Abstinence and well-being among members of Alcoholics Anonymous: personal experience and social perceptions

The authors examined the subjective experience of well-being (WB) among abstinent Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) members and social perceptions of an abstinent alcoholic's WB among 3 nonalcoholic French-Canadian samples: male police officers, Catholic nuns, and university women. The short-term abstinent AA members, along with the university women, reported the lowest self-ratings of WB, whereas the Catholic nuns reported the highest. However, among the abstinent AA members, the level of WB was positively related to the length of abstention. The 3 nonalcoholic groups evaluated an abstinent AA member more positively than a nonabstinent alcoholic. These evaluations of an abstinent AA member converged with the AA members' self-evaluations on the measure of WB.     

Stressful work, psychological job strain, and turnover: a 2-year prospective cohort study of truck drivers

Based on a model that combines existing organizational stress theory and job transition theory, this 2-year longitudinal study examined antecedents and consequences of turnover among Dutch truck drivers. For this purpose, self-reported data on stressful work (job demands and control), psychological strain (need for recovery after work and fatigue), and turnover were obtained from 820 drivers in 1998 and 2000. In agreement with the model, the results showed that strain mediates the influence of stressful work on voluntary turnover. Also in conformity with the model, job movement to any job outside the trucking industry (i.e., interoccupational turnover) resulted in a larger strain reduction as compared to job movement within the trucking industry (intraoccupational turnover). Finally, strain was found to stimulate interoccupational turnover more strongly than it stimulated intraoccupational turnover. These findings provide a thorough validation of existing turnover theory and give new insights into the turnover (decision) process.     

Testing the concurrent and predictive relations among articulation accuracy, speech perception, and phoneme awareness

The relations among articulation accuracy, speech perception, and phoneme awareness were examined in a sample of 97 typically developing children ages 48 to 66 months. Of these 97 children, 46 were assessed twice at ages 4 and 5 years. Children completed two tasks for each of the three skills, assessing these abilities for the target phoneme /r/ and the control phoneme /m/ in the word-initial position. Concurrent analyses revealed that phoneme-specific relations existed among articulation, awareness, and perception. Articulation accuracy of /r/ predicted speech perception and phoneme awareness for /r/ after controlling for age, vocabulary, letter-word knowledge, and speech perception or phoneme awareness for the control phoneme /m/. The longitudinal analyses confirmed the pattern of relations. The findings are consistent with a model whereby children's articulation accuracy affects preexisting differences in phonological representations and, consequently, affects how children perceive, discriminate, and manipulate speech sounds.     

Two-way interactions between music and language: Evidence from priming recognition of tune and lyrics in familiar songs

A priming technique was employed to study the relations between melody and lyrics in song memory. The procedure involved the auditory presentation of a prime and a target taken from the same song, or from unrelated but equally familiar songs. To promote access to memory representations of songs, we varied the format of primes and targets, which were either spoken or sung, using the syllable /1a/. In each of the four experiments, a prime taken from the same song as the target facilitated target recognition, independently of the format in which it occurred. The facilitation effects were also found in conditions close to masked priming because prime recognizability was very low, as assessed in Experiment 1 by d' measures. Above all, backward priming effects were observed in Experiments 2, 3, and 4, where song order was reversed in the prime-target sequence, suggesting that words and tones of songs are not connected by strict temporal contingencies. Rather, the results indicate that, in song memory, text and tune are related by tight connections that are bidirectional and automatically activated by relatively abstract information. Rhythmic similarity between linguistic stress pattern and musical meter might account for these priming effects.     

The Self-in-Relation Theory and Women for Sobriety: Female-Specific Theory and Mutual Help Group for Chemically Dependent Women

This article discusses the self-in-relation theory as it applies to chemically dependent women. The theory provides an alternative way of understanding and viewing chemically dependent women. The self-in-relation model (or theory) states that relationships are extremely important in women's psychological development and functioning and that women's connection with others is fundamental to self-concept. Women for Sobriety, a mutual help group for chemically dependent women, offers an alternative way of supporting women in trying to achieve recovery, and this is also discussed in a relational context.     

Encoding and Maintaining Reference in Oral Discourse

This study deals with information management and reference encoding modes in oral discourse production. Three potentially influential factors were the distance between the first occurrence of an item and its later occurrences, a topic change that takes the focus off that item, and the span of the conceptual information available for verbalization. French-speaking adult subjects were asked to tell stories from comic strips to a listener who was unfamiliar with them. The frames in each strip were presented simultaneously or in succession. Four versions were generated for each comic strip: a given version was either short (three frames) or long (eight frames), and either did or did not have a topic change. The results showed that the target character was usually marked as a given, regardless of the version. This was more often true, however, when the topic did not change. When the character was treated as a given, referent accessibility marking was dependent on (1) topic change alone when the frames were presented simultaneously, and (2) topic change and comic strip length when the frames were presented in succession. The discussion analyzes the results in terms of the allocation of cognitive resources to maintaining coreference and to assisting addressees in their processing.     

Cognitive factors and adaptation to auditory-visual discordance

Subjects pointed blindfolded at auditory targets before and after exposure to spatial conflict between the sound of a percussion instrument and images on a TV screen. Four experimental conditions were obtained by combining two levels of realism, in which sound was paired with either the image of the hands playing the instrument or with synchronously modulated light, and two levels of suggestion, in which a dummy loudspeaker from which the subjects had been told the sound would come was placed either in front of the TV screen or on top of the actual hidden loudspeaker. Adaptation occurred in all four conditions, but no difference between them was detected. These results confirm and extend the previous finding that auditory adaptation, unlike the impression of fusion (ventriloquism), is little influenced by cognitive factors.