'Do be my enemy for friendship's sake' (Blake)

The author explores our psychological need for enemies and the contribution this makes to overt conflicts in the external world. Enemies serve as an opposite from which we can differentiate ourselves, either as an individual or as a group; they help us to define our physical and psychological boundaries. Enemies provide a target and an outlet for our aggression and also for the projection of the shadow. They also provide the stimulus to individuation, through the heroic encounter with the enemy in the unfamiliar world outside the home, particularly in adolescence. The psychic integration of 'self' and 'enemy' is explored as the outcome of individuation.     

Determinants of diagnostic prototypicality judgments of the personality disorders

We evaluated the impact of three factors that have been suggested to be important determinants of the diagnostic process pertaining to personality disorders: (a) the number of features representative of a personality disorder category; (b) the extent to which those features are typical of the category, and (c) the dominance or proportion of category features to the total number of features. Thirty-two clinical psychologists evaluated 12 profiles of hypothetical patients in which these factors were varied factorially. The results revealed strong effects of typicality and dominance, but no effects for number. Implications for the assessment and classification of personality disorders are discussed.     

Convergent Validity of the Defense Mechanisms Manual and the Defensive Functioning Scale

This report, describing a peculiar reaction of two psychiatric patients to the Rorschach test, tries to relate this phenomenon to some other Rorschach phenomena, already known and previously described.     

Cognitive Processing in Specifically Language-Impaired Children

Eighteen language-impaired children and 25 non-language-impaired children were evaluated to investigate the relationship between language ability and selected aspects of the five-component problem-solving process defined by Kagan and Kogan (1970). Non-impaired children performed better than language-impaired children on nearly all components of the problem-solving process. Language-impaired children had particular difficulties in the areas of coding and hypothesis generation. In fact, coding ability was inversely related to the number of errors made in hypothesis evaluation. Coding ability was also positively correlated with language ability. The exact causal relationship between coding ability, language ability, and error-making in hypothesis evaluation is unclear; however, improving coding skills through training may increase automaticity and lead to improved performance in the higher levels of the problem-solving process.     

Psychological Adaptiveness and Sales Performance

The impact of adaptive psychological traits on sales performance is not well understood. In spite of sound theoretical foundations, initial research efforts have yielded inconsistent, inconclusive and generally disappointing results. In this paper, we examine how three adaptiveness traits (self-monitoring, androgyny and intrinsic reward orientation) impact sales performance. We conclude that, when sales performance is viewed as a multidimensional construct, relationships suggested by theory are revealed. In addition, the impacts of these traits are shown to differ somewhat depending on the salesperson's gender. Findings help to clarify the confusion in the literature and reveal a highly focused impact of adaptiveness on performance. Important implications for sales managers and adaptiveness research in marketing are highlighted.     

The Differential Salience of Spatial Information Features in the Geometric Reproductions of Young Children

To assess the differential salience of geometric features embedded in spatial displays, 60 preschool children, 3 to 5 years old, were required to reconstruct a series of geometric displays. Each arrangement included the depiction of a topological feature, unconnectedness; a Euclidean feature, linearity; and a projective feature, orientation. Children built their reconstructions under two demand conditions. The reconstructions were scored for the number that preserved each of the different geometric features. Results from a mixed-design analysis of variance revealed main effects for age, demand condition, and geometric feature, as well as for several first-order interactions. Data indicated that the Euclidean feature was the most salient and most frequently preserved characteristic and that the topological and projective ones were more problematic. The findings were discussed as a contrast to Piagetian predictions.     

Gender and Compensation: Understanding the Impact of Gender and Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Rewards

Children’s understanding of rewards for task completion was examined in the context of gender, and gender-based stereotypes. Eighty-eight children (43 girls, M_overall?=?58.39 months) completed a measure assessing gender-based occupational stereotypes. This measure, along with gender, was used to predict children’s self-reward for undergoing the testing, as well as their reward for a fictional other child having undergone the same procedure. The methodology provided a novel approach for studying reward allocation in children, as it did not require children to divide resources between themselves and another child for completing the same task. An occupation-based stereotype measure was found to predict the self-reward, as well as the reward allocated to the other child. In addition, the participant’s gender predicted self-reward, and an interaction between participant gender and gender of the experimenter contributed to predicting the other child reward. Overall, these findings suggest that gender and gender-based stereotyping have an impact on reward allocation of young children. Implications of these results in the context of reward allocation research among children and adult populations are discussed.     

A sharp image or a sharp knife: norms for the modality-exclusivity of 774 concept-property items

According to recent embodied cognition theories, mental concepts are represented by modality-specific sensory-motor systems. Much of the evidence for modality-specificity in conceptual processing comes from the property-verification task. When applying this and other tasks, it is important to select items based on their modality-exclusivity. We collected modality ratings for a set of 387 properties, each of which was paired with two different concepts, yielding a total of 774 concept-property items. For each item, participants rated the degree to which the property could be experienced through five perceptual modalities (vision, audition, touch, smell, and taste). Based on these ratings, we computed a measure of modality exclusivity, the degree to which a property is perceived exclusively through one sensory modality. In this paper, we briefly sketch the theoretical background of conceptual knowledge, discuss the use of the property-verification task in cognitive research, provide our norms and statistics, and validate the norms in a memory experiment. We conclude that our norms are important for researchers studying modality-specific effects in conceptual processing.     

Attending to music decreases inattentional blindness

This article investigates how auditory attention affects inattentional blindness (IB), a failure of conscious awareness in which an observer does not notice an unexpected event because their attention is engaged elsewhere. Previous research using the attentional blink paradigm has indicated that listening to music can reduce failures of conscious awareness. It was proposed that listening to music would decrease IB by reducing observers’ frequency of task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). Observers completed an IB task that varied both visual and auditory demands. Listening to music was associated with significantly lower IB, but only when observers actively attended to the music. Follow-up experiments suggest this was due to the distracting qualities of the audio task. The results also suggest a complex relationship between IB and TUTs: during demanding tasks, as predicted, noticers of the unexpected stimulus reported fewer TUTs than non-noticers. During less demanding tasks, however, noticers reported more TUTs than non-noticers.