The effects of depression on the emotional responses of Spanish-speaking Latinas

Emotional responses (physiology, self-report, and facial expression) of 12 depressed and 10 nondepressed Spanish-speaking Latinas during sad and amusing film clips of human and animal content were compared. Depressed Latinas demonstrated less electrodermal reactivity across all the film clips and displayed fewer social smiles during the amusing-human film clip than nondepressed Latinas. No differences emerged for cardiovascular measures, reports of emotion, or facial expressions of happiness and negative emotion. Observed differences in electrodermal reactivity are similar to results from previous studies of Anglo Americans, suggesting that reduced electrodermal activity may be linked to depression across cultures. The findings also suggest that, for Latinas, depression may selectively alter expressions that serve interpersonal functions.     

“Mind the gaps”: An empirical approach to engineering ethics, 1997–2001

A survey on ethical issues in engineering was administered over a five-year period to Stanford engineering students and practicing engineers. Analysis of its results strongly suggests that important disconnects exist between the education of engineering students regarding ethical issues in engineering on the one hand, and the realities of contemporary engineering practice on the other. Two noteworthy consequences of these gaps are that the views of engineering students differ substantially over what makes an issue an ethical issue, while practicing engineers exhibit significant disagreement over what is the most important non-technical aspect of being a responsible engineering professional in contemporary society. These divergences impede the recognition of ethical issues and of specific moral responsibilities of engineers in concrete professional practice. It is argued that the use of suitably refined and probing surveys of engineering students and practicing engineers about ethical issues in engineering is an important although neglected empirical approach to the study of engineering ethics. Such an approach can enhance the prevailing case study method and combat over-tidy theoretical-analytical approaches to the subject. When a train arrives at a station in the London Underground, a public announcement cautions passengers to “mind the gap”, i.e. heed the space between the station platform and the carriage while entering or exiting. An early draft of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Ethics in Engineering and Computer Science, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, March 21–23, 1999.     

Korean adolescents' "examination hell" and their use of free time

A 15-year-old girl's daily life is a vivid testimony to the hardships the Korean high school student is faced with. She leaves home for school at 7 A. M., taking two lunch bags, one for supper, with her. After regular classes end at 5 P.M., she attends the "autonomous study classes" studying by herself until 10 P.M. The exhausted young girl returns home at about 10:30 P.M. and gets to bed around midnight at the earliest. Under the current system, this will be her life for three years. Of course, there is no guarantee she will be able to enter the university she wants. She has no family life, except for Sundays, and they hardly ever see each other, let alone get together at the dining table for dinner. People call this "ipsi chiok," entrance examination hell. ["High School Students Deprived of Spring," 1996, p. 13].     

The neural basis of autobiographical and semantic memory: new evidence from three PET studies

A novel, neuropsychologically informed paradigm (extended retrieval of events in response to a cue word) was used to investigate the neural basis of autobiographical and semantic memory. Contrasting retrieval of autobiographical memories with retrieval of semantic facts (ABM-SEM) in 24 subjects across three PET studies revealed bilateral involvement of the middle temporal gyrus (BA 21) and medial frontal cortex (BA 9/10). The opposite contrast, SEM-ABM, resulted in increased regional cerebral blood flow in left posterior temporal regions (BA 37) and left prefrontal cortex (BA 45/46). Laterality maps suggest that the bilateral pattern seen in our studies, but not often in other neuroimaging investigations, reflects the use of a task stressing retrieval of specific personal events. Further comparisons revealed that the activation in the right anterior temporal lobe during autobiographical recall was virtually identical to that seen during retrieval of information about famous people or events in contrast with retrieval of general semantic facts. These findings suggest that the retrieval of an autobiographical event requires participation from conceptual knowledge, and that this type of knowledge is bilaterally distributed in the temporal lobes.     

Discrete varieties of care in the clinical pastoral tradition: continuing the dialogue

In the current cultural context, clinically trained ministers, lay and ordained, offer themselves to troubled souls through at least three distinct varieties of assistance: pastoral care, pastoral counseling, and pastoral psychotherapy. This essay delineates three accepted disciplines, emphasizing the importance of ascertaining, and perhaps re-evaluating, the particular needs and desires of persons who are in physical, mental, or spiritual distress. "Pastoral care," "pastoral counseling," and "pastoral psychotherapy" each play an important role in fulfilling the traditional mandate for "the cure of souls."     

A computer-aided digital audio recording and encoding system for improving the encoding of verbal reports

The increasing use of verbal reports in psychological research requires tools for improving the ease and reliability of collecting and coding verbal report data. An approach is described that maintains the verbal report data in digitally recorded audio form throughout the collecting and encoding processes. A new computer-aided encoding tool, CAPAS, is described, which randomly selects and plays individual protocol segments and stores computer keyboard-entered codes in an SPSS-formatted data file.     

Does visual word identification involve a sub-phonemic level?

The phonological codes activated in visual word recognition can be thought of minimally as strings of discrete and unstructured phoneme-like units. We asked whether these codes might additionally express a letter string's phonological form at a featural or gestural level. Specifically, we asked whether the priming of a word (e.g. sea, film, basic) by a rhyming non-word would depend on the non-word's phonemic-feature similarity to the word. The question was asked within a mask--prime--target--mask sequence with both brief (57 ms in Experiments 1 and 2) and long (486 ms in Experiment 1) prime durations. Non-word primes that differed from their targets by a single phonemic feature (initial voicing as in ZEA, VILM, PASIC) led to faster target lexical decisions than non-word primes that differed by more than a single phonemic feature (e.g. VEA, JILM, SASIC). Visual word recognition seems to involve a sub-phonemic level of processing.     

Human performance on visually presented Traveling Salesman problems

Little research has been carried out on human performance in optimization problems, such as the Traveling Salesman problem (TSP). Studies by Polivanova (1974, Voprosy Psikhologii, 4, 41–51) and by MacGregor and Ormerod (1996, Perception & Psychophysics, 58, 527–539) suggest that: (1) the complexity of solutions to visually presented TSPs depends on the number of points on the convex hull; and (2) the perception of optimal structure is an innate tendency of the visual system, not subject to individual differences. Results are reported from two experiments. In the first, measures of the total length and completion speed of pathways, and a measure of path uncertainty were compared with optimal solutions produced by an elastic net algorithm and by several heuristic methods. Performance was also compared under instructions to draw the shortest or the most attractive pathway. In the second, various measures of performance were compared with scores on Raven's advanced progressive matrices (APM). The number of points on the convex hull did not determine the relative optimality of solutions, although both this factor and the total number of points influenced solution speed and path uncertainty. Subjects' solutions showed appreciable individual differences, which had a strong correlation with APM scores. The relation between perceptual organization and the process of solving visually presented TSPs is briefly discussed, as is the potential of optimization for providing a conceptual framework for the study of intelligence. Received: 28 December 1998 / Accepted: 20 January 2000     

Embodiment: An Introduction

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

Category variability, exemplar similarity, and perceptual classification

Experiments were conducted in which observers learned to classify simple perceptual stimuli into low-variability and high-variability categories. Similarities between objects were measured in independent psychological-scaling tasks. The results showed that observers classified transfer stimuli into the high-variability categories with greater probability than was predicted by a baseline version of an exemplar-similarity model. Qualitative evidence for the role of category variability on perceptual classification, which could not be explained in terms of the baseline exemplar-similarity model, was obtained as well. Possible accounts of the effects of category variability are considered in the General Discussion section.