Thai Norms for Name,Image, and Category Agreement,Object Familiarity,Visual Complexity,Manipulability, and Age of Acquisition for 480 Color Photographic Objects

Normative databases containing psycholinguistic variables are commonly used to aid stimulus selection for investigations into language and other cognitive processes. Norms exist for many languages, but not for Thai. The aim of the present research, therefore, was to obtain Thai normative data for the BOSS, a set of 480 high resolution color photographic images of real objects (Brodeur et al. in PLoS ONE 5(5), 2010.  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010773). Norms were provided by 584 Thai university students on eight dimensions: name agreement, object familiarity, visual complexity, category agreement, image agreement, two types of manipulability (graspability and mimeability), and age of acquisition. The results revealed comparatively similar levels of name agreement to Brodeur et al. especially when unfamiliar items were factored out. The pattern of intercorrelations among the Thai psycholinguistic norms was comparable to previous studies and our cross-linguistic correlations were robust for the same set of pictures in English and French. Conjointly, the findings extend the relevancy of the BOSS to Thailand, supporting this photographic resource for investigations of language and other cognitive processes in monolingual, multilingual, and brain-impaired populations.     

Why Improvement Can Trump Consistent Strong Performance: The Role of Effort Perceptions

How do evaluators form comparative judgments of improved versus consistently strong performance records with equivalent recent performance? We propose that evaluators judge those with improved records to be more deserving of future opportunities (e.g., a promotion) and that this can be explained – at least in part – by perceptions of effort investments. Specifically, evaluators rely on improvement to judge effort and hence devalue consistent strong performance. Five studies supported these propositions. Evaluators perceived greater effort investment and trait effort in individuals with improved profiles than those with consistent profiles and consequently thought that those with improved profiles were more deserving of future opportunities. We discuss implications of these results across various decision contexts. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis and the Sociocultural Turn: From Cultural Contexts to Hermeneutic Understanding

This article addresses the tension between the defining impact of culture on human experience and the role of the person as agent. Focusing on the sociocultural turn in psychoanalysis, it examines the evolution of the notions of culture and the person, first in the culturalist psychoanalysis of Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, and then in the hermeneutic turn of recent psychoanalysis. The article maintains that persons are inescapably shaped by the culture in which they live. At the same time, the manner in which individual psychology is organized and experienced within culture points to the role of agency as an emergent human potential. The article suggests that culture and personal agency are mutually reinforcing and that psychoanalysis must account for both. It develops a hermeneutic perspective as an alternative to postmodernism and concludes by outlining a post-Cartesian approach in psychoanalysis that addresses culture and the person in a non-dualistic fashion.     

Aging and individual differences in rapid two-choice decisions

The effects of aging on performance were examined in signal detection, letter discrimination, brightness discrimination, and recognition memory, with each subject tested on all four tasks. Ratcliff’s (1978) diffusion model was fit to the data for each subject for each task, and it provided a good account of accuracy and the distributions of correct and error response times. The model’s analysis of the components of processing showed that aging had three main effects: The nondecision components of processing were slower and the decision criteria were more conservative for 60- to 74-year-old and 75- to 85-year-old subjects than for college students, but the quality of the evidence on which decisions were based was as good for the older subjects as for college students on some of the tasks. Individual differences among subjects in components of processing tended to be preserved across the tasks, as was shown by strong correlations across the tasks in the parameters of the model that represent the components of processing. For example, if the evidence on which a subject’s decisions were based was good in one task, it tended to be good in all four tasks.