36, 1980. George Allen and Unwin. Paperback, [euro]5.50.

W.R. Bion: The Long Weekend. Fleetwood Press, 1982 [euro]9.00.