“Last Night I Dreamed I Went to Manderly Again”: Vicissitudes of Maternal Identifications in Late Female Adolescence

To move forward into sexual maturity with a sense of bodily agency, the girl must internalize identifications with the mother as a sexual adult in her own right. These new identifications arouse intense internal conflict brought on by internalization with its unconscious association with destructive oral aggression and the archaic fear of retaliatory maternal rage. The unconscious dilemma is how to metabolize the sexual mother and also keep her alive as an internal resource. I present material from analytic sessions and literature to illustrate a characteristic defensive fantasy of late adolescence and the underlying conflicts that the fantasy conceals and attempts to ward off. This fantasy links aggression, internalization, and associated unconscious phantasies of oral sadism. Internalization may be derailed if the daughter's conflicts around aggression are felt to be intolerable. When all goes reasonably well, the late-adolescent girl tolerates the intense aggression associated with internalization and metabolizes representations of the sexual mother as a resonating internal presence that supports and enhances progressive development.     

Mental rotation of letters,pictures, and three-dimensional objects in German dyslexic children

This study examines mental rotation ability in children with developmental dyslexia. Prior investigations have yielded equivocal results that might be due to differences in stimulus material and testing formats employed. Whereas some investigators found dyslexic readers to be impaired in mental rotation, others did not report any performance differences or even superior spatial performance for dyslexia. Here, we report a comparison of mental rotation for letters, three-dimensional figures sensu Shepard and Metzler, and colored pictures of animals or humans in second-grade German dyslexic readers. Findings indicate that dyslexic readers are impaired in mental rotation for all three kinds of stimuli. Effects of general intelligence were controlled. Furthermore, dyslexic children were deficient in other spatial abilities like identifying letters or forms among distracters. These results are discussed with respect to the hypotheses of a developmental dysfunction of the parietal cortex or a subtle anomaly in cerebellar function in dyslexic readers.     

Improved Insight into and Prediction of Network Dynamics by Combining VAR and Dimension Reduction

To understand within-person psychological processes, one may fit VAR(1) models (or continuous-time variants thereof) to multivariate time series and display the VAR(1) coefficients as a network. This approach has two major problems. First, the contemporaneous correlations between the variables will frequently be substantial, yielding multicollinearity issues. In addition, the shared effects of the variables are not included in the network. Consequently, VAR(1) networks can be hard to interpret. Second, crossvalidation results show that the highly parametrized VAR(1) model is prone to overfitting. In this article, we compare the pros and cons of two potential solutions to both problems. The first is to impose a lasso penalty on the VAR(1) coefficients, setting some of them to zero. The second, which has not yet been pursued in psychological network analysis, uses principal component VAR(1) (termed PC-VAR(1)). In this approach, the variables are first reduced to a few principal components, which are rotated toward simple structure; then VAR(1) analysis (or a continuous-time analog) is applied to the rotated components. Reanalyzing the data of a single participant of the COGITO study, we show that PC-VAR(1) has the better predictive performance and that networks based on PC-VAR(1) clearly represent both the lagged and the contemporaneous variable relations.     

Community as Outsider Witness: Utilising Community Members in the Reconstitution of Problem-Saturated Identities

This study explored community members' ability to enlist discourses affirming of psychiatric patients' quest for generative identities. The participants were members of the public who attended an exhibition of psychiatric patients' artwork (n = 7, age range 18–55). A Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to analyse the research interviews. Results revealed that the majority of community members used dominant cultural discourses to speak about psychiatric patient-artists. These discourses conferred a problem-saturated identity on to psychiatric patients. We conclude that community members can be recruited as outsider witnesses to support psychiatric patients' search for generative identities, provided community members resist discourses that produce problem-saturated identity conclusions.     

