Contextualization of Survey Data: What Do We Gain and Does It Matter?

Survey research designs that integrate contextual data have become more prevalent in recent decades, presumably to enable a more refined focus on the person as the unit of analysis and a greater emphasis on interindividual differences due to social forces and contextual conditions. This article reviews varied approaches to contextualizing survey data and examines the value of linking two data sources to respondent information: interviewer ratings and neighborhood information (measured via census tracts). The utility of an integrative approach is illustrated with data from the Health and Retirement Study. The results reveal modest gains by using a contextualized approach but also demonstrate that neglecting contextual factors may lead to misdirected substantive conclusions, especially for older racial and ethnic minorities. To enhance the ecological validity of survey data, investigators should select theoretically-meaningful contextual data for specific research questions and consider cross-level interactions.     

The path more travelled: Time pressure increases reliance on familiar route-based strategies during navigation

Navigating large-scale environments involves dynamic interactions between the physical world and individuals’ knowledge, goals, and strategies. Time pressure can result from self-imposed goals or relatively dynamic situational factors that induce varied constraints. While time pressure is ubiquitous in daily life and has been shown to influence affective states, cost-benefit analyses, and strategy selection, its influence on navigation behaviour is unknown. The present study examined how introducing varied time constraints during virtual urban navigation would influence spatial strategies and impact the efficiency and effectiveness of goal-directed wayfinding. Participants learned a large-scale urban virtual environment by wayfinding between a series of 20 successive landmark goals (e.g., You have reached the Theater. Now find the Bank.). A day later, they again performed the same task, but landmark-to-landmark trials were characterized by conditions of low-, moderate-, or high-pressure time limits as quantified by a pilot experiment. As time pressure increased, participants more likely navigated along previously experienced paths and less likely travelled in the global direction of the destination. Results suggest strategy shifts under time constraints that increase reliance on egocentric, route-based strategies and decrease reliance on global configural knowledge, probably in an attempt to reduce cognitive demands and support performance under pressure.     

Theoretical Antecedents of Distress Disclosure in a Community Sample of Young People1

The Distress Disclosure Index ( Kahn & Hessling, 2001 ) measures the tendency to disclose psychological distress and is important in understanding psychological well‐being, interpersonal relationships, and help seeking. This paper used the disclosure decision model ( Omarzu, 2000 ) to explore the theoretical antecedents of distress disclosure. Results of a community‐based survey of 17–18‐year‐olds in South Wales (United Kingdom), suggesting that private self‐consciousness, social support, and femininity were associated with higher distress disclosure. Shame was associated with lower distress disclosure. Moderating effects of gender and gender identity were also explored. Social support and femininity both interacted with gender to predict distress disclosure. The results suggest a number of interventions to increase distress disclosure in young men and women.     

“This story is right on”: The impact of regulatory fit on narrative engagement and persuasion

When people read a story, feelings of rightness from regulatory fit (consistency between regulatory state and strategic means) could suggest that the story is “right on” relative to feelings of wrongness from regulatory nonfit. Under these conditions, individuals who are experiencing feelings of rightness should engage more with the narrative and be more persuaded by its implicit messages. Results from two experiments supported these hypotheses. Participants in Experiment 1 were more mentally engaged (transported) by the story when they experienced regulatory fit. We replicated this effect in Experiment 2 and extended it to endorsement of story‐consistent beliefs, an indicator of persuasion via narratives. Additionally, we found that drawing participants' attention to an earlier event as a source of feelings of rightness eliminated the regulatory fit effects on transportation and persuasion, suggesting attribution of feelings of regulatory fit/nonfit to the plausibility of the narrative world. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How do i know what i feel? Evidence for the role of self‐categorisation in symptom perceptions

This paper extends the self‐categorisation model of symptom appraisals to predict that individuals who believe they have a given illness will perceive concurrent symptoms relevant to that illness to be more severe when they categorise themselves as members of a group of people with that illness. These predictions are supported with opportunity samples of individuals reporting, or not reporting a common cold (Study 1, N = 60) and reporting colds or tinnitus (Study 2, N = 64). In both studies, relevant symptoms were rated as more severe when illness group memberships were salient. The methodological, theoretical and clinical implications of these findings and possible therapeutic applications of self‐categorisation theory (SCT) to symptom perceptions are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Neurophysiology and neuroanatomy of smooth pursuit: Lesion studies

