Group Therapy with Terror-Injured Persons in Israel: Societal Impediments to Successful Working Through

This paper describes a group intervention with terror-injured people in Israel to show the parallels between developments in the group and Israeli society's difficulties in working through and mourning its experiences of terror. Despite the development of group cohesion and a sense of empowerment, the group members remained unable to deal with the powerful emotions stemming from the experience of terror and continued to cling to their shared identity as terror victims, irrevocably helpless and isolated from others. Without excluding other explanations, we suggest that these difficulties reflect the defense mechanisms employed by Israeli society in dealing with the threat to its survival that is implicit in the terror to which it is exposed.     

A theoretical upgrade of the concept of parental psychological control: Proposing new insights on the basis of self-determination theory

Psychological control refers to manipulative parental behavior that intrudes upon the child’s psychological world. During the past decade, socialization research has consistently demonstrated the negative effects of psychologically controlling parenting on children’s and adolescents’ development. However, there has been relatively little advance in our conceptual understanding of this parenting construct. The present overview aims to enrich the theoretical background of the concept of psychological control by relating it to concepts used in self-determination theory. It is argued that this theoretical background allows for (a) a clearer definition of the concept of psychological control, (b) a more refined understanding of the dynamics involved in psychologically controlling parenting, and (c) a greater insight regarding its generalization across age and cultures. Directions for future research are formulated with respect to each of these three issues.     

Contaminants and the Path to Salvation: A Study of the Sarvāstivāda Hṛdaya Treatises

The Sa?gītiparyāya is the earliest Sarvāstivāda philosophical text that enumerates a series of contaminants (anu?aya), i.e. innate proclivities, inherited from former births, to do something of usually evil nature. This early list comprises seven such contaminants. As it is the contaminants that lead a worldling (p?thagjana) to doing volitional actions and thus to forming a karmic result (karmavipāka), these contaminants naturally also bear on the path to salvation. The gradual development of the peculiar Sarvāstivādin path to salvation necessitated a gradual refinement and reinterpretation of the original list of seven contaminants. Apart from a mere technical aspect, this reinterpretation also reflects the viewpoint of the Sautrāntika school of Buddhist philosophy on the nature of contaminants, i.e. their acceptance of a latent and an active state of the defilements, vis-à-vis the Vaibhā?ika viewpoint according to whom no such difference exists. Within Sarvāstivāda literature, the H?daya treatises illustrate this philosophical development.     

Individual differences in L2 proficiency as a function of L1 proficiency

Abstract

This paper offers an illustration of the claim that some individual differences in a second language (L2) can be accounted for by individual differeaces in the first language (L1). Two studies are reported, which examined L2 performance as a function of L1 performance. In the fmt study, 65 Dutch learners of English performed reading aloud tasks in L2 (Englrsh) and L1 (Dutch). In the second study, 50 Turkish lcarners of Dutch performed reading comprehension tasks in L2 (Dutch) and L1 (Turkish) as well as L2 vocabulary and grammar tests. The results of the ht study, obtained by means of co-variance analyses, show that most of the differences in L2 performance due to grade level (grade 9 vs 11) and academic level (higher vs lower) disappeared when performance in L1 WBS taken into account. The results of the second study, obtained by means of correlational techniques, provide support for the involvement of both an L2-spcafic (vocabulary and grammar) and a non-L2-sptcific component (as indicated by L1 reading performance) in L2 reading comprehension. Although the former appeared to be more involved, non-L2-specific factors did in fact contribute positively and substantially to the L2 reading performance of adult sccond language learners. Moreover, the data of the second study gave rise to thc idea that the contribution of aon-L2-speafic factors may not be stable, but liable to changes in the come of the L2 acquisition process.     

Pi on Earth, or Mathematics in the Real World

We explore aspects of an experimental approach to mathematical proof, most notably number crunching, or the verification of subsequent particular cases of universal propositions. Since the rise of the computer age, this technique has indeed conquered practice, although it implies the abandonment of the ideal of absolute certainty. It seems that also in mathematical research, the qualitative criterion of effectiveness, i.e. to reach one’s goals, gets increasingly balanced against the quantitative one of efficiency, i.e. to minimize one’s means/ends ratio. Our story will lead to the consideration of some limit cases, opening up the possibility of proofs of infinite length being surveyed in a finite time. By means of example, this should show that mathematical practice in vital aspects depends upon what the actual world is like.

