Depressive Mood in Female College Students: Father-Daughter Interactional Patterns

The interrelationship of sets of father and daughter factors in explaining depressive mood in normal female adolescents was examined. Separate questionnaires were given to 403 college students and their fathers. A mediational model was found, in which two sets of paternal variables were related to the daughter personality set, which in turn was related to her depressive mood. In addition, protective personality attributes of the daughter served both to offset the impact of paternal risk factors and to further strengthen paternal protective factors to reduce frequency of depressive mood. Comparisons are made with an earlier study of sons' depressive mood (Brook, Brook, Whiteman, & Gordon, 1983).     

Time Course of Tactile Gating in a Reach-to-Grasp and Lift Task

Humans’ sensory systems are bombarded by myriad events every moment of our lives. Thus, it is crucial for sensory systems to choose and process critical sensory events deemed important for a given task and, indeed, those that affect survival. Tactile gating is well known, and defined as a reduced ability to detect and discriminate tactile events before and during movement. Also, different locations of the effector exhibit different magnitudes of sensitivity changes. The authors examined that time course of tactile gating in a reaching and grasping movement to characterize its behavior. Tactile stimulators were attached to the right and left mid-forearms and the right index finger and fifth digit. When participants performed reach-to-grasp and lift targets, tactile acuity decreased at the right forearm before movement onset (F. L. Colino, G. Buckingham, D. T. Cheng, P. van Donkelaar, &; G. Binsted, 2014 Colino, F. L., Buckingham, G., Cheng, D. T., van Donkelaar, P., &; Binsted, G. (2014). Tactile Gating in a reaching and grasping task. Physiology Reports, 2(3), e00267.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). However, tactile sensitivity at the right index finger decreased by nearly 20% contrary to expectations. This result reflecting that there may be an additional source acting to reduce inhibition related to tactile gating. Additionally, sensitivity improved as movement end approached. Collectively, the present results indicate that predictive and postdictive mechanisms strongly influence tactile gating.     

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas. John I. Jenkins. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. pp. 267. £35.00 hb. ISBN 0–521–58126–5. The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. pp. 302. £12.95 pb. ISBN 0–521–43769–5. The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas's Natural Theology in the Summa Contra Gentiles I. Norman Kretzmann. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997. pp. 302. £35.00 hb. ISBN 0–19–823660–3. Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations. C. F. J. Martin. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1997. pp. 212. £40.00 hb. ISBN 0–7486–0901–6. Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages. Robert Pasnau. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. pp. 330. £37.00 hb. ISBN 0–521–58368–3.     

Industrial meanings

Industrial Society and its Museums 1890–1990: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics, by Brigitte Schroeder‐Gudehus, ed., Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic Publs, Gordon & Breach Science Publs, 1993, hb, $48.00; UK: Chur & Reading, hb £30.00.     

Children's memory for complex autobiographical events: Does spacing of repeated instances matter?

Often, when children testify in court they do so as victims of a repeated offence and must report details of an instance of the offence. One factor that may influence children's ability to succeed in this task concerns the temporal distance between presentations of the repeated event. Indeed, there is a substantial amount of literature on the “spacing effect” that suggests this may be the case. In the current research, we examined the effect of temporal spacing on memory reports for complex autobiographical events. Children participated in one or four play sessions presented at different intervals. Later, children were suggestively questioned, and then participated in a memory test. Superior recall of distributed events (a spacing effect) was found when the delay to test was 1?day (Experiment 1) but there was little evidence for a spacing effect when the delay was 1 week (Experiment 2). Implications for understanding children's recall of repeated autobiographical events are discussed.     

The effect of spatial and nonspatial contextual information on visual object memory

Recent research has found visual object memory can be stored as part of a larger scene representation rather than independently of scene context. The present study examined how spatial and nonspatial contextual information modulate visual object memory. Two experiments tested participants’ visual memory by using a change detection task in which a target object's orientation was either the same as it appeared during initial viewing or changed. In addition, we examined the effect of spatial and nonspatial contextual manipulations on change detection performance. The results revealed that visual object representations can be maintained reliably after viewing arrays of objects. Moreover, change detection performance was significantly higher when either spatial or nonspatial contextual information remained the same in the test image. We concluded that while processing complex visual stimuli such as object arrays, visual object memory can be stored as part of a comprehensive scene representation, and both spatial and nonspatial contextual changes modulate visual memory retrieval and comparison.     

Cognitive control of rotation in depth

Abstract

Five experiments examined the ability of observers to control the direction of rotation of parallel (Experiments 1–4) and polar (Experiment 5) projections of transparent objects using a control strategy based on the idea that attended surfaces are given front/convex default interpretations. Experiments 1 and 2 measured observers' degree of control and evaluated the role of attention in the control strategy. Experiment 3 examined whether attentional constraints limit the use of the strategy with dual rotating objects. Experiment 4 measured control with unambiguous stimuli in which the direction of rotation was specified by occlusion or proximity luminance covariance, and Experiment 5 measured the control of structure (rigid, non-rigid) as well as motion by examining the control of rotating displays presented in polar perspective. The General Discussion evaluates several hypotheses concerning the nature and rationale of an attentional bias in surface interpretation.     

'This is our life': strong evaluation in psychotherapy narrative

This paper examines the relevance of both client and counsellor conceptions of the ‘good life’ in relation to a narrative analysis of the first session of a case of successful client-centred therapy.In this opening session, the client embeds her ‘problem’ story within contrasting cultural narratives of what it means to live a good life. The therapist discourse also consistently draws upon a therapeutic meta-narrative that conveys an implicit story of how to live life well. This material is discussed from the perspective of the concept of ‘strong evaluation’ offered by the philosopher CharlesTaylor.Implications for research and practice are discussed.