Book reviews

Patterson, K., Marshall, J, C. and Coltheart, M. (Eds.). Surface dyslexia : Neuropsychological and cognitive studies of phonological reading. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1985. Pp. 544. ISBN 0-86377-026-6. £29.95.

Donovan, B. T. Hormones and human behaviour. Cambridge : Cambridge Unversity Press. 1985. Pp. 223. ISBN 0-521-25881-2. £25.00.

Harris, M. D. Introduction to Natural Language Processing. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall International. 1985. Pp. 366. ISBN 0-8539-3253-2. £25.00.

Daniloff, N. (Ed.). Speech science—Recent advances. London: Taylor and Francis. 1982. Pp. 326. ISBN 0-85066-501-9. £30.00.

Haugeland, J. Artificial Intelligence-The very Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. 1985. Pp. 287. ISBN 0-262-08153-9. £14.95.

Sampson, G. Writing systems. London: Hunthcinson. 1985. Pp. 234. ISBN 0-091-56980-X. £19.65.

Pavlidis, G. Th. and Fisher, D. f. (Eds.). Dyslexia: Its neuropsychology and treatment 1986. Chichester: John Wiley. £29.50.     

Thinking and Modeling at Multiple Levels: The Potential Contribution of Multilevel Modeling to Communication Theory and Research

In this introduction to the special issue on applications of multilevel modeling (MLM) to communication research, we provide a conceptual overview of the benefits of MLM—the ability to simultaneously analyze data collected at multiple levels, the ease with which it can be used to assess trends and change over time, and its incorporation of the nested structure of data in the estimation process. We highlight ways in which MLM can be used to further theory and research in communication. In addition, we comment on the applications of MLM highlighted in this special issue and echo past calls for more multilevel theorizing and analysis in the field of communication.     

Married Women's Achievement and Career Motivation: The Influence of Some Environmental and Psychological Variables

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships of some environmental and psychological variables to the career and achievement motivation of married women who had returned to college after an absence (N = 162).Subjects were grouped into first-and second-year students and by sex type (i.e., Androgynous, Feminine). Correlations for all groups indicated that either psychological or environmental variables were significantly related for some group to the motivation variables. Multivariate analyses for sex-typed groups supported the correlational findings for first-year subjects. These findings suggested the importance of including both types of variables in research investigating the career and achievement motivation of college reentry women. This was an exploratory study and researchers are urged to replicate it with larger, more representative sample.     

A developmental shift in processes underlying successful belief-desire reasoning

Young children's failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the most likely content for the belief to be attributed from amongst several competing contents [Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Developmental Science, 1, 247-254]. We tested this model with an ‘avoidance false belief task’ in which subjects predict the behavior of a character, who wants to avoid an object but who is mistaken about which of three locations it is in. The task has two equally correct answers—in seeking to avoid the location where she mistakenly believes the object to be, the character might equally go to the location where the object actually is, or to the remaining empty location. However, the model predicts that subjects will prefer one of these answers, selecting the object's actual location over the empty location. This bias was confirmed in a series of five experiments with children aged between 4 and 8 years of age. A sixth experiment ruled out two rival explanations for children's biased responding. Two further experiments found the opposite bias in adults. These findings support one selection model as an account of belief-desire reasoning in children, and suggest that a different model is needed for adults. The process of selecting contents for mental state attributions shows a developmental shift between 8 years of age and adulthood.     

Anorexic and bulimic states of mind in the psycho-analytic treatment of anorexic/bulimic patients and psychotic patients

SUMMARY

This paper discusses the relationship of bulimic and anorexic states of mind, and their interchangeability as manifested in the transference. The anorexic making bulimic-like greedy demands upon his/her objects. The bulimic showing all the qualities manifestly presented by the anorexic, an appetiteless approach to possibilities and peculiar searches in a non-specific fashion for satisfaction. Clinical material for discussion is presented from the analysis of three patients — one of whom was psychotic.

The paper attempts to show how in the transference in the true anorexic and bulimic, attacks are directed towards the awareness of the meaningful and intended specificity and function of all objects, so that any specific function can be mis-directed or nullified by the patient. The paper shows how some of these characteristics can appear as well in the treatment of borderline cases and affect the countertransference of the therapist.     

Infant perception of a manual pick-up event

Manual pick-up of an object is a simple causal event frequently observed by infants. A habituation-recovery of looking technique with filmed stimuli is used in experiments which seek to investigate aspects of the perception and encoding of such events in infants. In the first study with 28-week-olds, it is found that ‘lateral mirror-image’ pick-ups are hardly discriminable, while a change in the contact relation of hand and object is readily discriminable. In the second, again with 28-week-olds, the discriminability of the contact relation appears to be specific to a dynamic context involving a hand (rather than another inanimate object). The results of a further experiment make it appear unlikely that the previous results were simply due to the partial occlusion of the picked-up object produced by the grasping. The implications of these results for infant perception of causality are briefly considered.