Cognitive Heuristics and AIDS Risk Assessment Among Physicians1

Physicians (N= 331) reported perceived risk of HIV exposure, worry about on-the-job HIV exposure, and experience with patients who test seropositive for the HIV. In addition, the use of the availability heuristic was examined by responses to questions about talking and reading about AIDS, and the use of the simulation heuristic was examined by responses to questions about imagining oneself being exposed to HIV on the job. Simulation of the HIV-exposure experience related significantly to perceived risk (p < .001), even after variance attributable to actual experience and use of the availability heuristic was taken into account. Availability of AIDS information related marginally to perceived risk after variance attributable to actual experience and use of the simulation heuristic was taken into account. Simulation related strongly with worry about on-the-job exposure (p < .001), and availability was not significantly related to worry after variance associated with simulation and experience with AIDS was removed. Implications of these results for physician training are discussed.     

A model for group therapy with latency-age boys

This paper describes a model of group therapy with latency-age boys 9 through 12 years old. Usually parents and families are involved in family therapy while a boy is in group therapy. The model described here is appropriate for outpatient or inpatient treatment and has been used extensively by the author in a variety of settings.     

Excursions in Rorschachlandia: Surveying the scientific and philosophical landscape of Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics

This article examines the milieu of Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics (1921/2021) under development between 1911 and his death in 1922 and explores new evidence about the direction Rorschach's test might have taken after publication of Psychodiagnostics. This includes direct and indirect influences from turn of the century continental philosophy and science and innovative colleagues in the Swiss psychiatric and psychoanalytic societies. The availability of newly translated scholarship, including the correspondence between Ludwig Binswanger and Hermann Rorschach following the 1921 publication of Psychodiagnostics, Binswanger's posthumous 1923 commentary in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and recent new translation of Psychodiagnostics, permits a fresh appraisal of the milieu and foundations of Rorschach's development. Understanding these sources and influences opens new vistas in reappraising the nature of Rorschach's “test theory” which Rorschach considered undeveloped at the time of his death. This paper presents new evidence that, under the influence of Rorschach's close colleague, Ludwig Binswanger, the Geisteswissenschaften and phenomenology might have figured prominently in future developments. The paper concludes that Rorschach, preoccupied with considerations of kinesthetic subjectivity in his innovative conceptualization of human movement responses, was a nascent phenomenologist whose untimely death cut short further developments in his theory of the test.     

Parent engagement in an original and culturally adapted evidence-based parenting program,Legacy for Children™

Legacy for Children™ (Legacy) is an evidence-based program focused on promoting sensitive, responsive parenting for socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Legacy has recently been culturally and linguistically adapted for Spanish-monolingual Latino families and is being piloted in partnership with an early childhood education program. We conducted a mixed methods study to identify barriers and facilitators to engagement, using program monitoring data sources from both participant and group leader perspectives. We conducted qualitative analyses of open-ended data to identify distinct barriers (e.g., employment challenges, health-related challenges and appointments) and facilitators (e.g., other mothers in group, interest in program topics) to engagement that emerged across English and Spanish language curriculum versions; curriculum-specific barriers and facilitators were also documented. We interpret these findings in light of quantitative data on measures of engagement, showing that participants in the Spanish curriculum evidenced comparable levels of parent–group leader relationship quality relative to the English group, and higher levels of parent's group support/connectedness and overall satisfaction. These results offer promising considerations for optimizing families’ engagement in parenting programs in the context of early care and education settings.     

Is symmetry identity?

Wigner found unreasonable the "effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences". But if the mathematics we use to describe nature is simply a carefully coded expression of our experience then its effectiveness is quite reasonable. Its effectiveness is built into its design. We consider group theory, the logic of symmetry. We examine the premise that symmetry is identity; that group theory encodes our experience of identification. To decide whether group theory describes the world in such an elemental way we catalogue the detailed correspondence between elements of the physical world and elements of the formalism. Providing an unequivocal match between concept and mathematical statement completes the case. It makes effectiveness appear reasonable. The case that symmetry is identity is a strong one but it is not complete. The further validation required suggests that unexpected entities might be describable by the irreducible representations of group theory.     

Visual marking: dissociating effects of new and old set size

Visual marking makes it possible to ignore old items during search. In a typical study, old items are previewed 1 s before adding an equal number of new items, one of which is the target. Previewing half of the items reduces the search slope relating response time (RT) to overall set size by half. However, this manipulation sometimes only reduces overall RT but not search slope (Experiment 1). By orthogonally varying the numbers of old and new items, Experiment 2 shows that old and new set sizes interactively affect visual marking. Given a constant new set size, the size of the old set has negligible effect on RT. However, increasing the new set size reduces the preview benefit in overall RT. Experiment 3 shows that this reduction may be restricted to paradigms that use temporal segregation cues. Studies should vary old and new set size orthogonally to avoid missing a visual marking effect where one may be present.     

How is spatial context learning integrated over signal versus noise? A primacy effect in contextual cueing

Over repeated exposure to particular visual search displays, subjects are able to implicitly extract regularities that then make search more efficient-a phenomenon known as contextual cueing. Here we explore how the learning involved in contextual cueing is formed, maintained, and updated over experience. During an initial training phase, a group of signal first subjects searched through a series of predictive displays (where distractor locations were perfectly correlated with the target location), followed with no overt break by a series of unpredictive displays (where repeated contexts were uncorrelated with target locations). A second noise first group of subjects encountered the unpredictive displays followed by the predictive displays. Despite the fact that both groups had the same overall exposure to signal and noise, only the signal first group demonstrated subsequent contextual cueing. This primacy effect indicates that initial experience can result in hypotheses about regularities in displays-or the lack thereof-which then become resistant to updating. The absence of regularities in early stages of training even blocked observers from learning predictive regularities later on.