College-educated women's personality development in adulthood: perceptions and age differences

Adulthood encompasses a large time span and includes a series of psychosocial challenges (E. H. Erikson, 1950). Five aspects of personality (identity certainty, confident power, concern with aging, generativity, and personal distress) were assessed in a cross-sectional study of college-educated women who at the time of data collection were young adults (age: M = 26 years), middle-aged adults (age: M = 46 years), or older adults (age: M = 66 years). Respondents rated each personality domain for how true it was of them at the time, and they then rated the other 2 ages either retrospectively or prospectively. Results are discussed with attention to the ways in which women's adult development may have been shaped by experiences particular to both gender and birth cohort, and to how these women fit with E. H. Erikson's theory of adult development.     

Employment of persons with disabilities in information technology jobs: literature review for "IT works"

This article reviews relevant literature as to the labor pool of qualified individuals with disabilities and employment in information technology (IT) sector jobs. First, the article reviews the empirical literature on barriers to employment in IT for persons with disabilities. The examination then is extended to studies of barriers to employment for individuals with disabilities in other employment sectors. Findings illustrate the limited experiences that IT and non-IT companies have in employing and accommodating employees with disabilities. Implications are discussed for enhancing the employment of qualified workers with disabilities in IT through research, education, training, and mentoring programs.     

Infants of depressed mothers,although competent learners,fail to learn in response to their own mothers' infant-directed speech

Depressed mothers use less of the exaggerated prosody that is typical of infant-directed (ID) speech than do nondepressed mothers. We investigated the consequences of this reduced perceptual salience in ID speech for infant learning. Infants of nondepressed mothers readily learned that their mothers' speech signaled a face, whereas infants of depressed mothers failed to learn that their mothers' speech signaled the face. Infants of depressed mothers did, however, show strong learning in response to speech produced by an unfamiliar nondepressed mother. These outcomes indicate that the reduced perceptual salience of depressed mothers' ID speech could lead to deficient learning in otherwise competent learners.     

Why misinformation is more likely to be recognised over time: A source monitoring account

Although memory for actual events tends to be forgotten over time, memory for misinformation tends to be retrieved at a stable rate over long delays or at a rate greater than that found immediately after encoding. To examine whether source monitoring errors contribute to this phenomenon, two experiments investigated subjects' memory for the source of misinformation at different retention intervals. Subjects viewed a slide presentation, read a narrative containing misinformation, and, either 10 minutes or 1 week later, completed a recognition test about details seen in the slides and about the source of these details. After the longer retention interval in both experiments, participants were more likely to agree that they had seen misleading information and were also more likely to incorrectly associate the misinformation with the slide event. Theoretical implications of these findings are considered.     

Recognition memory for single items and for associations is similarly impaired following damage to the hippocampal region

The formation of new associations between items is critical for establishing episodic memories. It has been suggested that the hippocampus is essential for creating such associations but is not involved, or is much less involved, in memory for single items. In Experiment 1, we tested controls and amnesic patients with bilateral lesions thought to be limited primarily to the hippocampal region in both single-item and associative recognition memory tasks. In the single-item task, a conventional recognition memory task was administered in which participants studied either houses or faces and were tested for their ability to recognize the individual items. In the associative task, participants studied paired pictures of houses and faces with instructions that encouraged associating the two stimuli, and were tested for their ability to recognize the specific pairings that were presented at study. Like the controls, the amnesic patients performed more poorly on the associative task. Relative to the controls, the amnesic patients were impaired to a similar extent on the single-item and associative tasks. In Experiment 2, the performance of the amnesic patients was improved by increasing the number of presentations of the study lists (eight presentations instead of one). On both the single-item and associative tests, the performance of the amnesic patients after eight presentations was now identical to the performance of the controls who had been given only one presentation of the study list. Thus, the associative condition was not disproportionally difficult for the amnesic patients. These results are consistent with the idea that the hippocampus is similarly involved in single-item and associative memory.     

Police Officer Performance Under Stress: A Pilot Study on the Effects of Visuo-Motor Behavior Rehearsal

This study examined the effectiveness ofvisuo-motor behavior rehearsal(VMBR) as a method of reducing acute stress and improving police officer performance. Fifty-four recruits were randomly assigned to a treatment and a nontreatment condition prior to undergoing a highly stressful, critical event training scenario involving live fire. A manipulation check showed that participants who received VMBR displayed significantly lower scores on the cognitive state anxiety subscale of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2; somatic state anxiety and self-confidence were unaffected by the VMBR treatment. Most importantly, participants in the VMBR training condition displayed better performance on the critical event scenario, including significantly more assailant hits. The findings are discussed with respect to the four-stage model of stress and human performance of Salas and colleagues.     

Magnitude estimation of conceptual data dimensions for use in sonification

Sonifications must match listener expectancies about representing data with sound. Three experiments showed the utility of magnitude estimation for this. In Experiment 1, 67 undergraduates judged the sizes of visual stimuli and the temperature, pressure, velocity, size, or dollars they represented. Similarly, in Experiment 2, 132 listeners judged the pitch or tempo of sounds and the data they represented. In both experiments, polarity and scaling preference depended on the conceptual data dimension. In Experiment 3, 60 listeners matched auditory graphs to data created with the results of Experiment 2, providing initial validation of scaling slopes. Magnitude estimation is proposed as a design tool in the development of data sonifications, with the level of polarity preference agreement predicting mapping effectiveness.