Throwing spatial light: on topological explanations in Gestalt psychology

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - It is a well-known fact that mathematics plays a crucial role in physics; in fact, it is virtually impossible to imagine contemporary physics without it....     

No Room of her Own: Married Couples’ Negotiation of Workspace at Home During COVID-19

Sex Roles - The current study examined the right to a professional workspace and separation between private and public within the home as an arena of gendered negotiation and struggle between...     

Re-examination of “release-from-PI” phenomena: recall accuracy does not recover after a semantic switch

Recall accuracy decreases over successive memory trials using similar memoranda. This effect reflects proactive interference (PI) – the tendency for previously studied information to reduce recall of new information. However, recall improves if memoranda for a subsequent trial are semantically dissimilar from the previous trials. This improvement is thought to reflect a release from PI. We tested whether PI is reduced or released from the semantic category for which it had been induced by employing paradigms which featured inducement, semantic switch, and then return-to-original category epochs. Two experiments confirmed that PI was not released after various semantic switch trials (effects from d?=??0.93 to ?1.6). Combined analyses from both studies demonstrated that the number of intervening new category trials did not reduce or release PI. In fact, in all conditions recall accuracy decreased, demonstrating that PI is maintained and can increase after the new category trials. The release-from-PI account cannot accommodate these broader dynamics of PI. This account is also incongruent with evidence and theory from cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. We propose a reintroduction-of-PI account which explains these broader PI dynamics and is consistent with the wider psychological and neurosciences.     

Formal and Applied Counseling in Israel

Living in Israel is intensive and demanding but also meaningful and exciting. This article addresses the gap between the narrowly defined formal status of counseling in Israel and the widespread occurrence of counseling in various settings. It is argued that several recent changes, especially in the definition of treatment, along with the increasing need for counseling, especially in minority ethnic groups, set the stage for optimism regarding the future of counseling in Israel.     

Social factors and mental health symptoms among women who have experienced involuntary job loss

The growing proportion of women in the labor force and the current economic crisis has made women a target population for job loss. In that situation, they are likely to experience recurrent layoffs, which force them to cope with multiple job loss and with unemployment. The present study aimed to examine sociodemographic factors that help women succeed in coping with single or multiple experiences of job loss, and that even enhance their self-efficacy in returning to work. The population of participants consisted of 134 Israeli women aged 30-45 who had been laid off. The findings indicate that the women who had experienced multiple job loss expressed a stronger desire to return to work than did those who had been laid off only once. Married women showed a greater tendency to become accustomed to stress after being laid off than did never-married women. However, even though multiple job loss might be a forced solution to home-work conflict, never-married women were found to be at risk for distress responses after being laid off. There is a need to develop responses for women who are at risk for multiple job loss, and to enhance employers' awareness of the situation faced by women who are laid off.     

The construction of perceptual grouping displays using GERT

To study perceptual grouping processes, vision scientists often use stimuli consisting of spatially separated local elements that, together, elicit the percept of a global structure. We developed a set of methods for constructing such displays and implemented them in an open-source MATLAB toolbox, GERT (Grouping Elements Rendering Toolbox). The main purpose of GERT is to embed a contour in a field of randomly positioned elements, while avoiding the introduction of a local density cue. However, GERT's modular implementation enables the user to create a far greater variety of perceptual grouping displays, using these same methods. A generic rendering engine grants access to a variety of element-drawing functions, including Gabors, Gaussians, letters, and polygons.     

Eating regulation and bulimic symptoms: the differential correlates of health-focused and appearance-focused eating regulation

Based on Self-Determination Theory, this study aimed to gain further insight in the pathway from eating regulation to bulimic symptoms by (a) examining diet-specific need frustration as an intervening mechanism, (b) investigating the associations between different types of goals underlying eating regulation and diet-specific need frustration and bulimic symptoms, and (c) considering body dissatisfaction as an antecedent of eating regulation and eating regulation goals. In a sample of 244 female adolescents, SEM analyses showed that (a) the association between eating regulation and bulimic symptoms can be accounted for by need frustration, (b) appearance-focused and health-focused eating regulation are associated differentially with need frustration and bulimic symptoms, and (c) body dissatisfaction is related positively to eating regulation and appearance-focused eating regulation. These findings suggest that the goals underlying one's eating regulation and the concept of need frustration help to understand when and why eating regulation is associated with bulimic symptoms.