The Disappearance of Adulthood

In 1982, Neil Postman wrote The Disappearance of Childhood. In that work, Postman recounted the invention of childhood in the modern world and its demise at the hands of, among other things, the electronic media (principally television). In Postman’s view, television had transformed education into ‘edutainment.’ The implications of this loss were devastating. Taking up where Postman left off I wish to reexamine his claim and amend and update his thesis by suggesting that, after the latest electronic turn, we now live in societies where a meaningful conception of adulthood is disappearing. It is disappearing, in part, because of an impoverished conception of citizenship. Yet it is additionally undermined because, claims to the ascendancy of the ‘knowledge worker’ notwithstanding, the fundamental connection between education and employment is unraveling. In this climate, the purposes of education are constantly queried and scrutinized as its telos is redefined by criteria external to the practice of education: cost-effectiveness, value-for-money, and so on. I suggest that only be reclaiming a meaningful conception of adulthood can education be defended and only by so doing can individuals hope to understand the world around them.     

Presentation modality effect on false memories in younger and older adults: the use of an inference paradigm

Classically, false memories are studied using the DRM paradigm (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995), involving use of words lists. The words of each list are linked to a critical word not presented. Participants create a false memory in recognising and/or recalling this critical word. In most cases older adults have more false memories than younger adults in this paradigm. To use less strategy-dependent material, we compared predictive inferences activated during text reading in young and healthy older participants. For example, in the sentence "The fragile porcelain vase was thrown against the wall" the predictive inference was that the vase is broken. After reading or hearing the texts, the participants had false memories in recalling and/or recognising the predictive inferences. Older adults had more false recognitions than younger adults when they read or heard the text. However, the difference did not reach significance with the cued recalled task. It is concluded that, in more ecological situations such as text reading, abilities in older adults can be preserved.     

The advantage of mentally rotating clockwise

The time taken to decide whether a character is shown in its mirror or normal version has been shown to increase approximately linearly with the angular departure from an up-right position. Additionally, in some studies, decisions took longer for clockwise tilted characters than for counterclockwise tilted ones. Other studies do not report the latter effect. We argue that inconsistencies across studies are caused by variance in participants' strategies. The task employed here was specifically designed to bring these strategies and thereby the direction of rotation under experimental control. From the EEG recorded during the rotation period, we extracted an event-related slow potential whose amplitude is sensitive to the amount of mental rotation. In both strategy conditions, the slow potential's amplitude was lower for clockwise than for counterclockwise rotations. We take this as evidence that mental rotation of alphanumeric characters is easier in a clockwise than in a counterclockwise direction.     

Valuations of compensation and benefit items by new entrants into the professional workforce: Do men and women differ?

Women make up nearly half of the workforce in America, and they continue to enter fields such as business and engineering in record numbers. Additionally, more women with children under 3 years of age are remaining in the workforce. Considering these changes, examining whether the compensation and benefit preferences of male and female entrants into the workforce are different now than they were 15 to 20 years ago is relevant. This study used a sample of 195 college seniors to examine this issue. Results suggested that compensation and benefit preferences of current new entrants are somewhat different from the preferences reported in earlier studies.     

Acute Thoughts,Exercise Consistency,and Coping Self‐Efficacy1

One study purpose was to determine whether individuals classified with respect to consistency of exercise adherence and acute thinking tone differed on coping self‐efficacy, decisional struggle, exercise intention, and affect. A second study purpose was to examine whether coping self‐efficacy predicted struggle, intention, and affect. Participants were 160 healthy people (Mage = 25.6 years) exercising in fitness settings. Social cognitive, affect, and exercise consistency measures were obtained concurrently. A multivariate analysis indicated that positive thinkers experienced significantly lower decisional struggle and higher coping self‐efficacy compared to negative thinkers. Further, consistent exercisers experienced significantly lower decisional struggle and higher coping self‐efficacy, intention, and positive affect compared to inconsistent exercisers. Regression analyses indicated that coping self‐efficacy significantly predicted decisional struggle and intention.     

Pretreatment Correlates of the Therapeutic Alliance in the Chronically Depressed

We examined the relationship between patient characteristics and the working alliance in a multisite trial for chronic depression. Patients treated with the Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP), alone (n = 169) or combined with nefazodone (n = 198), completed the Working Alliance Inventory during the 2nd week of treatment. Within the CBASP alone group, a history of drug abuse/dependence, lower peak social adjustment over the past five years, and lower current social adjustment predicted a significantly poorer alliance. Within the combination group, male gender and a distancing coping style predicted a significantly poorer alliance. Results should be interpreted with caution since they did not replicate across treatment groups, and the number of significant findings were not much greater than chance expectations.     

Visual marking: selective attention to asynchronous temporal groups

In visual search, when a subset of distractors is previewed 1 s before the target and the remaining distractors, search speed is independent of the number of previewed items. This is visual marking. What allows old items to be marked? Four experiments show that marking is disrupted if the onset of the new items is accompanied by synchronous changes to the old items, but it is not disrupted by changes restricted to the background or by asynchronous changes to the old items. Further, behaviorally relevant old items can be prioritized over new items. Visual marking is based on temporal asynchrony between new and old items, which allows segregation of these items into 2 temporal groups. Attention is then selectively applied to 1 group.