Exploring Conflict Culture in the Family: Consistency and Continuity of Conflict During Family Meal Discourse

Conflict discourse in the context of everyday activities of families during mealtimes was examined with a view to determining consistency and continuity on two occasions one year apart. In particular, the use of authority, the part played by each member of the family, and the ways in which conflicts were terminated was addressed. Data derived from Jewish families was considered not only to enable comparisons to be made with data derived from the broader community, but to illuminate the issues pertinent to the exploration of conflict within the family. It was observed over a period of time that there was a continuity of conflict culture within each family. Additionally it was found that generally, family conflict interactions terminated in standoffs rather than resorting to full blown conflicts and the outcome was, on the whole, favourable to all parties, with conversations continuing to be pursued without further conflict. In some instances termination of the episode was through an external agent, rather than a family member. The key part that family members play in deflecting conflict, especially the part played by mothers and siblings was noted. The extension of existing conflict coding schema to account for different types of authority moves, so as to discriminate between authority based on status and that which invokes an idea of shared responsibility or a common code of conduct is recommended. A further extension of the coding schema to account for paralinguistic aspects of communication is suggested.     

Escalation of Commitment and the Framing Effect: An Empirical Investigation

Research and theory are reviewed which consider two decision biases: escalation of commitment and decision framing. Some authors (Bazerman, 1986; Whyte, 1986) have suggested that escalation of commitment may be explained by the decision framing used in the research paradigms. A study was conducted which simultaneously manipulated both responsibility for a prior decision and decision frame. Results show a main effect on resource allocation for responsibility and no effect for decision frame. A follow-up study found that amount of information provided systematically affected the framing bias, and that when responsibility was added to a large amount of contextual information, the framing effect became nonsignificant. These results suggest a need to further examine the boundary conditions of framing.     

Children's reactions to serial murder

This study examined the psychological reactions of children who lived in a community exposed to serial murder. The research also examined how parents coped with their children's psychological responses. Thirty-four parents of 64 children between the ages of 5 and 18, inclusive, were asked to identify changes in their children since the serial murders. Data collection began 4 weeks following the murders and included assessment of emotional, cognitive and behavioral aspects of the child's responses. Follow-up data collection occurred at 9 months and 18 months after the murders. Results indicated that children, as a group, experienced a number of psychological changes following the murders, even though none of the actual victims were children. The most frequently reported symptoms were anxiety-based (fear of being alone, difficulty falling asleep and wanting to sleep with patents). Most children showed a significant decline in symptoms across time. The most popular parent coping strategies involved discussing issues of risk minimization, talking about the murders, and spending more time with children.     

Stimulus functions in chained fixed-interval schedules

Pigeons were required to complete three successive fixed-interval components to obtain food. When the same exteroceptive stimulus was correlated with the three components, responding was positively accelerated between food deliveries. When different exteroceptive stimuli were correlated with each component in a fixed sequence, prolonged pauses developed in the first component; low response rates developed in the second component; and responding was positively accelerated in the second and third components. When different exteroceptive stimuli were correlated with each component in a variable sequence, responding was positively accelerated in each component. Because the response and reinforcement contingencies were the same in all three procedures, the differences in performances must be due to the changes in the sequence of stimuli.     

Methylphenidate and stimulus control of avoidance behavior

The introduction of a warning signal that preceded a scheduled shock modified the temporal distribution of free-operant avoidance responses. With response-shock and shock-shock intervals held constant, response rates increased only slightly when the response-signal interval was reduced. The result is consistent with Sidman's (1955) findings under different conditions, but at variance with Ulrich, Holz, and Azrin's (1964) findings under similar conditions. Methylphenidate in graded doses increased response rates, modifying frequency distributions of interresponse times. Drug treatment may have disrupted a "temporal discrimination" formed within the signal-shock interval. More simply, methylphenidate influenced response rates by increasing short response latencies after signal onset; this effect was more prominent than the drug's tendency to increase the frequency of pre-signal responses. When signal-onset preceded shock by 2 sec, individual differences in performance were marked; methylphenidate suppressed responding in one rat as a function of increasing dose levels to a greater degree than in a second animal, but both subjects received more shocks than under control conditions.     

College Freshman Performance: Summer Entrants vs. Fall Entrants

Entering college students and their advisors—high school and college personnel—frequently assert that the student will do better academically by entering college during the summer term rather than during the fall term with its many extracurricular activities. Comparing the academic performances over the first two quarters of 320 summer quarter entrants with 320 fall quarter entrants at the University of Tennessee yielded no significant differences for season entered. The ACT composite score for each student was held constant by using analysis of covariance. Significant differences for year entered—1962 or 1963—were apparently a function of the lack of reliability in grading practices. The academic performance of entering students did not benefit from summer quarter entrance.     

Explaining the behaviour of random ecological networks: the stability of the microbiome as a case of integrative pluralism

Synthese - Explaining the behaviour of ecosystems is one of the key challenges for the biological sciences. Since 2000, new-mechanism has been the main model to account for the nature of scientific...     

The curious case of spillover: Does it tell us much about saccade timing in reading?

In completing daily activities, the eyes make a series of saccades by gazing at stimuli in succession. The duration of gaze on each stimulus has been used to infer how the initiation of a saccade is timed relative to the underlying mental processing. In reading, gaze dwells longer on a word that occurs infrequently in English text (low frequency) than on a more frequent word (high frequency), but also on the following word, which is referred to as spillover. Accounts of spillover attribute it to mechanisms of lexical access. A low-frequency word n is assumed to delay the onset of cognitive processing of word n+1 more than it delays the saccade to n+1, leaving more processing to be done on n+1 once it is fixated. We tested this assumption by having participants perform a series of speeded lexical decisions on a linear array of letter strings spaced 5° apart, using low- and high-frequency words to vary the lexical difficulty. Lexical decision adds a response selection stage that is absent in reading, which should eliminate differential effects on saccades and cognitive processing. Nonetheless, we found the typical pattern of lengthened gaze duration and spillover for low-frequency words, with effects that were consistent in magnitude with those seen in studies of reading. These data challenge existing accounts of spillover and argue against the idea that reading has a unique interaction with oculomotor control. Instead, the similarity of our gaze patterns to those of reading suggests a common pattern of saccade initiation across tasks.     

"THE DUNGEON OF THYSELF": The Claustrum as Pathological Container

The author discusses the claustrum as an aspect of pathological containment within inner space and its relation to Bion's (1962a, b) container—contained concept. Having outlined the early psychoanalytic conceptual foundations of claustrophobia and the claustrum, the author charts the term from its introduction by Erikson in 1937 through its divergent developmental trajectories within the conceptual vocabulary of the classical, Independent and Kleinian schools up to Meltzer's (1992) contemporary reworking. The vicissitudes of the transmission of ideas within and between these groups is stressed, Esther Bick's work being particularly highlighted as an example of a nodal intellectual influence. The claustral space within the physical or internal object body, its internal structuralisation, and the impairments in quality of psychic life of the selves that seek to inhabit such spaces, entered through intrusive projective identification, are highlighted. Developmental and psychopathological claustrum manifestations are discussed, particularly fear, separation, problems mourning and claustrophobia. A reciprocal and hierarchical avatar relation between the claustrum and the container is proposed.