Can Toddlers Learn Vocabulary from Television? An Experimental Approach

This study was inspired by the rise in television targeting toddlers and preverbal infants (e.g., Teletubbies, Baby Mozart). Overall, we investigated if very young children who are in the early stages of language acquisition can learn vocabulary quickly (fast map) from television programs. Using a fast mapping paradigm, this study examined a group (n = 48) of toddlers (15–24 months) and their ability to learn novel words. Utilizing a repeated measures design, we compared children's ability to learn various novel words in 5 different conditions. These included the presentation and identification of a novel word by an adult speaker via live presentation when the toddler was attending (i.e., joint reference), an adult via live presentation when the toddler was not attending, an adult speaker on television, and an edited clip from a children's television program (Teletubbies). Overall, the toddlers were most successful in learning novel words in the joint reference condition. They were significantly less successful in the children's program condition. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between age and condition on children's performance. Both younger (15–21 months) and older (22–24 months) participants identified the target objects when they were taught the novel word by an adult speaker; however, it appeared that children under the age of 22 months did not identify the target item when they were taught the novel word via the television program.     

Small subitizing range in people with Williams syndrome

Recent evidence suggests that the rapid apprehension of small numbers of objects—often called subitizing—engages a system which allows representation of up to 4 objects but is distinct from other aspects of numerical processing. We examined subitizing by studying people with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic deficit characterized by severe visuospatial impairments, and normally developing children (4–6.5 years old). In Experiment 1, participants first explicitly counted displays of 1 to 8 squares that appeared for 5 s and reported “how many”. They then reported “how many” for the same displays shown for 250 ms, a duration too brief to allow explicit counting, but sufficient for subitizing. All groups were highly accurate up to 8 objects when they explicitly counted. With the brief duration, people with WS showed almost perfect accuracy up to a limit of 3 objects, comparable to 4-year-olds but fewer than either 5- or 6.5-year-old children. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to report “how many” for displays that were presented for an unlimited duration, as rapidly as possible while remaining accurate. Individuals with WS responded as rapidly as 6.5-year-olds, and more rapidly than 4-year-olds. However, their accuracy was as in Experiment 1, comparable to 4-year-olds and lower than older children. These results are consistent with previous findings, indicating that people with WS can simultaneously represent multiple objects, but that they have a smaller capacity than older children, on par with 4-year-olds. This pattern is discussed in the context of normal and abnormal development of visuospatial skills, in particular those linked to the representation of numerosity.     

The Role of Attachment Styles and Interpersonal Problems in Suicide‐Related Behaviors

The relationships among adult attachment styles, interpersonal problems, and categories of suicide‐related behaviors (i.e., self‐harm, suicide attempts, and their co‐occurrence) were examined in a predominantly psychiatric sample (N = 406). Both anxious and avoidant attachment styles were associated with interpersonal problems. In turn, specific interpersonal problems differentially mediated the relations between attachment style and type of suicide‐related behaviors. These findings suggest the importance of distinguishing between these groups of behaviors in terms of etiological pathways, maintenance processes, and treatment interventions.     

Judgments of average magnitude: Analyses in terms of the functional measurement and two-stage models

Subjects made magnitude estimates of the average loudness of pairs of 1,000-Hz tones varying in sound pressure. A test of fit of an averaging model employing an analysis of variance suggested that the judgments were internally consistent. However, estimates of the parameters of a two-stage model based on the assumption that power transformations were imposed in both input and output implied a nonlinear output function, inconsistent with the averaging model. Additional analyses employing a nonmetric scaling solution also suggested that output was nonlinear, indicating that this implication was not an artifact of the strong assumptions of the two-stage model. Large differences were found among the output functions of individual subjects, and it was suggested that these may have inflated the error term in the analysis of variance, reducing its power to detect violations of the additive model. Similar analyses were performed on data from judgments of average grayness collected by Weiss (1972).     

Judging the plausibility of arguments in scientific texts: a student–scientist comparison

The ability to evaluate scientific claims and evidence is an important aspect of scientific literacy and requires various epistemic competences. Readers spontaneously validate presented information against their knowledge and beliefs but differ in their ability to strategically evaluate the soundness of informal arguments. The present research investigated how students of psychology, compared to scientists working in psychology, evaluate informal arguments. Using a think-aloud procedure, we identified the specific strategies students and scientists apply when judging the plausibility of arguments and classifying common argumentation fallacies. Results indicate that students, compared to scientists, have difficulties forming these judgements and base them on intuition and opinion rather than the internal consistency of arguments. Our findings are discussed using the mental model theory framework. Although introductory students validate scientific information against their knowledge and beliefs, their judgements are often erroneous, in part because their use of strategy is immature. Implications for systematic trainings of epistemic competences are discussed.