Not just standing there: the use of postural coordination to aid visual tasks

Postural control is an integral part of all physical behavior. Recent research has indicated that postural control functions in a manner that facilitates other higher order (suprapostural) tasks. These studies, while showing that postural sway is modulated in a task specific manner, have not examined the form of postural coordination that allows for the achievement of these higher behavioral goals. The current study examined the relation between visual task constraints (viewing distance), environmental constraints (changes in the surface of support), and the postural coordination employed to complete the task. Thirty-one participants were asked to perform a reading task while standing on various surfaces. Postural motion was recorded from the head, cervico-thoracic spine, sacrum (hip), and ankle. It was found that body segment coordination changed as a function of surface characteristics and task constraints. Additionally, the overall pattern of postural sway (head motion) replicated that which was found by Stoffregen et al. [J. Exp. Psychol. Human Percep. Perform. 25 (6) (1999) 1641]. These findings suggest that postural adaptation involves more than basic reduction or increase of motion; it involves the functional coordination of body segments to achieve a particular goal. The data further suggest that there is a need to examine postural control in the absence of external perturbations.     

The Role of Mothers and Fathers

The development of personality characteristics appears to differ by sex of child and role of parent, with interpersonal concerns tending to characterize mothers and instrumental concerns describing fathers. Using a semi-structured interview protocol and paper-and-pencil questionnaires, we examined the effects of parenting, as reported by middle-class high school senior boys and girls, on the development of two aspects of personality. Ego development and self-esteem both have demonstrated sex differences, with girls displaying more advanced ego development and boys displaying higher self-esteem. We expected that mothers, because of their greater interpersonal orientation, would influence the development of ego development more than would fathers, and that, based on past findings, the opposite-sex parent would exert the primary influence on self-esteem. While ego development was found to relate to more encouraging, warmer mothering in boys, it related weakly to mothering in girls. Boys and girls who perceived their cross-sex parent to be warm and supportive were found to have higher self-esteem.     

The effects of semantic integration training on memory for pictograph sentences

The effectiveness of training a semantic integration strategy for recall of pictograph sequences, and the generalization of the strategy to a related oral sentence task were examined in 60 kindergarten prereaders. Semantic integration training consisted of three individual sessions in which the child was instructed to treat the sequence as a sentence and to act out the pictograph sentences using toys in order to facilitate recall. Repetition and no-practice control groups were included. Pictograph sentence memory post-tests immediately following and 2 weeks after training indicated that semantic integration training substantially improved recall for pictograph sequences, an improvement that was unrelated to the child's initial memory performance or subsequent post-training awareness of the strategy. In addition, the training resulted in better performance on a generalization test of oral sentence synthesis. These findings support a strategy-based conceptualization of individual differences in the semantic processing of written materials.     

The Femininity Ideology Scale: Factor Structure, Reliability, Convergent and Discriminant Validity, and Social Contextual Variation

This study reports on the psychometric properties of the Femininity Ideology Scale (FIS) from the responses of 407 undergraduate participants in the USA. Factor analysis supported the five factor structure. Cronbach alpha coefficients of the factors and total scale were adequate. Support for discriminant validity was found after examining the relationship between the FIS and the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which measures feminine traits. Support for convergent validity was found after examining, first, with the entire sample, the relationships between the FIS and the Male Role Norm Inventory, and second, with the female sample, the relationships between the FIS and the Feminist Identity Development Scale. We also found that FIS scores vary in relationship to the social contextual variables of race/ethnicity and sex.     

The Recaptured Scale Technique: A Method for Testing the Structural Robustness of Personality Scales

Tellegen and Waller advocated a complex and time-consuming scale construction method that they called “exploratory test construction.” Scales that are constructed by this method—such as the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ)—are presumed to be more “psychologically coherent” and “robust” than scales constructed by other means. Using a novel procedure that we call the “recaptured scale technique,” we tested this conjecture by conducting a megafactor analysis on data from the 411 adult participants of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart who completed the MPQ, the MMPI, and the CPI. We extracted and obliquely rotated 21 factors from a matrix of gender-corrected tetrachoric correlations for the 1,102 nonredundant items of the three omnibus inventories. Robustness of the 11 MPQ scales was assessed by the degree to which these factors recaptured the MPQ item groupings. Our results showed that nine factors were clearly recognizable as MPQ scales and two additional factors represented a bifurcation of an MPQ scale. A higher-order factor analysis of all 21 factor scales yielded five factors that clearly resembled the Big Five. Our results provide strong support for (a) the method of exploratory test construction, (b) the structural robustness of most MPQ scales, and (c) the utility of the recaptured scale technique.     

Couples’ Negative Interaction Behaviors and Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe mental health problem predisposing to dysfunctional interaction behaviors and negative couple outcomes. This study aimed to assess, through direct observation, the quality of relationships of couples in which women were diagnosed with BPD. The sample consisted of 28 couples in which the woman had BPD, and 82 community couples. Couples’ interactions were coded using three scales—withdrawal/ avoidance, dominance, and criticism/attack/conflict—from the Global Couple Interaction Coding System. Couples in which the women had BPD evidenced significantly more negative behaviors, particularly dominance behaviors, than community couples. Moreover, in BPD couples, women adopted Criticism/Attack/Conflict behaviors more frequently than men.     

The role of recollection in source memory: an examination of schizophrenia patients and their first-degree relatives

Source recognition memory deficits have repeatedly been observed in people with schizophrenia (SZ), and have also recently been observed in their first-degree relatives. These deficits have been hypothesized to result, at least in part, from impairments in the conscious recollection process. Although other processes are clearly also affected in SZ, it has been proposed that impairments in the conscious recollection process could be a parsimonious explanation for the source memory deficits observed in their relatives. Here, we tested 25 patients with SZ and 34 of their non-affected parents, as well as two groups of matched healthy controls, on a short-term associative memory task that shares the characteristics of standard source recognition tasks but minimizes the need for recollection of stored information from memory. This task was administered in order to determine if deficits can still be observed in these people when involvement of the conscious recollection process is minimized. We observed deficits on our short-term source memory task in people with SZ, but their first-degree relatives did not share this deficit. These results support the idea that multiple memory processes supporting associative/source memory are affected in SZ, whereas the source memory deficits previously observed in relatives of SZ seem specific to tasks that rely on the conscious recollection process.