Memory: Between traumatic shock and psychic historicization

‘I want to erase him from my memory,’ she said, ‘his eyes, his eyes staring at me … they are there every night, his hand … every night it hits me again and again …’. On the basis of these few words taken from the therapeutic work with Keltoum, the author reflects theoretically and clinically on the place of memory in a traumatism: a fixed memory, a ‘frozen image’, the signs of a traumatic compulsion to repeat, are the expressions of a process of psychic disorganization but also of a ‘symbolized and symbolizing’ memory anticipating a possible historicization of this memory, of a path, therefore, towards a resolution of the trauma resulting from a process of psychic integration and reorganization.     

Reaction time inconsistency in a spatial stroop task: age-related differences through childhood and adulthood

Age-related differences in inconsistency of reaction time (RT) across the life span were examined on a task with differing levels of demand on executive control. A total of 546 participants, aged 5 to 76 years, completed a spatial Stroop task that permitted observations under three conditions (congruent, incongruent, and neutral) according to the correspondence between the required response (based on stimulus direction) and stimulus location. An interference effect was observed across all ages. Analyses of neutral condition data replicated previous research demonstrating RT inconsistency follows a U-shaped developmental curve across the life span. The relationship between age and inconsistency, however, depended on condition: inconsistency in the congruent condition was higher than inconsistency in both the neutral and incongruent conditions across middle-aged groups. Reaction time inconsistency may reflect processing efficiency that is maximal in young adulthood and may also be sensitive to fluctuations in performance that reflect momentarily highly efficient responding.     

Referate und diskussionen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Democracy and equity: the idea of the just state (Rechtsstaat) before and after 1994

Abstract

The recent publication of a special number of the SAJP dedicated to a discussion of Samantha Vice’s thoughts on being a white South African prompted this reflection on justice, equity and the modern idea of the state – against the background of moral feelings of guilt and shame, cultural diversity and merging identities. Its aim is to provide a perspective on the unity of the public legal order of the state, the distinct meaning of citizenship and affirmative action in terms of the distinction between constitutive and regulative legal principles also helping white South Africans to understand how affirmative action relates to injustices of the past. The classical understanding of equity will play a key role in this discussion, aimed at showing how we can avoid the apparent impasse of equality before the law and of “fair discrimination.”     

Heart electrophysiology as a dependent measure in children

This study extends the cardiac component analysis technique, reported by Eddy and his coworkers (Eddy, McKendree, McKenzie, & Bremner, 1982; McKendree, 1982), to children. Three male children between the ages of 8 and 10 years served as subjects and were tested on several days. In particular, the children were taught a simple relaxation task and a simple cognitive task. The cardiac electrophysiology of these children was statistically tested to determine whether there was a reliable difference between psychological tasks but only minimal variance within psychological tasks. The results of testing the ST component of the cardiac electrophysiology confirmed our hypothesis that there is a statistical difference between tasks (p < .001) but not within tasks when tested over time.     

An experiment promoting interdisciplinary applied human development: The University of Pittsburgh model

The University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development is an unusual university facilitative and administrative unit that promotes, funds, plans, implements, manages, and conducts interdisciplinary applied education, research, service demonstration, program evaluation, and policy projects pertaining to children, youth, and families. In the 9+ years of its existence, its soft-money budget has grown more than 34 times, its number of employees has increased 27-fold, and it has played a major role $75 million worth of collaborative projects. This article describes the Office's rationale, structure, purposes, principles of operation, projects, evaluation, and positive and negative factors in its development so that others may benefit from this case-study experiment in interdisciplinary applied human development programming.     

Psychological characteristics of infertile couples: can they predict pregnancy and treatment persistence?

The paper describes an exploratory study of the relative importance of different psychological variables for the prediction of (a) pregnancies and (b) treatment continuation in a sample of 140 couples seeking specialized infertility treatment one year after their first contact with an infertility clinic. The couples filled out questionnaires dealing with psychological and interpersonal functioning, marital and life satisfaction, child-related attitudes, causal attribution of infertility and general expectations towards the treatment. It could be shown that the psychological variables explain a relatively small amount of the variance of the pregnancy criterion. Nevertheless, there were some indications supporting the hypothesis that psychological complaints can be seen as a ‘risk factor’ associated with a lower pregnancy rate. Couples who had terminated treatment after one year indicated a higher amount of psychological and interpersonal complaints (females) as well as partner problems (males and females), and a dominance of internal attributions of the fertility problem. This result—which might help to develop strategies for counselling couples making use of the new reproductive technologies—highlights the importance of attribution and cognitive appraisal in coping with infertility. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.