Ego identity status in college women

Ego-identity status was determined for 49 college women and related to difficulty of college major, self-esteem, authoritarianism, and Welsh Anxiety Scale (WAS) scores The modified identity status interview for women included “attitudes toward premarital intercourse” Identity achievements had more difficult majors than identity diffusions Foreclosures were highest in self-esteem and lowest in WAS scores–interpreted either as approval-seeking or as this status's adaptive value for women. They were also highest in authoritarianism Moratoriums were lowest in authoritarianism. Identity diffusions obtained the highest WAS scores Failure to find differences on the Luchins Water Jars task was seen as limiting the range of the identity status constructs.     

Reviews of current books

Pastoral Psychology -     

Individual differences in preschool children's knowledge of superordinate categories

The present study assesses intensional knowledge of superordinate categories in preschool children. This assessment is part of a larger programmatic research effort aimed at the development of a cognitive preschool screening test to detect learning problems prior to their manifestation in school failure. Necessary prerequisites for including intensional superordinate category knowledge as a potential component of this screening test are addressed: (a) Are there substantial variations in this knowledge across preschool children? (b) Can the knowledge be measured reliably using game-like picture tasks? (c) Do individual differences in this knowledge relate to the child's current level of intellectual functioning? An underlying assumption for the development of this screening test is that assessing gradually emerging abstract knowledge that develops through active, ongoing processing is more likely to predict learning problems than assessing knowledge that develops through rote associative learning. Consistent with this approach was the prediction that one component of intension, knowledge of differences, would be a better predictor of current functioning than knowledge of similarities. The data support this contention. Although both knowledge of similarities and differences was stable within an individual, variable among individuals and highly correlated with each other, only knowledge of differences related to the child's concurrent level of intellectual functioning.     

A national survey of candidates: I. demographics, practice patterns, and satisfaction with training

To better focus efforts in recruiting psychoanalytic candidates, current candidates' demographics, practice patterns, and satisfaction with psychoanalytic training were investigated. An anonymous web-based survey was distributed by e-mail to all candidates subscribing to the affiliate member e-mail list in 2009-2010. Surveys were completed by 226 of 565 affiliate members, for a return rate of 40%. The majority of respondents were women 45 to 64 years of age, married, with a doctoral degree, in private practice, with an annual household income of over $100,000. Most candidates devoted 11 to 30 hours a week to training and had no analysts or candidates in their workplace. Almost half had considered training for more than four years before matriculation, with financial issues cited most frequently as delaying entry. Over 80% of respondents were satisfied with their training. The most frequently cited reasons for dissatisfaction were a negative institute atmosphere, concerns about teaching or the curriculum, and difficulty finding cases. Candidates in training for eight years or more accounted for almost 20% of the group and were more often dissatisfied with training. This study demonstrates that the majority of current candidates are satisfied with training but suggests that recruitment may become increasingly difficult unless factors related to time, cost, case finding, graduation requirements, and institute atmosphere can be addressed.     

Laughter exaggerates happy and sad faces depending on visual context

Laughter is an auditory stimulus that powerfully conveys positive emotion. We investigated how laughter influenced the visual perception of facial expressions. We presented a sound clip of laughter simultaneously with a happy, a neutral, or a sad schematic face. The emotional face was briefly presented either alone or among a crowd of neutral faces. We used a matching method to determine how laughter influenced the perceived intensity of the happy, neutral, and sad expressions. For a single face, laughter increased the perceived intensity of a happy expression. Surprisingly, for a crowd of faces, laughter produced an opposite effect, increasing the perceived intensity of a sad expression in a crowd. A follow-up experiment revealed that this contrast effect may have occurred because laughter made the neutral distractor faces appear slightly happy, thereby making the deviant sad expression stand out in contrast. A control experiment ruled out semantic mediation of the laughter effects. Our demonstration of the strong context dependence of laughter effects on facial expression perception encourages a reexamination of the previously demonstrated effects of prosody, speech content, and mood on face perception, as they may be similarly context dependent.     

Assistive/rehabilitation technology, disability, and service delivery models

The United Nation's Millennium Development Goals do not explicitly articulate a focus on disability; similar failures in the past resulted in research, policy, and practice that are not generalizable and did not meet the needs of persons with disabilities since they were developed for an "average" population. Academics and professionals in health and other disciplines should have a knowledge base in evidence-based practices that improve well-being and participation of people with disabilities through effective service delivery of assistive technology. Grounded by a theoretical framework that incorporates a multivariate perspective of disability that is acknowledged in the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities and the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, we present a review of models of assistive technology service delivery and call for future syntheses of the fragmented evidence base that would permit a comparative effectiveness approach to evaluation.