Meaning in life: Discovered or created?

Against the background claims that a meaningful life is more likely to be the product of creation than discovery and that a meaningful life must involve both subjective satisfaction and an objective moral component, three foundations of a meaningful life are discussed. These include the quality of one's relationships, the integrative power of one's goals and projects, and the role of story or stories. Concerning the role of story, the theological challenge is to choose that story or those stories that place life in a genuinely ultimate context.     

Memory and aging: Implications for theories of memory development during childhood

Research is reviewed suggesting that early school age children and older adults demonstrate a similar pattern of performance deficits (relative to the performance of young adults) on memory tasks, raising the possibility that age-related changes in some common factor might account for both memory development and memory decline. It is argued here that whereas “metamemory” theory of memory development does not provide a viable theory of memory decline, Craik's (F. I. M. Craik & M. Byrd, 1982, in F. I. M. Craik & S. E. Trehub (Eds.), Aging and cognitive processes, New York: Plenum; F. I. M. Craik & E. Simon, 1980, in L. W. Poon, J. L. Fozard, L. S. Cermak, D. Arenberg, & L. W. Thompson (Eds.), New directions in memory and aging, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum) attentional deficit theory of memory decline provides a viable theory of memory development as well. Evidence supporting this position is reviewed, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Infants’ sensitivity to familiar size: The effect of memory on spatial perception

Two experiments investigated infants’ sensitivity to familiar size as information for the distances of objects with which they had had only brief experience. Each experiment had two phases: a familiarization phase and a test phase. During the familiarization phase, the infant played with a pair of different-sized objects for 10 min. During the test phase, a pair of objects, identical to those seen in the familiarization phase but now equal in size, were presented to the infant at a fixed distance under monocular or binocular viewing conditions. In the test phase of Experiment 1, 7-month-old infants viewing the objects monocularly showed a significant preference to reach for the object that resembled the smaller object in the familiarization phase. Seven-month-old infants in the binocular viewing condition reached equally to the two test phase objects. These results indicate that, in the monocular condition, the 7-month-olds used knowledge about the objects’ sizes, acquired during the familiarization phase, to perceive distance from the test objects’ visual angles, and that they reached preferentially for the apparently nearer object. The lack of a reaching preference in the binocular condition rules out interpretations of the results not based on the objects’ perceived distances. The results, therefore, indicate that 7-month-old infants can use memory to mediate spatial perception. The implications of this finding for the debate between direct and indirect theories of visual perception are discussed. In the test phase of Experiment 2,5-month-old infants viewing the objects monocularly showed no reaching preference. These infants, therefore, showed no evidence of sensitivity to familiar size as distance information.     

Testing visual short-term memory: Simultaneous versus sequential presentations

Two experiments testing immediate ordered recall are presented; in these experiments, subjects engaged in repetitive speech (“articulatory suppression”) during a visual presentation in order to prevent auditory recoding of the stimuli. In both experiments, a simultaneous presentation produced results that suggested the use of visual short-term memory, whereas a sequential presentation did not. In Experiment 1, visual confusion errors occurred more often than would be expected by chance for a simultaneous presentation but not for a sequential presentation. In Experiment 2, recall from visual short-term memory was expected to suffer more when subjects wrote a prefix than when they spoke a prefix; this effect occurred for a simultaneous presentation but not for a sequential presentation. These results suggest that existence of a visual short term store that retains a simultaneous presentation but not a sequential presentation.     

Adaptation and vulnerability in high-risk adolescents: An examination of environmental mediators

The relationship of characteristics of the social environment to the adaptation of adolescents from high-risk predisposing environments was examined. Specifically, the degree to which adolescents' perceptions of various dimensions of their family and school environment as well as sources of social support related to differential levels of personal well-being and academic adjustment was explored. Multiple regression analyses revealed differences in the salience of the dimensions of the social environment as a function of the particular sphere of functioning under consideration. Implications of the findings for developing a model for understanding the relative vulnerability of individuals at risk as well as of the design of preventive interventions are discussed.     

Parent-infant resemblance for general and specific cognitive abilities in the Colorado adoption project

Previous publications emanating from the Colorado Adoption Project have reported significant relationships between parental general cognitive ability (g) and infant Bayley MDI scores. The present study compared infant Bayley factor scores representing separable dimensions of infant cognition with parental general and specific cognitive abilities for 182 adoptive families and 164 nonadoptive families. Parent/offspring correlations between 12-month Bayley factors and parental cognitive abilities suggest only minimal relationships for both parental g and specific abilities. At 24 months, more parent/offspring resemblance was present; moreover, Bayley factors that were related to parental cognition tended to be related to parental g, not to specific abilities. The finding of significant parent/offspring relationships at 24 months between biological parents and their adopted-away infants, as well as between nonadoptive parents and their infants, suggests some genetic continuity from infancy to adulthood.     

Physical self-efficacy and actualization

In his theorizing about self-actualization, Maslow speculated that physical ability and physical self-confidence were two aspects of cooperative dominance which were associated positively with actualization. These aspects of dominance bear close resemblance to the Perceived Physical Ability (PPA) and the Physical Self-Presentation Confidence (PSPC) dimensions of the Physical Self-Efficacy (PSE) Inventory. Accordingly, the PPA and PSPC scores of undergraduate men and women were correlated with their scores on the Personal Orientation Inventory (POI), a popular measure of actualization, to test Maslow's hypotheses. The results showed that, contrary to Maslow's claims, PPA is not a positive correlate of self-actualization. However, strong support was found for Maslow's contention that high-PSPC individuals are more likely to be actualizing than low-PSPC people. Also, Maslow's hypothesis that actualizers are high in global sensation seeking (SS) was tested. The data indicated that only male actualizers were high in various aspects of SS, but female actualizers were not. Multiple regression analyses revealed further that both SS and PSPC are primary contributors to POI for men, but only PSPC contributes significantly to POI for women. Discussion focused on the reasons why research findings showing that increases in physical fitness lead to increases in self-esteem cannot be used to support the view that physical fitness and actualization are linked positively.