Books Received from August 1, 2009 to July 31, 2010

This study aimed to explore the recognition of emotional and non-emotional biological movements in children with severe and profound deafness. Twenty-four deaf children, together with 24 control children matched on mental age and 24 control children matched on chronological age, were asked to identify a person's actions, subjective states, emotions, and objects conveyed by moving point-light displays. Results showed that when observing point-light displays, deaf children showed impairments across all conditions (emotions, actions, and moving objects) compared with their chronological age-matched controls but showed no differences across subjective states. The results are supportive that deaf children present developmental delays in their biological motion apart from the ones relative to their own mental state, and this may be interpreted in relation to the expertise they have acquired in decoding action toward themselves. The findings are discussed in relation to deaf children viewing motion stimuli very differently to hearing children.     

Perceived Benefits Following Sport Injury: A Qualitative Examination of their Antecedents and Underlying Mechanisms

The purpose of the present study was to describe the development and validation of the Self-Talk Questionnaire (S-TQ), designed to measure two functions of self-talk strategies, namely the motivational function and the cognitive function, used by athletes to enhance their sport performances. The study was conducted in three phases. The first phase targeted item selection and content relevance. The second phase set out to test the factor structure of the instrument. The aim of the third phase was focused on further examination of the psychometric properties of the instrument. The results of an exploratory factor analysis provided adequate support for the instrument. The S-TQ consists of 11 items, representing two factors (motivational and cognitive). A confirmatory factor analysis showed an acceptable fit to the data. The factors were internally consistent, the correlations with external criteria were significant, and test-retest reliability values were very good. Examining the relationships between the S-TQ and similar constructs supported convergent validity. Discriminant validity was supported by correlations between the S-TQ and a different construct. The S-TQ appears to be a promising psychometric instrument that can be used in research and psychological intervention programs.     

A Review of The Anthropology of Eastern Religions: Ideas,Organizations, and Constituencies

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the cultural factors that may lead to plagiarism by ESL students from Confucian-influenced societies and suggests steps that can be taken to address “cultural plagiarism,” hoping to aid students in their transition into a Western educational culture.     

The Treatment of Choice: Commentary on Paper by Susan Fairfield

Dr. Fairfield's paper brings a radically deconstructivist, postmodern perspective, with great thoughtfulness and wit, to current concepts of “multiplicity.” I consider here the importance of the points she raises yet express some discomfort with deconstructionism as a conceptual methodology. I also show why I believe that some concepts Fairfield considers irreversibly modernist, like “authenticity,” can be retooled within a postmodern perspective.     

Commentary on “deconstructing difference: Gender,splitting, and transitional space”;

This essay identifies Kohut's major contribution as methodological: that psychoanalytic inquiry entails the sustained empathic immersion in the patient's psychological experience. Kohut's consistent employment of this method enabled him to discover that it was not instinctual drive derivatives but selfobject needs that were central to all psychological relationships. This discovery was the basis for the transformation of analysts’ approach to the “narcissistic”; aspects of a wide variety of disorders—a transformation whose theoretical and therapeutic importance rivals the revolutionary approach taken by Freud to the vicissitudes of psychosexuality and its disturbances. The author describes the major areas of progress in self psychology—much of which centers on the growing recognition that the health and vitality of the self depend on complex relational, or intersubjective, selfobject experiences. He indicates how this recognition is changing our perspectives on transference and countertransference and is improving our ability to respond optimally to our patients. He describes how optimal responsiveness constitutes the guiding principle for therapeutic work, and how it may both constitute, and be different from, “being empathic.”;     

More than meets the eye: Implicit perception in legally blind individuals

Legally blind participants (uncorrected vision of 20/200+) were able to identify a visual stimulus attribute (clock hand position) in the absence of consciously identifying its presence. Specifically, participants—with their corrective lenses removed—correctly guessed the hour-hand position above chance (8%) on a clockface shown on a computer screen. This occurred both when presented in a 1-clockface display (28%), as well as when shown a display containing 4 clockfaces (21%), in which only 1 face contained a hand. Even more striking, hand identification accuracy in the 4-clockface condition was comparable whether the clockface containing the hand was (21%) or was not (20%) correctly identified. That legally blind individuals are capable of identifying stimulus attributes without conscious awareness provides an additional vehicle for exploring implicit perception. Consistent with previous research, the visualsystem can apparently cope with degraded visual input through information available through a(n unconscious) secondary pathway via the superior colliculi.     

