Speech errors reflect newly learned phonotactic constraints

Speech errors reveal the speaker's implicit knowledge of phonotactic constraints, both languagewide constraints (e.g., /K/ cannot be a syllable onset when one is speaking English) and experimentally induced constraints (e.g., /k/ cannot be an onset during the experiment). Four experiments investigated the acquisition of novel 2nd-order constraints, in which the allowable position of a consonant depends on some other property of the syllable (e.g., /k/ can only be an onset if the vowel is /I/). Participants recited strings of syllables that exhibited the novel constraints throughout a 4-day experiment. Their errors reflected the newly learned constraints but not until the 2nd day of training. This contrasts with previous research showing that errors become sensitive to 1st-order constraints almost immediately. A model that learns to assign phonemes to syllable positions is presented. It attributes the relative slowness of the acquisition of 2nd-order constraints to the self-interfering property of these constraints.     

Playing Patient, Playing Doctor: Munchausen Syndrome, Clinical S/M, and Ruptures of Medical Power

This article deploys sadomasochism as a framework for understanding medical practice on an institutional level. By examining the case of the factitious illness Munchausen syndrome, this article analyzes the operations of power in the doctor-patient relationship through the trope of role-playing. Because Munchausen syndrome causes a disruption to the dyadic relationship between physicians and patients, a lens of sadomasochism highlights dynamics of power in medical practice that are often obscured in everyday practice. Specifically, this article illustrates how classification and diagnosis are concrete manifestations of the mobilization of medical power.     

That's a boy's toy: gender-typed knowledge in toddlers as a function of mother's marital status

A child who is highly gender schematic readily uses gender when processing new information. In the current study, we examined whether and how family structure predicts a child's level of gender-typed knowledge (as assessed by a gender-stereotype sorting task) once the category of gender is in place (as assessed by a gender-labeling task). It was predicted that children from more "traditional" family structures (married mothers) would have more gender-typed knowledge compared to children from less traditional families (unmarried mothers). Moreover, we explored if this relationship would be related to, at least in part, the greater frequency of androgynous behaviors (i.e., both masculine and feminine household activities) an unmarried mother performs. Twenty-eight children (age 2 to 3) were tested at local childcare centers. The mother of each child reported her marital status as well as how often she engaged in stereotypically masculine and feminine behaviors. As expected, mothers' marital status was associated with children's level of gender-typed knowledge, such that children with unmarried mothers had less gender-typed knowledge, in part due to the unmarried mother's greater frequency of androgynous behaviors. Implications for children's acquisition of gender-related stereotypes and the possible benefit of having mothers model both masculine and feminine behaviors are discussed.     

Moral Evil and Leibniz’s Form/Matter Defense of Divine Omnipotence

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Leibniz’s form/matter defense of omnipotence is paradoxical, but not irretrievably so. Leibniz maintains that God necessarily must concur only in the possibility for evil’s existence in the world (the form of evil), but there are individual instances of moral evil that are not necessary (the matter of evil) with which God need not concur. For Leibniz, that there is moral evil in the world is contingent on God’s will (a dimension of divine omnipotence), with the result that even though it is necessary that God exerts his will, there are particular products of his will that are contingent and unnecessary—including human moral evil. If there are instances of evil which are contingent on God’s will and yet unnecessary, then the problematic conclusion for Leibniz’s view must be that human evil depends upon divine concurrence, not just for its possibility in the world (which is necessary) but for its instance (which is contingent). If the form/matter defense of omnipotence contains a true paradox, then God concurs in the form as well as the matter of evil. To assuage this difficulty for Leibniz, I will argue that he could either give up an Augustinian notion of evil, or rely upon a distinction between *potenta absoluta* and *potenta ordinate*, which was popular among important thinkers in the medieval period.     

The measurement of participant-reported memory across diverse populations and settings: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the Multifactorial Memory Questionnaire

ABSTRACT

The Multifactorial Memory Questionnaire (MMQ) is a participant-reported measure of memory satisfaction, ability, and strategy use. Initially validated with healthy older adults, it has since been used in many different populations and settings for a variety of purposes. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the measurement properties of the MMQ across multiple, diverse studies. Methods: The study was designed using the Consensus-Based Standards for the Selection of Health Measurement Instruments and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. We calculated aggregate statistics and evaluated the methodological quality of 29 studies retrieved from PsycINFO, MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Web of Science. Results: Analyses revealed high-quality evidence for internal consistency, stability, measurement error, convergent validity, and known-groups validity of the three MMQ scales. There was moderate-quality evidence for responsiveness and structural validity, with some studies identifying separate factors for internal and external memory strategy use. Measurement properties were similar across languages, participant samples, and study designs. Conclusions: The MMQ is a valid, reliable, and responsive measure across diverse settings and populations. Future research is needed to determine whether more detailed information can be obtained from the scales, specifically, internal versus external strategy use.     

Leaning Into Termination

Ending treatment is inevitably filled with multiple and disparate losses for the analytic dyad. The author sets forth a call for reconsidering termination from a Relational perspective. She argues that many, if not all, terminations, are primed for enactment. The mutual processes of attaching and detaching, of growing close and then saying goodbye elicit powerful feelings and equally powerful dissociative processes. Specifically, she suggests that termination can be understood as co-created enactments of complex unconscious processes between patient and analyst. There is some necessary integrative work that may possible only when ending treatment. Key to this integrative work is the acceptance of both the achievements and the limitations of analytic work for both participants. She argues that we need to suspend our analytic ambition and begin to formulate what a co-created and mutually enacted good-enough ending would look like.     

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.