Sandler's concept of role-responsiveness and the relationship to the psychoanalytic frame

This paper attempts to integrate Sandler's object relations theory of transference with Langs theories regarding the centrality of framework issues in psychotherapy. The authors illustrate how modifications in the framework are the primary way in which a patient attempts to impose a role on the therapist—a role which is in keeping with the patient's internal object reactions and early pathogenic relationships. In addition, the authors demonstrate how a patient's attempts to impose a role on the therapist are often a reaction to the therapist's own modifications of the framework.The authors would like to thank Dr. Robert Langs for his editorial assistance.     

Justification effects on the judgment of analogy

Many of us share a strong intuition that justification forces us to better understand the situations we face. And there is substantial evidence indicating that this is often the case. However, there is a growing body of research showing that, under certain circumstances, explanation and justification can impair performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. In the present research, the effects of justification on judgment of the soundness of analogies were examined. Subjects judged the quality of the match between pairs of stories with varying degrees of superficial and analogical similarity. Experimental subjects either provided reasons for their judgments or wrote recollections of the target stimuli. These subjects rated the match between stimulus pairs as more sound than did control subjects. Also, providing reasons led to poorer discrimination between superficially similar aspects of the stimuli and analogous aspects. Explanations of these findings are proposed, and implications for problem solving and confidence judgment are discussed.     

Intermodal perception at birth: Intersensory redundancy guides newborn infants’ learning of arbitrary auditory−visual pairings

In this study the ability of newborn infants to learn arbitrary auditory–visual associations in the absence versus presence of amodal (redundant) and contingent information was investigated. In the auditory-noncontingent condition 2-day-old infants were familiarized to two alternating visual stimuli (differing in colour and orientation), each accompanied by its ‘own’ sound: when the visual stimulus was presented the sound was continuously presented, independently of whether the infant looked at the visual stimulus. In the auditory-contingent condition the auditory stimulus was presented only when the infant looked at the visual stimulus: thus, presentation of the sound was contingent upon infant looking. On the post-familiarization test trials attention recovered strongly to a novel auditory–visual combination in the auditory-contingent condition, but remained low, and indistinguishable from attention to the familiar combination, in the auditory-noncontingent condition. These findings are a clear demonstration that newborn infants’ learning of arbitrary auditory–visual associations is constrained and guided by the presence of redundant (amodal) contingent information. The findings give strong support to Bahrick’s theory of early intermodal perception.     

Attenuation and interaction

A significance test is proposed for determining whether a correlation coefficient is less than unity by an amount greater than that attributable to errors of measurement.     

On the sampling errors of factor loadings

The results of three empirical studies on the sampling fluctuation of centroid factor loadings are reported. The first study is based on data which happened to be available on 8 variables for 700 cases and which were factored to three factors for subsamples. The second study is based on fictitious data for 2500 cases which provided separate analyses on 25 samples for each of three situations: 5 variables, one factor; 5 variables, two factors; and 6 variables, three factors. The third study, based on real data for 9 variables and 7000 cases, involves separate factorization for 35 samples of 200 cases. The three studies agree in showing that the sampling behavior of first centroid factor loadings is much like that of correlation coefficients, whereas the sampling fluctuations for loadings beyond the first are disturbingly large.     

Category Representation in Young Infants

Results obtained from a novelty-preference procedure indicate that young infants possess abilities to organize objects into perceptual categories that have conceptual significance for adults. This work suggests that the initial construction of category representations is not dependent on language, formal instruction, or specialized processes, and that category development may proceed through a process of enrichment.     

Attracting Applicants in the War for Talent: Differences in Work Preferences Among High Achievers

This study examines how several indicators of ability and achievement are associated with individual differences in preferences for job and organizational attributes. Results from a sample of 378 business and liberal arts students suggest that students with high cognitive ability and all types of high achievement place greater importance on interesting and challenging work than do other students. However, on other work attributes (e.g., job flexibility, pay practices, fast-track promotion systems), students with high cognitive ability and high academic achievement (i.e., grade point average) appear to have different preference patterns from those with high social achievement (e.g., extracurricular and leadership activities). Results are discussed in terms of implications for employers and future research.     

An inner face advantage in children's recognition of familiar peers

Children’s recognition of familiar own-age peers was investigated. Chinese children (4-, 8-, and 14-year-olds) were asked to identify their classmates from photographs showing the entire face, the internal facial features only, the external facial features only, or the eyes, nose, or mouth only. Participants from all age groups were familiar with the faces used as stimuli for 1 academic year. The results showed that children from all age groups demonstrated an advantage for recognition of the internal facial features relative to their recognition of the external facial features. Thus, previous observations of a shift in reliance from external to internal facial features can be attributed to experience with faces rather than to age-related changes in face processing.