As It Was in the Beginning: Death and Re-membrance and the Christian Intuition

The author argues that the psyche crafts an affective metaphor for death out of the separation drama of infancy. Emergence of self from the mother–infant dyad can accomplish cohesion of fragmentary unconscious mentation strong enough, following Winnicott, to make possible a belief in God. Through developmental synergy between female and male elements, a sense of participation in an eternal principle of being can be achieved, sustaining the ego against anxieties over disintegration, and death as its analog. Myths of the child god illuminate the equation of fragmentation with death of self. Christianity expresses how the cohered self can transcend fragmentation.     

A lifespan database of adult facial stimuli.

Faces constitute a unique and widely used category of stimuli. In spite of their importance, there are few collections of faces for use in research, none of which adequately represent the different ages of faces across the lifespan. This lack of a range of ages has limited the majority of researchers to using predominantly young faces as stimuli even when their hypotheses concern both young and old participants. We describe a database of 575 individual faces ranging from ages 18 to 93. Our database was developed to be more representative of age groups across the lifespan, with a special emphasis on recruiting older adults. The resulting database has faces of 218 adults age 18-29, 76 adults age 30-49, 123 adults age 50-69, and 158 adults age 70 and older. These faces may be acquired for research purposes from http://agingmind.cns.uiuc.edu/facedb/. This will allow researchers interested in using facial stimuli access to a wider age range of adult faces than has previously been available.     

Different patterns of contingent stimulation differentially affect attention span in prelinguistic infants

The ability to sustain attention influences different domains including cognitive, motor, and communicative behavior. Previous research has demonstrated how an infant's parent can influence sustained attention. The purpose of our study was to expose infants systematically to both sensitive and redirective patterns of behavior to examine how unfamiliar individuals could influence attention. Results revealed infants changed their patterns of looking with the unfamiliar individuals. Infants had longer durations of sustained attention when interacting with a sensitive unfamiliar individual who followed into their attentional focus as opposed to an intrusive person who led their attentional focus. This study demonstrates that infants discriminate patterns of contingency to persons seen for only a short period of time broadening the range of potential mentors for learning.     

ROMANTIC PARTNERS' COPING STRATEGIES AND PATTERNS OF CORTISOL REACTIVITY AND RECOVERY IN RESPONSE TO RELATIONSHIP CONFLICT

Stress in close relationships can have significant negative consequences for mental health, physical health, and long-term relationship functioning. Dysregulated physiological responses to stress are potential pathways through which relationship stress may lead to these kinds of outcomes, and the ways in which individuals attempt to cope with relationship stress are likely to impact their physiological responses. However, our understanding of the specific coping strategies that predict physiological reactivity and recovery in these contexts is rather limited. This study explored relations between young adult college students' self-reported methods of coping with stress in their romantic relationships and their physiological reactivity to and recovery from negotiating conflict with their romantic partners. Partners' coping styles were also examined as predictors of physiological stress responses. One hundred and ninety opposite-sex couples (N = 380; modal length of relationship = 1-2 years) participated in an experimental conflict discussion task. Physiological stress reactivity to the task was assessed using salivary cortisol, a primary hormonal product of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis. Growth modeling of the cortisol levels before, during, and after the conflict task indicated that men who typically coped with relationship stress by seeking social support showed greater physiological reactivity to the conflict task. Partners' need for social support predicted stronger stress responses for both men and women, as well. While seeking social support is generally thought to be an adaptive coping strategy for couples, the results suggest that within the context of conflict negotiation in which receiving and providing support may be more difficult, seeking support from a partner is associated with greater phyisological stress.     

The Moderating Effect of Personality on Employees’ Reactions to Procedural Fairness and Outcome Favorability

Purpose  

The purpose of this study was to examine how personality moderates the interactive effect of procedural fairness perceptions and outcome favorability on employees’ job attitudes.     

Remembering words not presented in lists: Can we avoid creating false memories?

Can subjects avoid creating false memories as outlined in Roediger and McDermott’s (1995) false recognition paradigm if they are forewarned about this memory illusion? We presented subjects with semantically related word lists, followed by a recognition test. The test was composed of studied words, semantically related nonstudied words (critical lures), and unrelated nonstudied words. One group of subjects was uninformed about the false recognition effect, a second group was urged to minimize all false alarms, and a third group was forewarned about falsely recognizing critical lures. Compared with the uninformed and cautious subjects, the forewarned subjects reduced their false alarm rate for critical lures, and they made remember and know judgments equally often for recognized studied words and critical lures. But forewarning did not eliminate the false recognition effect, as these subjects and those in the other groups made numerous false recognitions in this task.     

Euthanasia,the terminal patient,and the physician's role

A random sample of Cleveland clergy was asked to assess 1) the terminal patient's views on death, 2) the desires of some terminally ill patients to find an easy and dignified death, and 3) the role the physician ought to play in treating terminal patients. Protestant clergy more than their Catholic counterparts are substantially in favor of 1) disclosure of terminal illness, 2) allowing an easy death for the terminal patient at his request, and 3) facilitating the role of the physicians in cases of terminal illness. Fundamentalist Protestants are less approving than liberal Protestants. Clerics who saw their role extend beyond man's spiritual need approve of the physician's disclosure of terminal illness and his cooperation with patients who request with-holding or terminating medical treatment.This work was supported by the office of Research Development at Bowling Green State University and the College of Arts and Sciences.     

Empirical bayes point estimates of latent trait scores without knowledge of the trait distribution

In this paper, recent developments in empirical Bayes procedures are tied in with current work in mental test theory. Point estimators of true scores are derived for the binomial and Rasch test models. These estimators are shown to be asymptotically optimal. Smoothing and an empirical study of the behavior of empirical Bayes estimates are taken up in the final section.This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Division of Biological and Medical Sciences, Program in Psycho-Biology, Grant No. NSF GB-30779.