Adaptive automation, trust, and self-confidence in fault management of time-critical tasks

An experiment on adaptive automation is described. Reliability of automated fault diagnosis, mode of fault management (manual vs. automated), and fault dynamics affect variables including root mean square error, avoidance of accidents and false shutdowns, subjective trust in the system, and operator self-confidence. Results are discussed in relation to levels of automation, models of trust and self-confidence, and theories of human-machine function allocation. Trust in automation but not self-confidence was strongly affected by automation reliability. Operators controlled a continuous process with difficulty only while performing fault management but could prevent unnecessary shutdowns. Final authority for decisions and action must be allocated to automation in time-critical situations.     

The obsessive compulsive spectrum: a survey of 800 practitioners

The obsessive-compulsive (OC) spectrum is a group of related disorders that appear to share symptomatology, neurobiology, and treatment response with obsessive-compulsive disorder. To collect data on the appreciation of the OC spectrum concept among clinicians, 800 participants completed a questionnaire to help determine their understanding and appreciation of this concept, at a workshop on the OC spectrum.     

Sentence reading: do we make use of orthographic cues in homophones?

Starting from the finding that currently phonological models of visual word processing predominate, we examined what happened when important morphological information is disclosed in the orthography but not in the phonology. To do so, we made use of a peculiarity in Dutch. In this language, some forms of the present and the past tense of verbs are homophones or homographs. This allowed us to look at the power of orthographic and phonological cues to derive the tense of the verb. Two experiments showed that orthographic cues alone suffice to recover the tense of the verb, and that this recovery does not take more time than tense recovery on the basis of a combination of orthographic and phonological cues. On the basis of these results, we conclude that orthographic cues in homophones are very efficient during silent reading. Our findings, however, do not allow us to conclude whether this is due to a direct route from orthography to meaning, or to a specialised, morpho-syntactic back-up strategy elicited by certain sequences of letters.     

Primary femininity: clinical advances and theoretical ambiguities

This paper examines the use of the term "primary femininity" in current psychoanalytic thinking. The concept of primary femininity arose in reaction to early theories about female sexuality and development; based on a model of male development, these presented problems when applied to females. The author attempts to demonstrate the clinical advances that have resulted from the idea of primary femininity. At the same time she argues that the idea has been used to carry widely differing meanings, and has reflected many writers' differing frames of reference, which range from gender identity through biological traits, object relations, genital anxieties, and bisexuality. Like the terms it originally was intended to replace or augment, it has come to be used reductionistically or loosely. The author warns against its misuse and argues that primary femininity is not a unitary concept, but rather encompasses a related group of ideas about the female body and mind.     

Resolving the debate over birth order, family size, and intelligence

Hundreds of research articles have addressed the relationship between birth order and intelligence. Virtually all have used cross-sectional data, which are fundamentally flawed in the assessment of within-family (including birth order) processes. Although within-family models have been based on patterns in cross-sectional data, a number of equally plausible between-family explanations also exist. Within-family (preferably intact-family) data are prerequisite for separating within- and between-family causal processes. This observation reframes an old issue in a way that can be easily addressed by studying graphical patterns. Sibling data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth are evaluated, and the results are compared with those from other studies using within-family data. It appears that although low-IQ parents have been making large families, large families do not make low-IQ children in modern U.S. society. The apparent relation between birth order and intelligence has been a methodological illusion.     

A Psychoanalytic Contribution to Psychic Vampirism: A Case Vignette

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -