Dressing Religious Bodies in Public Spaces: Gender, Clothing and Negotiations of Stigma Among Jews in Paris and Muslims in London

In recent years religious clothing has become prevalent across many European cities, making religious bodies more visible in public spaces. This paper brings together our separate research on Jews in Paris and Muslims in London. While recognising the clear differences between these two socio-political contexts and distinct religious groups, we suggest that a focus on clothing allows us to consider some points of similarity and difference in the presentation of gendered religious bodies, particularly in situations of heightened stigmatisation. We draw upon Goffman’s notion of impression management, in contexts of risks and threats, to explore how individuals experience and negotiate self presentation as members of stigmatised religious groups. We use rich qualitative data based on indepth interviews to consider how, when faced with collective stigmatisation, actors make deliberate and measured choices to present themselves and attempt to impression manage.     

Children on the autism spectrum update their behaviour in response to a volatile environment

Typical adults can track reward probabilities across trials to estimate the volatility of the environment and use this information to modify their learning rate (Behrens et al., 2007). In a stable environment, it is advantageous to take account of outcomes over many trials, whereas in a volatile environment, recent experience should be more strongly weighted than distant experience. Recent predictive coding accounts of autism propose that autistic individuals will demonstrate atypical updating of their behaviour in response to the statistics of the reward environment. To rigorously test this hypothesis, we administered a developmentally appropriate version of Behrens et al.'s (2007) task to 34 cognitively able children on the autism spectrum aged between 6 and 14 years, 32 age‐ and ability‐matched typically developing children and 19 typical adults. Participants were required to choose between a green and a blue pirate chest, each associated with a randomly determined reward value between 0 and 100 points, with a combined total of 100 points. On each trial, the reward was given for one stimulus only. In the stable condition, the ratio of the blue or green response being rewarded was fixed at 75:25. In the volatile condition, the ratio alternated between 80:20 and 20:80 every 20 trials. We estimated the learning rate for each participant by fitting a delta rule model and compared this rate across conditions and groups. All groups increased their learning rate in the volatile condition compared to the stable condition. Unexpectedly, there was no effect of group and no interaction between group and condition. Thus, autistic children used information about the statistics of the reward environment to guide their decisions to a similar extent as typically developing children and adults. These results help constrain predictive coding accounts of autism by demonstrating that autism is not characterized by uniform differences in the weighting of prediction error.     

School psychologists' services in special education programs

Reviews school psychologists' services in special education programs. Fifty-eight credentialed school psychologists in 10 school districts were interviewed individually about background and training, professional duties, favored clinical techniques, and opinions and recommendations for improved services. According to self-reports, the bulk of time was devoted to activities directly related to assessment of pupils with little involvement in research, in-service training, or other clinical activities. Professional association memberships were primarily local. Assessment techniques tended to be limited to a few standardized tests. Overall findings support sample psychologists' expressed concerns as to need for changes in preservice and in-service training.     

War,revolution, and psychoanalysis: Freudian thought begins to grapple with social reality

Psychoanalytic theory and practice have been affected by external events as well as by internal development. Specifically, the period of the Great War and its aftermath was a turning point in the history of psychoanalysis. These experiences emphasized the inadequacy of the libido theory alone, accelerated Freud's impetus toward metapsychology, and encouraged the articulation of theories of innate destructive urges, of ego instincts, of the superego, and of social interaction. Discussionsof war neuroses, of aggression and the death instinct, of the reality principle, and of the mechanisms of social psychology undermined Freud's original biologism in favor of a social-scientific approach. Psychoanalytic theory began to take more account of social experience and was profoundly changed in the process.     

Heteronyms and polyphones: Categories of words with multiple phonemic representations

Heteronyms are words that have two different possible pronunciations that are associated with two (or more) different meanings. They can be used to investigate psychological mechanisms in reading and other cognitive processes. A corpus of English heteronyms has been collected and is tabulated here. In addition, a corpus of English polyphones is tabulated. These are words with different pronunciations that are not associated with different meanings.     

