Further Experiments with the Scribbling Game - Projection Method

One of the early participants in the clinical-statistical controversy describes his effort to mediate the dispute and to direct attention to the underlying issues, to most of which the box scores were irrelevant. A previously undiscussed undercurrent of the controversy is the conflict between different metaphysical world views, the history of which for the past few hundred years is quickly sketched. The mechanist metaphysics of behaviorism, which has long been dominant in American mainstream psychology, favors objective and statistical approaches and discourages interest in judgment, an issue that nevertheless refuses to go away. Systems philosophy is proposed as an integrative alternative.     

Development of the Bias in Attitudes Survey: A Sex-Role Questionnaire

Empirical research into sex bias continues to grow at the same time that societal attitudes are changing. For this reason, broader and more sensitive measuring tools are necessary. The present study describes the development of such an instrument, the Bias in Attitudes Survey, a female/male role questionnaire. The BIAS was developed from the responses of 354 male and female college students to a 89-item tryout draft. Thirty-five items were retained, yielding a reliability estimate of.91. Scores across gender, age, and marital status are discussed, as well as implications and applications for further study.     

Gaze direction and facial expressions exert combined but different effects on attentional resources

Gaze direction and facial expressions are critical components of face processing and have been shown to influence attention deployment. We investigated whether gaze direction (direct vs. averted) combined with a neutral or angry expression modulates the deployment of attentional resources over time. In a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm participants had to decide the gender of a neutral or an angry target face with direct or averted gaze (T1) and then to judge the orientation of a target picture of a landscape (T2), following the face at different time intervals. Results showed no attentional blink effect (i.e., no deterioration in T2 accuracy) when T1 was an angry face with direct gaze, whereas it was present for angry faces with averted gaze or neutral faces with either averted or direct gaze. These findings are consistent with appraisal theories and are discussed against the background of automatic processing of threat stimuli.     

Mothers and Daughters from Today's Psychoanalytic Perspective

In this paper, I review and synthesize findings that may help us remodel the way we think about the vicissitudes of the mother-daughter relationship. Although exciting new ideas are burgeoning in the literature, there seems to be a lag between discoveries and their integration into clinical practice. Older theories emphasizing separation and the girl's “change of libidinal object” from mother to father reflect linear models that do not encompass the development we observe and experience. Newer theories depict development as interactive and relational throughout the life cycle—leading not to separation but to autonomy with connectedness. Applying male models to the female superego or speaking of the “female Oedipus complex” is misleading. New myths are being proposed to describe the conflicts integral to the girl's triangular situation. Applying the myth of Persephone and Demeter has been especially instructive. Many analysts tend to pathologize or infantilize the woman's ongoing tie to her mother and tend to misunderstand the intense ambivalence between daughter and mother. Once we recognize that the course of development is not linear, we should expect to see the woman revisiting, reexamining, and resynthesizing representations of self-versus-mother and self-with-mother over her lifetime.     

Working Memory Capacity and the Development of Quantitative Central Conceptual Structures

Abstract

This article reconsiders Case’s theory of central conceptual structures (CCS), examining the relation between working memory and the acquisition of quantitative CCS. The lead hypothesis is that the development of working memory capacity shapes the development of quantitative concepts (whole and rational numbers). Study I, with 779 children from preschool to grade 5, validated a measure of the whole number CCS and found that children’s understanding of whole number advances by one developmental level per additional unit of working memory capacity. Study II, with 92 sixth- and seventh-graders, found that a test of the rational number CCS was predicted by working memory capacity and, to a lesser extent, by intrusion errors in the listening span. We also identified 2 subsets of items that demand a capacity of 4 or 5 units, respectively. Overall, the results support Case’s CCS theory and clarify the role of working memory in the acquisition of numerical concepts. The relevance of these results in relation to the current debate is discussed, with extensive connections to other current theories of whole or rational number comprehension.     

Effects of Action Video Game Experience on Change Detection

Reflected sounds are often treated as an acoustic problem because they produce false localization cues and decrease speech intelligibility. However, their properties are shaped by the acoustic properties of the environment and therefore are a potential source of information about that environment. The objective of this study was to determine whether information carried by reflected sounds can be used by listeners to enhance their awareness of their auditory environment. Twelve listeners participated in two auditory training tasks in which they learned to identify three environments based on a limited subset of sounds and then were tested to determine whether they could transfer that learning to new, unfamiliar sounds. Results showed that significant learning occurred despite the task difficulty. An analysis of stimulus attributes suggests that it is easiest to learn to identify reflected sound when it occurs in sounds with longer decay times and broadly distributed dominant spectral components.     

Effects of Hardiness and Years of Military Service on Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in U.S. Army Medics

We examined the effects of hardiness on symptoms of posttraumatic stress (PTS) in postdeployed U.S. Army medics (N = 322). Medics endure a high level of work-related stress on and off the battlefield. Hardiness correlated negatively with reports of PTS symptoms and moderated the cumulative effects of years of military service on PTS symptoms. After controlling for socially desirable responding, PTS symptoms increased with years of military service for those with low levels of hardiness and decreased with years of military service for those with very high levels of hardiness. The military’s current resiliency training programs would likely benefit from incorporating hardiness measures and principles into its curriculum.     

Preliminary evidence for low openness to experience as a pre-clinical marker of incipient cognitive decline in older adults

The current study examined self-reported Openness to Experience as a marker of incipient cognitive decline among older adults. Seventy five cognitively-intact, community-dwelling adults ages 58–87 were assessed with the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO PI-R; (Costa & McCrae, 1992) and the Mattis Dementia Rating Scale 2nd edition (DRS-2; (Mattis, Jurica, & Leitten, 1988) to examine association with incipient decline over approximately 1 year. Low Openness to Experience was associated with decline, controlling for baseline screening scores, age, education, and the other four personality factors. Examination of facet-level associations indicated that lower scores on the Values and Aesthetics facets of Openness primarily explained the association. Current findings build on prior research suggesting that exaggerated reaction to novelty may signal pre-clinical cognitive decline.     

The temporal dynamics of first versus second language production

In this study we explored the temporal origin of processing differences between first and second language production. Forty highly proficient bilinguals named objects of high and low lexical frequency aloud for both L1 and L2 separately while event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The first electrophysiological differences elicited by response language occurred at the same early P2 peak (∼140–220 ms) where we observed the onset of the lexical frequency effect, but only for those bilinguals who started naming in an L1 context and afterwards switched to an L2 naming context. The bilinguals who named objects in the reverse direction did not display a language effect in the ERPs. Taken together, the data show that the L2 naming disadvantage originates during the onset of lexical access and seems to be driven by both representational strength, which is lower for L2 words, and language control demands, which are higher for L2 words.