Exploring Culture-Specific Differences in Beliefs about Causes, Kinship and the Heritability of Major Depressive Disorder: The Views of Anglo-Celtic and Chinese-Australians

The aim of this study was to explore cultural differences in causal attributions and beliefs about heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD). Face-to-face interviews with Anglo-Celtic- and Chinese-Australians community members with a family history of MDD were conducted and subjected to a rigorous qualitative analysis, using the computer software NVivo. Sixteen Anglo-Celtic-Australians and 16 Chinese-Australians were interviewed. Both groups believed that a combination of genetic and environmental factors contributed to MDD, that stress was an important cause of MDD, and that coping factors were significant moderators of the impact of stress on MDD. Both cultural groups believed that the causes of MDD affecting multiple family members included a shared family environment and a “contagion effect”, in addition to genetics. Unique to the Chinese-Australian group was the beliefs that parental pressures to exceed academically contributed to MDD; this cultural group also reported beliefs that depression was due to God’s will or alternatively fate, which in turn was related to attributions to feng shui and auspicious dates. This study documented key culture-specific differences in beliefs about causes and inheritance of MDD; such differences have major implications for clinician-patient communication about genetic risk associated with having a family history of MDD.     

Reading your own lips: Common-coding theory and visual speech perception

Common-coding theory posits that (1) perceiving an action activates the same representations of motor plans that are activated by actually performing that action, and (2) because of individual differences in the ways that actions are performed, observing recordings of one’s own previous behavior activates motor plans to an even greater degree than does observing someone else’s behavior. We hypothesized that if observing oneself activates motor plans to a greater degree than does observing others, and if these activated plans contribute to perception, then people should be able to lipread silent video clips of their own previous utterances more accurately than they can lipread video clips of other talkers. As predicted, two groups of participants were able to lipread video clips of themselves, recorded more than two weeks earlier, significantly more accurately than video clips of others. These results suggest that visual input activates speech motor activity that links to word representations in the mental lexicon.     

Youth Exposure to Community Violence: Association with Aggression,Victimization, and Risk Behaviors

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between exposure to community violence and aggression, victimization, and risk-taking behaviors among young adolescents. Secondary analysis was conducted on data from a cross-sectional survey of 8,259 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students from eight urban schools in Texas. Results indicated that students exposed to a high level of community violence were 7.7 times more likely to carry a handgun, 5.2 times more likely to be involved in a gang were 6.4 times more likely to use marijuana, 5.3 times more likely to binge drink, and 2.8 times more likely to be injured as a result of fighting. This suggests the need for an interdisciplinary approach to violence prevention that targets all the environments of youth, including schools, homes, neighborhoods, and other community units.     

College Men’s Concerns About Sharing Dormitory Space with a Male-to-Female Transsexual

We examined male college students’ attitudes toward sharing dormitory space with a male-to-female (MTF) transsexual. Participants read three scenarios, in a sequence of either increasing or decreasing contact with the transsexual, in which they imagined sharing dormitory space with a MTF transsexual as a roommate, in the bathroom, and at a residence hall meeting, after each of which they answered open-ended questions about how they would feel or act, or what they would do if they were a resident advisor, in the imagined scenarios. Participants then rated statements measuring their attitudes toward transsexuals and toward masculine norms. Whether they imagined increased or decreased contact, participants expressed comparable transphobia, and made numerous negative and neutral statements and fewer positive statements about how they would feel or act. However, many students made positive statements about how they would act toward the transsexual, particularly in the roommate situation. Adherence to masculine norms and transphobia were so highly positively correlated that they apparently measured a common attitude, but regression analyses indicated that transphobia mediated the association between adherence to masculine norms and frequencies of positive, negative and neutral responses to the open-ended questions. Men who were Christian, from middle to high SES families, and heterosexual were more transphobic and adhered more to masculine norms than those who were nonChristian, from lower SES families, and gay, respectively. Black and white men were equally transphobic and adhered equally to masculine norms. The men’s recommendations when imagining themselves as a resident advisor typically concerned making connections between the men and the transsexual and controlling the situation.