Post-divorce adaptation and the attribution of responsibility

A study was conducted to explore the possible relationship between post-divorce adjustment and the attributions divorced women give for the failure of their marriages. The study revealed that significantly more subjects who attributed their divorces to interactive rather than personal factors were more active, more socially skilled, happier, more optimistic, and less likely to blame themselves rather than outside forces for failures. The findings were also analyzed in light of whether or not subjects had initiated their divorce proceedings. The importance of making interactive attributions was discussed.We would like to thank Cynthia Weinman for her help in conducting the study. We are also grateful to the City University of New York for providing the funds for this research.     

Depth discrimination from shading under diffuse lighting

The human visual system has a remarkable ability to interpret smooth patterns of light on a surface in terms of 3-D surface geometry. Classical studies of shape-from-shading perception have assumed that surface irradiance varies with the angle between the local surface normal and a collimated light source. This model holds, for example, on a sunny day. One common situation in which this model fails to hold, however, is under diffuse lighting such as on a cloudy day. Here we report on the first psychophysical experiments that address shape-from-shading under a uniform diffuse-lighting condition. Our hypothesis was that shape perception can be explained with a perceptual model that "dark means deep". We tested this hypothesis by comparing performance in a depth-discrimination task to performance in a brightness-discrimination task, using identical stimuli. We found a significant correlation between responses in the two tasks, supporting a dark-means-deep model. However, overall performance in the depth-discrimination task was superior to that predicted by a dark-means-deep model. This implies that humans use a more accurate model than dark-means-deep to perceive shape-from-shading under diffuse lighting.     

Changing the means of managerial work: effects of automated decision support systems on personnel selection tasks

Journal of Business and Psychology - To enhance the quality and efficiency of information processing and decision-making, automation based on artificial intelligence and machine learning has...     

Meaning gained versus meaning lost: The effects of meaning salience on anxiety and depression during the coronavirus pandemic

People who have meaningful lives generally experience less anxiety and depression. Meaning salience, or the awareness of the meaning in one's life, is believed to partially explain this relationship. However, in times of isolation, what might be most salient to people are the meaningful aspects of their lives that have disappeared. This study seeks to understand how making gained versus lost meaning salient affects anxiety and depression. Participants either wrote for 5 minutes about how their life gained meaning (n = 29) or lost meaning (n = 30) due to the coronavirus restrictions, or about music (i.e., the control condition; n = 32). Those who wrote about gained meaning experienced less momentary anxiety than those who wrote about lost meaning. In addition, meaning salience moderated the relationship between meaning and both anxiety and depression. Those who wrote about gained meaning appeared to exhibit a positive relationship between meaning in life (MIL) and both anxiety and depression, while those who wrote about lost meaning exhibited negative relationships. In all, this suggests that meaning salience is not always positive and that researchers and practitioners should consider how making positive meaning salient may be more beneficial than a general focus on MIL.     

Learning to Reach by Constraining the Movement Search Space

Trial‐and‐error learning strategies play a central role in sensorimotor development during early infancy. However, learning to reach by trial‐and‐error normally requires a slow and laborious search through the space of possible movements. We propose a computational model of reaching based on the notion that early sensorimotor control is driven by the generation of exploratory movements, followed by the selection and maintenance of adaptive movement patterns. We find that, instead of exhaustively exploring the full search space of movement patterns, the model exploits several emergent constraints that limit the initial size of the movement search space. These constraints exploit both mechanical and kinematic properties of the reaching task. We relate these results to the development of reaching during infancy, and discuss recent findings that have identified similar constraints in young infants.     

Mindful Learning

Mindfulness, achieved without meditation, is discussed with particular reference to learning. Being mindful is the simple act of drawing noveldistinctions. It leads us to greater sensitivity to context and perspective, and ultimately to greater control over our lives. When we engage in mindfullearning, we avoid forming mind-sets that unnecessarily limit us. Many of our beliefs about learning are mind-sets that have been mindlessly accepted to be true. Consideration is given to some of the consequences that result from a mindful reconsideration of these myths of learning.