Narratives of therapeutic art-making in the context of marital breakdown: older women reflect on a significant mid-life experience

This paper explores the narratives of three women aged 65–72 years. They reflected on an episode of therapeutic art-making in midlife, which addressed depression associated with marital crisis and breakdown. The narrative analysis focused upon on the ways in which participants narrated the events leading up to their participation in therapeutic art-making; the aspects of therapeutic art-making that continued to be given significance; the characters given primacy in the stories they told about their journey through therapy and marital breakdown; meanings, symbolic and otherwise, that participants ascribed to their artwork made during this turning point in their lives; and aspects of the narratives that conveyed present-day identities and artistic endeavors. The narratives revealed the complexity of the journey through marital breakdown and depression into health, and showed that therapeutic art-making could best be understood, not as a stand-alone experience, but as given meaning within the context of wider personal and social resources. Participants looked back on therapeutic art-making that occurred two decades earlier and still described this as a significant turning point in their personal development. Art as an adjunct to counselling/therapy was not only symbolically self-expressive but provided opportunity for decision-making, agency and a reformulated self-image.     

Relation of perfectionism with athletes' burnout: further examination

The purpose was to examine the different aspects of perfectionism and athletes' burnout. College athletes (N = 320) with mean age of 19.7 yr. (SD = 1.4) completed the Chinese version of the Multiple Perfectionism Scale for Sport and the Eades' Athlete Burnout Inventory. Results indicated that perfectionism could be separated into adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism. Adaptive perfectionism was linked to reduced athletes' burnout while maladaptive perfectionism was associated with athletes' burnout. In addition, significant interaction was found between adaptive perfec tionism and maladaptive perfectionism on athletes' burnout. Results suggest that high maladaptive perfectionism and low adaptive perfectionism corresponds to higher scores on athletes' burnout. Perfectionism should not be treated as an all-or-nothing disposition. The extent of athlete burnout can vary with the interaction effects of the two types of perfectionism. In terms of practical implications in intervention work, coaches and sport psychologists should try to reduce athletes' maladaptive perfectionism and increase adaptive perfectionism.     

Validation of the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ) in Taiwanese Undergraduate Students

The aim of this study was to translate and validate the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ; McCullough et al. 2002) using Taiwanese undergraduate students. A total of 608 college students (M _age = 20.19, SD = 2.08) were recruited for the current study and they completed the GQ, optimism, happiness, and big five personality questionnaires. Confirmation factor analysis indicated that a five item model was a better fit than the original six item model. Cross-validation also supported the modified Chinese version of the GQ. In addition, the Chinese version of the GQ was, as expected, positively correlated with optimism, happiness, agreeableness, and extraversion, which supported its construct validity. The Cronbach’s α was .80 for the Chinese version of the GQ, indicating satisfactory validity and reliability in a Taiwanese student sample. It was concluded that the Chinese version of the GQ would be useful for assessing individual differences in dispositional gratitude.     

Developmental changes in the effects of presentation media on noun-pair learning

Interpretations of previous research have indicated that there are age-related increases in the efficacy of pictorial media, relative to verbal, for presenting paired-associate items and elaborative prompts to young children. The purposes of the present study were to replicate these phenomenon and to evaluate two hypotheses advanced to account for them: a semantic encoding hypothesis and a verbal decoding hypothesis. To these ends, 14 treatments conditions were partioned into three independent-groups experimental designs. Each of 504 childrens, sampled from nursery, kindergarten, and second-grade populations, learned a list of 20 pairs of familiar objects. The expected developmental increase in the effectiveness of presenting items in a pictorial medium was not replicated. As predicted, however, the results revealed an increase with age in the effect of presenting elaborative prompts pictorially, but the phenomenon was confined to groups where the sex of subject and of experimenter was the same. It was concluded that the verbal decoding hypothesis accomodated the pattern of results better than did the semantic encoding hypothesis. Throughout the sudy, performance was substantially facilitated by elaborative prompts, that is, across age, presentation media, and testing conditions.     

Differential priming effect for subliminal fear and disgust facial expressions

Compared to neutral or happy stimuli, subliminal fear stimuli are known to be well processed through the automatic pathway. We tried to examine whether fear stimuli could be processed more strongly than other negative emotional stimuli using a modified subliminal affective priming paradigm. Twenty-six healthy subjects participated in two separated sessions. Fear, disgust and neutral facial expressions were adopted as primes, and 50% happy facial stimuli were adopted as a target to let only stronger negative primes reveal a priming effect. Participants were asked to appraise the affect of target faces in the affect appraisal session and to appraise the genuineness of target faces in the genuineness appraisal session. The genuineness instruction was developed to help participants be sensitive to potential threats. In the affect appraisal, participants judged 50% happy target faces significantly more 'unpleasant' when they were primed by fear faces than primed by 50% happy control faces. In the genuineness appraisal, participants judged targets significantly more 'not genuine' when they were primed by fear and disgust faces than primed by controls. These findings suggest that there may be differential priming effects between subliminal fear and disgust expressions, which could be modulated by a sensitive context of potential threat.     

Consistency of hand preference: predictions to intelligence and school achievement.

Gottfried and Bathurst (1983) reported that hand preference consistency measured over time during infancy and early childhood predicts intellectual precocity for females, but not for males. In the present study longitudinal assessments of children previously classified by Gottfried and Bathurst as consistent or nonconsistent in cross-time hand preference were conducted during middle childhood (ages 5 to 9). Findings show that (a) early measurement of hand preference consistency for females predicts school-age intellectual precocity, (b) the locus of the difference between consistent vs. nonconsistent females is in verbal intelligence, and (c) the precocity of the consistent females was also revealed on tests of school achievement, particularly tests of reading and mathematics.     

Girls Not Boys Show Gender-Connotation Encoding from Print

The present study examines gender differences in children's encoding of gender-connotation from words. The release from proactive interference method was used to measure gender-connotation encoding. Forty-eight third-grade children attending a public elementary school serving a predominantly White middle-socioeconomic-status community participated and were presented with stimulus words in print. The design of the study can be characterized as a two (gender) by two (condition: control vs. experimental) by four (trials) factorial. Results revealed reliable proactive interference buildup and release for gender-connotation for girls, but not for boys. This new finding, taken together with extant research, demonstrates that while both boys and girls have the ability to encode gender-connotation from aurally presented words, the spontaneous activation of gender-connotation attributes with print is not guaranteed for boys.     

Asymmetries in finger-tapping interference produced by mental versus manual rotation of Shepard and Metzler type objects

Two experiments were conducted using dual-task finger-tapping procedures to examine cerebral hemisphere laterization for mental versus manual rotation. Actual three-dimensional block-designs based on Shepard and Metzler's (1971) abstract three-dimensional cubes were constructed. Forty-eight right-handed introductory psychology students participated in each study. The first experiment showed greater right-hand than left-hand interference for mental rotation implicating more left-hemisphere involvement. In contrast, more left-hand than right-hand finger-tapping disruption with manual rotation was observed suggesting more right-hemisphere involvement. A second experiment was conducted to determine if the right-hemisphere involvement found with manual rotation was due to the manual activity of handling and rotating the blocks. Results showed that dual-task interference produced by irrelevant manual rotation combined with mental rotation was not lateralized. Thus, the pattern of results indicate that the manipulospatial processing required in the first experiment was responsible for the asymmetry implicating right-hemisphere involvement.