Relationship between a history of consistent maternal employment and depression in young adults

Research on the correlates of maternal employment has yielded inconsistent results. In this study, 79 male and 120 female undergraduates with mothers who had been employed from the students' infancy through their adolescence scored higher on the Beck Depression Inventory-II than those whose mothers had not been employed. This relationship between children's depressive symptoms and mothers' employment history was not evident among young adults whose mothers' employment was perceived to be financially unnecessary.     

The temporal contiguity effect predicts episodic memory performance

One way to study the associative processes at work during episodic memory is to examine the order of participant responses, which reveal the strong tendency to transition between temporally contiguous or semantically proximal items on the study list. Here, we assessed the correlation between participants’ recall performance and their use of semantic and temporal associations to guide retrieval across nine delayed free recall studies. The size of the participants’ temporal contiguity effects predicted their recall performance. When interpreted in terms of two models of episodic memory, these results suggest that participants who more effectively form and retrieve associations between items that occur nearby in time perform better on episodic recall tasks. Sample code may be downloaded as a supplement for this article from http://mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/ supplemental.     

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LOCKEAN ABSTRACTION

In this work I argue that Descartes was not a trialist by showing that the main tenets of trialist interpretations of Descartes's theory of substance are either not supported by the text or are not sufficient for establishing the trialist interpretation.     

Eastern Europe 1997-2000: A Review of Church Life

A decade after the collapse of communist rule, Christian life in Eastern Europe continues to be a complex mixture of satisfaction and disappointment. This survey of the last four years illustrates the recent successes and failures, and sets out to highlight the many challenges which still await effective responses.     

Separation of Religion and State and Secularism in Theory and in Practice

Abstract

This study examines whether states follow the religion policies they declare in their constitutions. It identifies four types of policies which officially seek to limit religion's role in government: absolute separation of religion and state (SRAS); neutral political concern; exclusion of ideals; and secularism–laicism. I determine whether states follow these policies using the religion and state (RAS) dataset and compare this to constitutional declarations that the state is secular and declarations of separation of religion and state. The results show that a majority of states which make both types of declaration do not follow these policies based on any of the four standards used in this study. However, the presence and wording of these clauses are correlated with state religion policy.     

Evidence of the Psychometric Integrity of the Creative Personality Scale using Item Response Theory Models

Gough’s Creative Personality Scale (CPS) has been very widely used to assess creative personality characteristics, and many researchers have argued that it is associated with strong reliability and validity evidence. However, findings vary considerably across the samples used in each study, suggesting that an analysis using the item response theory framework would provide more useful evidence of the instrument’s psychometric integrity. Results suggest that the CPS is multidimensional, and some items have low discrimination indices. Additionally, significant correlations between participants’ trait estimates (i.e., estimated creative personality) and their engagement in a range of creative activities indicate that the CPS is associated with convincing evidence of criterion-related validity.     

Books Received

This paper is an attempt to answer the question, ‘could there be causation in a timeless world?’ My conclusion: tentatively, yes. The paper and argument have three parts. Part one introduces salient issues and spells out the importance of this (initially somewhat baroque seeming) line of investigation. Section two of the paper reviews recent arguments due to Baron and Miller, who argue in favour of the possibility of causation in a timeless world, and looks to reject their arguments developed there. Section three is a response to a response. In their, Baron and Miller also argue that an argument in favour of the possibility of causation at timeless worlds, that I put forward, is an argument that fails. In section three, my response to Baron and Miller is that their argument against me succeeds, but that there is a nearby argument that we can appeal to in order to demonstrate the possibility of causation at timeless worlds.     

Demand Transitions and Sustained Attention

A recent report by the National Research Council (Huey & Wickens, 1993) has identified transitions in task demand as an important dimension for study in vigilance research. This experiment tested the possibility that the effects of such transitions follow a relatively simple psychophysical rule—they are characterized by contrast effects. Transitions in task demand were achieved by shifting subjects from single-task to dual-task monitoring and vice versa. These transitions produced changes in subjects' sensing and decision-making functions that were far more intricate than simple contrast effects. The demand transition issue offers a complex research challenge on both basic and applied levels and warrants further investigation.     

Adaptation in Visuomanual Tracking Depends on Intact Proprioception

The role of arm proprioception in motor learning was investigated in experiments in which, by moving the arm, subjects followed the motion of a target displayed on a monitor screen. Adaptive capabilities were tested in visuomanual tracking tasks following alterations in the relationship between the observer's actual arm movement and visual feedback of the arm movement given by a cursor motion on the screen. Tracking performance and adaptive changes, measured in terms of spatiotemporal error, tracking trajectory curvature, and spatial gain, were compared in 7 control subjects (CSs) and in 1 deafferented subject (DS). CSs adapted appropriately to altered visuomanual relationships; those changes were present in trials immediately after restoration of normal scaling. In contrast, although the DS modified his tracking strategy from trial to trial according to the altered conditions, he did not show plastic changes in internal visuomanual scaling. Like the results of prismatic adaptation experiments, the present results suggest that arm proprioception contributes to the plastic changes that follow alterations in the scaling of visuomanual gain.