Family Ties and Child Placement

The fundamental premise of this paper is the primacy of the child's experience of biological-familial continuity in establishing his sense of self and personal significance. This paper examines the effects of current child placement practices on the child's ties to his biological, foster, and adoptive families. It explores alternative practices that would take into account biological-familial continuity.Comment is invited.     

The focusing effect of self-evaluation threat in coaction and social comparison

This article contends that the presence of a coactor leads to a focusing effect whenever this presence represents a threat or a potential threat to self-evaluation. Experiment 1 showed that attentional focusing appears in the presence of an actual (in the case of upward comparison) or potential (in the case of mere coaction) threat to self-evaluation but not in its absence (in the case of downward comparison). Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed that the presence of a coactor affects focusing because the coactor represents a potential threat and showed that introducing a threat in downward comparison can produce a focusing effect. Experiment 4 showed that removing the threat in upward comparison decreases the focusing effect. Experiment 5 confirmed that the effects observed in upward comparison are due to attentional focusing and not to an increase in effort. Contributions to social facilitation, social comparison, and attention research are discussed.     

Close to me? The influence of affective closeness on space perception

Recent data show that psychosocial factors affect visual perception. We tested this hypothesis by investigating the relationship between affective closeness and the perception of apertures between two people. People feel discomfort when they are near someone they are not affectively close to. Therefore, we predict that they will be less likely to perceive that they can pass between two people not affectively close to them. Participants had to imagine passing through the aperture between two life-size classmate pictures. We found that the closer participants felt to their classmates, the more they felt able to pass between them. This provides the first evidence of a relationship between affective closeness and the perception of aperture between two people, suggesting that psychosocial factors constrain space perception.