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The intergenerational transmission of authoritarianism: The mediating role of parental goal promotion

This study examined the intergenerational transmission of adolescent authoritarian submission (Right-Wing Authoritarianism or RWA) and authoritarian dominance (Social Dominance Orientation or SDO). It was hypothesized that the type of goals that parents promote (i.e., conservation versus openness to change and extrinsic versus intrinsic goal promotion) would mediate any direct association between parents’ and adolescents’ authoritarian attitudes. This hypothesis was examined in a sample of middle adolescents and their parents. First, a significant parent–child concordance was found for RWA and SDO. Second, whereas parental RWA predicted parental promotion of conservation goals (rather than openness to change goals) as well as the promotion of extrinsic goals (rather than intrinsic goals), parental SDO predicted parental promotion of extrinsic goals only. Third, process analyses showed that, whereas parental conservation goal promotion mediates the relationship between parent and child RWA, parental extrinsic goal promotion mediates the relationship between parent and child SDO.     

On the origins of the task mixing cost in the cuing task-switching paradigm

Poorer performance in conditions involving task repetition within blocks of mixed tasks relative to task repetition within blocks of single task is called mixing cost (MC). In 2 experiments exploring 2 hypotheses regarding the origins of MC, participants either switched between cued shape and color tasks, or they performed them as single tasks. Experiment 1 supported the hypothesis that mixed-tasks trials require the resolution of task ambiguity by showing that MC existed only with ambiguous stimuli that afforded both tasks and not with unambiguous stimuli affording only 1 task. Experiment 2 failed to support the hypothesis that holding multiple task sets in working memory (WM) generates MC by showing that systematic manipulation of the number of stimulus-response rules in WM did not affect MC. The results emphasize the role of competition management between task sets during task control.     

The conditional power of randomization tests for single-case effect sizes in designs with randomized treatment order: A Monte Carlo simulation study

The conditional power (CP) of the randomization test (RT) was investigated in a simulation study in which three different single-case effect size (ES) measures were used as the test statistics: the mean difference (MD), the percentage of nonoverlapping data (PND), and the nonoverlap of all pairs (NAP). Furthermore, we studied the effect of the experimental design on the RT’s CP for three different single-case designs with rapid treatment alternation: the completely randomized design (CRD), the randomized block design (RBD), and the restricted randomized alternation design (RRAD). As a third goal, we evaluated the CP of the RT for three types of simulated data: data generated from a standard normal distribution, data generated from a uniform distribution, and data generated from a first-order autoregressive Gaussian process. The results showed that the MD and NAP perform very similarly in terms of CP, whereas the PND performs substantially worse. Furthermore, the RRAD yielded marginally higher power in the RT, followed by the CRD and then the RBD. Finally, the power of the RT was almost unaffected by the type of the simulated data. On the basis of the results of the simulation study, we recommend at least 20 measurement occasions for single-case designs with a randomized treatment order that are to be evaluated with an RT using a 5% significance level. Furthermore, we do not recommend use of the PND, because of its low power in the RT.     

Exogenous influences on task set activation in task switching

To explore the effect of exogenous processes on cognitive control, we used a cueing task-switching paradigm with two spatial judgement tasks and added an irrelevant colour attribute to the task-relevant spatial attribute of the target. The colour was not related to any specific Stimulus–Response relation in the tasks. A correlation was created between stimulus colour and task identity. This correlation was strong but imperfect in Experiment 1 and perfect in Experiment 2. As a result of the colour–task correlation, stimuli contained redundant information about task identity. By changing the correlation pattern every few blocks we caused this information to be sometimes invalid. In both experiments, performance was worse when the information carried by the target was invalid than when it was valid. However, this effect was exclusive to conditions with short task preparation time. By comparing performance with a control group, which had no colour–task correlation (in Experiment 2) we established that the colour manipulation did not cause a qualitative change in preparation strategy, and that the exogenous effect was stronger in switch trials than in repetition trials. We conclude that exogenous processes that are related to task set affect performance primarily if they are presented before endogenous processes of task set preparation have been launched.