Marian Images: Madonna and Hodigitria

The Madonna of Western religious art and the articulation of Marian theology is enunciated in Kathleen C. Ford's piece entitled Portrait of Our Lady. This paper is a companion piece focusing on the Hodigitria, Mother of God, an Eastern liturgical icon and its theological and psychological influence on the clinical treatment of a young woman. The client's recurrent turtle metaphor is discussed for clinical significance. In both portraits, Madonna and Hodigitria, the centrality of the mother image is essential. Kathleen emphasized the influence of the Great Mother Archetype in art and religion and the ancillary theme of containing and contained. The emphasis in this companion paper is the mother image as theologically and psychologically relational, communal, interpathic and companioning.     

Heroin Use Among Southern Arrestees: Regional Findings From the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program

The identification of jurisdictional drug use patterns is critical to counselors who address substance abuse proactively. In the current study, heroin use data were analyzed from adult arrestees who were surveyed between 1990 and 1997 through the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program.     

Goal specificity effects on hypothesis testing in problem solving

Previous research has found that having a nonspecific goal (NSG) leads to better problem solving and transfer than having a specific goal (SG). To distinguish between the various explanations of this effect requires direct evidence showing how a NSG affects a participant's behaviour. Therefore we collected verbal protocols from participants learning to control a linear system consisting of 3 outputs by manipulating 3 inputs. This system was simpler than the one we had used previously, so in Exp. 1 we generalized our earlier goal specificity findings to this system. In Exp. 2 protocol analysis confirmed our prediction (based on dual-space theories of problem solving) that NSG participants focused on hypothesis testing whereas SG participants focused on the goal. However, this difference only emerged over time. We also replicated the goal specificity effect on performance and showed that giving participants a hypothesis to test improved performance.     

Stigma, Culture, and HIV and AIDS in the Western Cape, South Africa: An Application of the PEN-3 Cultural Model for Community-Based Research

HIV- and AIDS-related stigma has been reported to be a major factor contributing to the spread of HIV. In this study, the authors explore the meaning of stigma and its impact on HIV and AIDS in South African families and health care centers. They conducted focus group and key informant interviews among African and Colored populations in Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, and Mitchell's Plain in the Western Cape province. The audio-recorded interviews were transcribed and coded using NVivo. Using the PEN-3 cultural model, the authors analyzed results showing that participants' shared experiences ranged from positive/nonstigmatizing, to existential/unique to the contexts, to negative/stigmatizing. Families and health care centers were found to have both positive nonstigmatizing values and negative stigmatizing characteristics in addressing HIV/AIDS-related stigma. The authors conclude that a culture-centered analysis, relative to identity, is central to understanding the nature and contexts of HIV/AIDS-related stigma in South Africa.     

Sensitivity to stimulus similarity is associated with greater sustained attention ability

Sustained attention is critical for tasks where perceptual information must be continuously processed, like reading or driving; however, the cognitive processes underlying sustained attention remain incompletely characterized. In the experiments that follow, we explore the relationship between sustaining attention and the contents and maintenance of task-relevant features in an attentional template. Specifically, we administered the gradual onset continuous performance task (gradCPT), a sensitive measure of sustained attention, to a large web-based sample (N>20,000) and a smaller laboratory sample for validation and extension. The gradCPT requires participants to respond to most stimuli (city scenes – 90 %) and withhold to rare target images (mountain scenes – 10 %). By using stimulus similarity to probe the representational content of task-relevant features—assuming either exemplar- or category-based feature matching—we predicted that RTs for city stimuli that were more “mountain-like” would be slower and “city-like” mountain stimuli would elicit more erroneous presses. We found that exemplar-based target-nontarget (T-N) similarity predicted both RTs and erroneous button presses, suggesting a stimulus-specific feature matching process was adopted. Importantly, individual differences in the degree of sensitivity to these similarity measures correlated with conventional measures of attentional ability on the gradCPT as well as another CPT that is perceptually less demanding. In other words, individuals with greater sustained attention ability (assessed by two tasks) were more likely to be influenced by stimulus similarity on the gradCPT. These results suggest that sustained attention facilitates the construction and maintenance of an attentional template that is optimal for a given task.     

Using an abbreviated assessment to identify effective error‐correction procedures for individual learners during discrete‐trial instruction

Previous research comparing the effectiveness of error‐correction procedures has involved lengthy assessments that may not be practical in applied settings. We used an abbreviated assessment to compare the effectiveness of five error‐correction procedures for four children with autism spectrum disorder or a developmental delay. During the abbreviated assessment, we sampled participants' responding with each procedure and completed the assessment before participants reached our mastery criterion. Then, we used the results of the abbreviated assessment to predict the most efficient procedure for each participant. Next, we conducted validation assessments, comparing the number of sessions, trials, and time required for participants to master targets with each procedure. Results showed correspondence between the abbreviated assessment and validation assessments for two of four participants and partial correspondence for the other two participants. Findings suggest that a brief assessment may be a useful tool for identifying the most efficient error‐correction procedure for individual learners.     

Similar stimulus features control visual classification in orangutans and rhesus monkeys

Many species classify images according to visual attributes. In pigeons, local features may disproportionately control classification, whereas in primates global features may exert greater control. In the absence of explicitly comparative studies, in which different species are tested with the same stimuli under similar conditions, it is not possible to determine how much of the variation in the control of classification is due to species differences and how much is due to differences in the stimuli, training, or testing conditions. We tested rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus and Pongo abelii) in identical tests in which images were modified to determine which stimulus features controlled classification. Monkeys and orangutans were trained to classify full color images of birds, fish, flowers, and people; they were later given generalization tests in which images were novel, black and white, black and white line drawings, or scrambled. Classification in these primate species was controlled by multiple stimulus attributes, both global and local, and the species behaved similarly.