Age,working memory,and the Tower of London task

The current study explores the role of three components of working memory in age differences in an executive task, the Tower of London (TOL). The TOL task is sensitive to frontal lobe damage, and is widely used to measure planning ability. Dual tasks were used to test the involvement of the phonological loop (articulatory suppression), visuospatial buffer (pattern tapping), and central executive (random generation) in age effects on the TOL. Older adults showed greater reliance than young on domain-specific verbal and spatial memory components in performing the TOL. In terms of executive function, qualitatively different interference patterns were seen in young and old participants. However, the validity of using random generation tasks to assess executive function in older populations can be questioned. For older participants, performing the TOL loads all components of working memory, whereas for the younger participants the TOL more specifically loads executive functioning.     

A taste of words: linguistic context and perceptual simulation predict the modality of words

Previous studies have shown that object properties are processed faster when they follow properties from the same perceptual modality than properties from different modalities. These findings suggest that language activates sensorimotor processes, which, according to those studies, can only be explained by a modal account of cognition. The current paper shows how a statistical linguistic approach of word co-occurrences can also reliably predict the category of perceptual modality a word belongs to (auditory, olfactory-gustatory, visual-haptic), even though the statistical linguistic approach is less precise than the modal approach (auditory, gustatory, haptic, olfactory, visual). Moreover, the statistical linguistic approach is compared with the modal embodied approach in an experiment in which participants verify properties that share or shift modalities. Response times suggest that fast responses can best be explained by the linguistic account, whereas slower responses can best be explained by the embodied account. These results provide further evidence for the theory that conceptual processing is both linguistic and embodied, whereby less precise linguistic processes precede precise simulation processes.     

Great expectations: students’ educational attitudes upon the transition to post-secondary vocational education

In this study, we examine students’ educational attitudes upon the transition to Dutch senior vocational education (SVE), a transition associated with high dropout rates in the first year. Prior studies have identified differences in educational attitudes between sociodemographic groups. However, the mechanisms underlying those differences remain topic of debate: some studies point at differences in the school orientation and support in students’ social communities outside school, others focus on differences in educational experiences between sociodemographic groups. Multilevel sequential regression analyses on a diverse sample of 1438 students in urban SVE schools reveal that students have very positive educational attitudes upon their transition to SVE. Ethnic minority students express particularly positive attitudes. School-related encouragement and support at home plays an important role in students’ attitudes, but the attitudes of students from lower educated or ethnic minority communities are less related to this support. Prior school experiences play an essential, but occasionally counterproductive, role in students’ attitudes upon transition, depicting the transition as a fresh new start for some, and an unwelcome threshold for others.     

Critical issues in psychological autopsy studies

This paper reviews research based on the psychological autopsy (PA) method applied to the study of suicide. It evidences the presence of a number of methodological problems. Shortcomings concern sampling biases in the selection of control subjects, confounding influences of extraneous variables, and reliability of the assessment instruments. The absence of homogeneity among studies in the procedure employed, as well as the lack of defined guidelines for performing this type of inquiry are emphasized. Questions needing empirical investigation in the future are pointed out. It is concluded that the validity and reliability of findings emerging from the use of this method of investigation would benefit from a standardization of its application.     

Assessing the relationship between cold pressor pain responses and dimensions of the anxiety sensitivity profile in healthy men and women

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) has been shown previously to be an important factor in the perception and experience of experimentally induced pain within healthy adults. The aim of the current study was to extend this research by: (i) using the Anxiety Sensitivity Profile (ASP) as an alternative measure of AS; (ii) examining whether different coping instructions affect pain reports; and (iii) investigating potential differences between men and women. Participants were 50 healthy adults (23 males, 27 females) who were required to complete 2 versions of the cold pressor pain task; one version required the use of control instructions, whereas the other made use of acceptance-based instructions. Although the coping instructions were found to affect pain thresholds (acceptance resulted in lower thresholds), a similar pattern of correlations were found between the pain indexes and AS under both conditions. Of the ASP subscales, the gastrointestinal and cognitive concerns components were found to be the most strongly related to pain experiences. When the analysis was conducted separately for each sex, the ASP scales were related to the self-report measures of pain in women, whereas they were related to the behavioural measures of pain in men. These results not only confirm that AS is associated with experimental pain, but that there may be sex differences in this relationship.