Constraints on infants' musical rhythm perception: effects of interval ratio complexity and enculturation

Effects of culture-specific experience on musical rhythm perception are evident by 12 months of age, but the role of culture-general rhythm processing constraints during early infancy has not been explored. Using a habituation procedure with 5- and 7-month-old infants, we investigated effects of temporal interval ratio complexity on discrimination of standard from novel musical patterns containing 200-ms disruptions. Infants were tested in three ratio conditions: simple (2:1), which is typical in Western music, complex (3:2), which is typical in other musical cultures, and highly complex (7:4), which is relatively rare in music throughout the world. Unlike adults and older infants, whose accuracy was predicted by familiarity, younger infants were influenced by ratio complexity, as shown by their successful discrimination in the simple and complex conditions but not in the highly complex condition. The findings suggest that ratio complexity constrains rhythm perception even prior to the acquisition of culture-specific biases.     

Mirror Mirror: The role of self-monitoring and sincerity in emotional manipulation

This study examined for the first time the relationships between self-monitoring, sincerity, and emotional manipulation, by investigating whether sensitivity to social cues and to appropriate emotional expression would facilitate the use of emotion in malevolent contexts. Participants (N = 170 student and community members) completed online measures of self-monitoring, sincerity, and emotional manipulation in a cross-sectional, correlational design. As predicted, high self-monitoring (of self-presentation) and low sincerity were significantly associated with emotional manipulation. Lower levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness also predicted emotional manipulation. Although the current research is exploratory, it is concluded that attention to, and control of, emotional expression, in combination with an insincere approach, are central to emotional manipulation.     

Career guidance in England: retrospect and prospect

This paper tackles three challenges: first, to sketch the history of career guidance provision in England over the last 25 years; second, to identify what the current structure of career guidance in England is; and finally, to analyse the key issues and challenges which career guidance in England now faces. Whilst its earlier history in this field was in step with the other constituent countries of the United Kingdom, the path taken by England in more recent times (notably the last decade) has diverged; this divergence being exacerbated by a relentless quest for target achievement. England now stands alone in eschewing an all-age guidance service. It is argued that the current situation in England is a fretwork of polarities across which policy is stretched, leading to tension and incoherence.     

Conquest and the Western Church

This article examines the action of power relations in the church in pursuit of worldly advantage – political, economic, and social – in the formation, action, and spread of the institution of the Western church, often in collusion with the imperial aspirations of state powers. It argues that redress is required to make amends for injustices and crimes against humanity, as well as to evangelize more effectively in a world that includes those victimized by those claiming to represent God's authority.     

Pretreatment Correlates of the Therapeutic Alliance in the Chronically Depressed

We examined the relationship between patient characteristics and the working alliance in a multisite trial for chronic depression. Patients treated with the Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP), alone (n = 169) or combined with nefazodone (n = 198), completed the Working Alliance Inventory during the 2nd week of treatment. Within the CBASP alone group, a history of drug abuse/dependence, lower peak social adjustment over the past five years, and lower current social adjustment predicted a significantly poorer alliance. Within the combination group, male gender and a distancing coping style predicted a significantly poorer alliance. Results should be interpreted with caution since they did not replicate across treatment groups, and the number of significant findings were not much greater than chance expectations.     

Gender Differences in the Importance of Work and Family Roles: Implications for Work–Family Conflict

In this study we explored between- and within-gender differences in the importance of life roles and their implications for work–family conflict. In earlier research (Cinamon & Rich, 2002) we found 3 profiles of workers who differ in attributions of importance to work and family roles: persons who assigned high importance to both the work role and the family role (“Dual” profile); participants who ascribed high importance to the work role and low importance to the family role (“Work” profile); and participants who attributed high importance to the family role and low importance to the work role (“Family” profile). We used these profiles to clarify the relationship between gender and work–family conflict. Participants were 126 married men and 87 married women who were employed in computer or law firms. Significant between- and within-gender differences were found in the distribution of participants to profiles. Men were equally distributed throughout the profiles, whereas women were underrepresented in the Work category. More women than men fit the Family profile, and more men than women fit the Work profile. No gender differences were found for the Dual profile. Women reported higher parenting and work values than men did. Between-gender differences in work–family conflict were apparent, as were within-gender differences across profiles. Results demonstrate the value of examining both between- and within-gender variation in studies of gender and work–family conflict.     

Conversational coherency

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations. The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a “context space.” Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially, a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces. As a conversation proceeds, each conversant builds a discourse model that includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. Conversational coherency depends upon a lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by speakers following high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify their discourse models. These rules, given in the study, are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here—a hierarchy of related context spaces.