Smooth pursuit impairment is recognized clinically by the presence of saccadic tracking of a small object and quantified by reduction in pursuit gain, the ratio of smooth eye movement velocity to the velocity of a foveal target. Correlation of the site of brain lesions, identified by imaging or neuropathological examination, with defective smooth pursuit determines brain structures that are necessary for smooth pursuit. Paretic, low gain, pursuit occurs toward the side of lesions at the junction of the parietal, occipital and temporal lobes (area V5), the frontal eye field and their subcortical projections, including the posterior limb of the internal capsule, the midbrain and the basal pontine nuclei. Paresis of ipsiversive pursuit also results from damage to the ventral paraflocculus and caudal vermis of the cerebellum. Paresis of contraversive pursuit is a feature of damage to the lateral medulla. Retinotopic pursuit paresis consists of low gain pursuit in the visual hemifield contralateral to damage to the optic radiation, striate cortex or area V5. Craniotopic paresis of smooth pursuit consists of impaired smooth eye movement generation contralateral to the orbital midposition after acute unilateral frontal or parietal lobe damage. Omnidirectional saccadic pursuit is a most sensitive sign of bilateral or diffuse cerebral, cerebellar or brainstem disease. The anatomical and physiological bases of defective smooth pursuit are discussed here in the context of the effects of lesion in the human brain.     

Age-related changes in children's understanding of effort and ability: implications for attribution theory and motivation

Building on Nicholls's earlier work, we examined developmental changes in children's understanding of effort and ability when faced with a negative outcome. In a sample of 166 children and adolescents (ages 5-15 years), younger children conflated the meaning of effort and ability, explaining that smart students work hard, whereas older children understood effort and ability to be reciprocally related constructs, explaining that smart students do not need to work as hard. Understanding the reciprocal relation between effort and ability was correlated with age. Age-related changes in the meaning and correlates of effort and ability were also examined. Developmental implications for attribution theory and achievement motivation are discussed.     

Independent processing of form, colour, and texture in object perception

Most investigations of object recognition have focused on the form rather than the material properties of objects. Nevertheless, knowledge of the material properties of an object (via its surface cues) can provide important information about that object's identity. In this study, we used Garner's speeded-classification task to explore whether or not the processing of form and the processing of surface properties are independent. In experiment 1, participants made length and width classifications in an initial form task. Participants were unable to ignore length while making width classifications, and were unable to ignore width while making length classifications. This suggests that the perception of length and the perception of width share common processing resources. In a subsequent task, we examined possible interactions between the processing of form and the processing of surface properties. In contrast to the findings with the form task, participants were able to ignore form while making surface-property classifications, and to ignore surface properties while making form classifications. This suggests that the form of objects and their surface properties are processed independently. In experiment 2, we went on to show that the two prominent surface-property dimensions of colour and texture can also be processed independently. In other words, participants were able to ignore colour while making texture classifications, and vice versa. Finally, in experiment 3, we examined the possibility that the stimuli and required responses that we used in experiment 2 were too categorical and thus not optimal for assessing whether or not colour and texture share common processing resources. Using a different stimulus set, participants were again able to ignore colour while making texture classifications, and vice versa. Taken together, these results provided convincing evidence that the separate ventral-stream brain regions identified for form, texture, and colour in a recent neuroimaging study (Cant and Goodale, 2007 Cerebral Cortex 17 713-731) can indeed function independently.     

Killing the father,Parmenides: On Lacan’s anti-philosophy

This paper examines the historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides, that we argue underlie Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, we systematically present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975, assembling his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions of this subject have not systematically done. In part iii, focusing upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touching on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and (in a remarkable confirmation of Lacan’s “Parmenidean” conception of philosophy) the early Wittgenstein—we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas, nearly-contemporary with Galileo’s mathematization of physics and carried forwards by Kant’s critical philosophy and account of the substanceless subject of apperception. In different terms than Slavoj ?i?ek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit (as against mere illusion or falsity) that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried, at the same time as it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which thinking and being could be the same.