A Psychoanalytic Moveable Feast

The author describes his development as a psychoanalyst. He describes the weaving of his formative experiences into a source of motivation in the pursuit of psychoanalysis as a vocation. He describes the gradual development of the ability to utilize the synergism of the evolution of his self-analysis, clinical experience, and psychoanalytic knowledge in the evolution of his work as a psychoanalyst.     

Empirically Supported Treatments for Insomnia

The purpose of this study was to examine the level of fears in Swedish children and to examine the relation of those fears to state and trait anxiety. The purpose was also to do a normative study of FSSC-R (Fear Survey Schedule for Children - Revised). In total, 550 children between 8 and 16 years of age answered the questionnaires. The results indicate that there are no gender differences in total fear score, factor scores and number of fears. In contrast to earlier results, there was no correlation between fear and trait anxiety; however, a modest correlation was found between fear and state anxiety     

Sensory experience ratings for over 5,000 mono- and disyllabic words

Sensory experience ratings (SERs) reflect the extent to which a word evokes a sensory and/or perceptual experience in the mind of the reader. Juhasz, Yap, Dicke, Taylor, and Gullick (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64:1683–1691, 2011) demonstrated that SERs predict a significant amount of variance in lexical-decision response times in two megastudies of lexical processing when a large number of established psycholinguistic variables are controlled for. Here we provide the SERs for the 2,857 monosyllabic words used in the Juhasz et al. study, as well as newly collected ratings on 3,000 disyllabic words. New analyses with the combined set of words confirmed that SERs predict a reliable amount of variance in the lexical-decision response times and naming times from the English Lexicon Project (Balota, Yap, Cortese, Hutchison, Kessler, Loftus, & Treiman, Behavior Research Methods 39:445–459, 2007) when a large number of surface, lexical, and semantic variables are statistically controlled for. The results suggest that the relative availability of sensory/perceptual information associated with a word contributes to lexical–semantic processing.     

Rorschach and TAT Responses of Negro,Mexican-American,and Anglo Psychiatric Patients

The Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Projective Test responses of 75 Anglos, Negroes, and Mexican-American patients on the psychiatric unit of a Veterans Administration General Medical and Surgical Hospital were compared. The subjects were a random sample of non-psychotic male veterans whose ages, educational backgrounds and occupational levels were quite similar.

A number of statistically significant differences were found between the groups, with most distinct differences on the Rorschach appearing on the measures of hostility. The TAT pointed up differences between the Mexican-Americans and the other two groups in themes of family unit, and in their characterization, but more particularly of father-son and mother-son relationships. This TAT finding possibly demonstrates the persistence of Mexican-American cultural values regarding interpersonal. relationships within the family. Results of this study suggest the utility of projective measures in the formulation of culture and personality theories.     

"I couldn't have seen it coming": The impact of negative self-relevant outcomes on retrospections about foreseeability

We examined a phenomenon related to hindsight bias, specifically, retrospective judgements about the foreseeability of an outcome. We predicted that negative, self-relevant outcomes would be judged as less foreseeable by the recipient of the outcome than by others, unlike either positive outcomes or outcomes that are not self-relevant. In the context of a "stock market decision-making game", the hypothetical stock selected by one of two players showed an extreme increase or decrease. As predicted, the player who received an extreme negative outcome reported that this outcome was less foreseeable than did the opponent and an observer, for whom the outcome was less self-relevant. For no other kind of outcome was there a difference between the recipient of an outcome, the opponent, and the observer. The findings have several implications, including the possibility that hindsight bias should be considered as a special case of retrospective foreseeability.     

Single- versus dual-process models of lexical decision performance: insights from response time distributional analysis

This article evaluates 2 competing models that address the decision-making processes mediating word recognition and lexical decision performance: a hybrid 2-stage model of lexical decision performance and a random-walk model. In 2 experiments, nonword type and word frequency were manipulated across 2 contrasts (pseudohomophone-legal nonword and legal-illegal nonword). When nonwords became more wordlike (i.e., BRNTA vs. BRANT vs. BRANE), response latencies to nonwords were slowed and the word frequency effect increased. More important, distributional analyses revealed that the Nonword Type = Word Frequency interaction was modulated by different components of the response time distribution, depending on the specific nonword contrast. A single-process random-walk model was able to account for this particular set of findings more successfully than the hybrid 2-stage model.     

The influence of belief that a car crashed on witnesses' estimates of civilian and police car speed

The authors performed 2 experiments investigating the influence of the belief that a vehicle crashed on witnesses' estimates of the vehicle's speed. In Experiment 1, participants saw a video of a civilian car being driven, after which they were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions. The 1st group was told that the vehicle subsequently crashed; the 2nd group was not told that the vehicle crashed. The results indicted no differences between the 2 groups on a number of factors, including estimates of the vehicle's speed. Experiment 2 was identical except that the video showed a police car using flashing lights and sirens. Participants who had been told that the car had crashed overestimated speed, the likelihood of a crash, and the likelihood of someone being killed. Participants who were not told that the vehicle crashed estimated the speed of the vehicle accurately. Confidence in their estimates of speed was not significantly different between the 2 groups. Results are discussed with regard to police investigations of road accidents.