Adaptation and the perception of facial age

We examined how the perceived age of adult faces is affected by adaptation to younger or older adult faces. Observers viewed images of a synthetic male face simulating ageing over a modelled range from 15 to 65 years. Age was varied by changing shape cues or textural cues. Age level was varied in a staircase to find the observer's subjective category boundary between “old” and “young”. These boundaries were strongly biased by adaptation to the young or old face, with significant aftereffects induced by either shape or textural cues. A further experiment demonstrated comparable aftereffects for photorealistic images of average older or younger adult faces, and found that aftereffects showed some selectivity for a change in gender but also strongly transferred across gender. This transfer shows that adaptation can adjust to the attribute of age somewhat independently of other facial attributes. These findings suggest that perceived age, like many other natural facial dimensions, is highly susceptible to adaptation, and that this adaptation can be carried by both the structural and textural changes that normally accompany facial ageing.     

Healing the physical/spiritual divide through a holistic and hermeneutic approach to education

In this special edition of the journal, attention is being given to the two dimensions of spirituality and physicality. In this particular paper I argue that there is an unhelpful divide that is often assumed to exist between these two dimensions and that this divide can be transcended or ‘healed’ through a holistic and hermeneutic approach to education. Rather than give our focus to narrower concerns such as spiritual education and physical education, we ought instead to pursue education in such a way that it is understood to necessarily be inclusive of both the physical and the spiritual simultaneously. That is, our spirituality is necessarily embodied in the physical. In order to make this argument, references to holistic education shall mainly draw upon the works of Dewey and Gadamer.     

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.     

Responses to the AAR‐Teagle White Paper: “The Religious Studies Major in a Post‐9/11 World”

In October 2008 The American Academy of Religion published the findings of an eighteen month study (conducted with funding from the Teagle Foundation) on “The Religious Studies Major in a Post–9/11World: New Challenges, New Opportunities.” Re‐published here, this AAR‐Teagle White Paper provides the opportunity for four respondents to raise issues and questions about the teaching of religion in their own institutional contexts. First, Jane Webster describes how the White Paper's “five characteristics of the religion major” find expression in her biblical literature course. Then James Buckley suggests some of the general level teaching issues provoked by the study and analyzes how well the White Paper aligns with how the teaching of religion is conceived in his Catholic university context. Tim Jensen draws comparisons between the White Paper and the higher education structures and goals from his university context in Denmark, raising questions about what motivates students to major in religious studies, the “utility” of a religious studies major, and whether students' religious and spiritual concerns ought to enter the classroom. And finally Stacey Floyd‐Thomas finds surprising similarities between the state of the religion major and the various crises facing contemporary North American theological education.     

Personal Therapy in Psychotherapeutic Training: Current Research and Future Directions

Recent research literature in the field of personal therapy for psychotherapists shows that therapists claim overwhelmingly positive outcomes with few negative effects (Orlinsky et al., The Psychotherapist’s own psychotherapy: Patient and clinician perspectives. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005). However, there has been little interest to date in the extent to which the personal characteristics of therapists might have a bearing on the way in which personal therapy is experienced in psychotherapeutic training. This paper reviews some of the current research in the field and then discusses a subset of results from a small-scale qualitatively-driven study (Rizq and Target, Counselling Psychology Quarterly 23(4):1–27, 2010b) suggesting that early attachment experience may be a relevant factor in understanding how a mandatory training therapy is perceived and experienced within psychotherapeutic training. Implications for psychotherapeutic education are briefly discussed and some directions for future research proposed.     

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.     

Coping with "bad body image days": strategies from first-year young adult college women

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how college women cope with body image concerns, a topic which has rarely been studied. Semi-structured interviews with first-year female college students (N = 30) revealed common strategies used for body image coping as well as their perceived effectiveness. While exercise was most frequently cited, other coping strategies included healthy eating, appearance changing, talking to friends or family, religion/spirituality, spending time alone, getting out and doing something, and self-acceptance. One of the emerging themes was participation in a cycle of eating as a result of body image concerns, and then feeling bad about themselves for eating. Participants identified that women in this cycle either adopt a self-defeatist attitude, believing they can do nothing about their appearance, or engage in self-improvement strategies, including goal setting. Far more women reported coping strategies that reflected avoidance or appearance fixing motives rather than acceptance.     

Does visual expertise improve visual recognition memory?

In general, humans have impressive recognition memory for previously viewed pictures. Many people spend years becoming experts in highly specialized image sets. For example, cytologists are experts at searching micrographs filled with potentially cancerous cells and radiologists are expert at searching mammograms for indications of cancer. Do these experts develop robust visual long-term memory for their domain of expertise? If so, is this expertise specific to the trained image class, or do such experts possess generally superior visual memory? We tested recognition memory of cytologists, radiologists, and controls with no medical experience for three visual stimulus classes: isolated objects, scenes, and mammograms or micrographs. Experts were better than control observers at recognizing images from their domain, but their memory for those images was not particularly good (D’ ~ 1.0) and was much worse than memory for objects or scenes (D’ > 2.0). Furthermore, experts were not better at recognizing scenes or isolated objects than control observers.     

Counselling in the workplace: How time‐limited counselling can effect change in well‐being

Background: Many employers provide counselling support on work and personal issues for their employees, but in times of economic pressure such services can be at risk if their effectiveness is not demonstrated. Aim: To evaluate whether time‐limited counselling in a workplace can effect sustained change in well‐being. Method: The study was carried out by a staff counselling team in a university setting. The Warwick‐Edinburgh Mental Well‐being Scale (WEMWBS) was completed by clients at the beginning and end of counselling, and at three and six months following. A non‐treatment comparison group completed the survey at the same intervals. Results: The results of our investigation show clearly that the effect of time‐limited counselling (average seven sessions) on distressed clients is positive. The evidence of our treatment group suggests that they acquire an increased sense of well‐being as a result of the experience of counselling with a significant statistical difference between pre‐and post‐counselling treatment group scores on the WEMWBS and consistently higher scores found post counselling. The improvement was maintained at the same level for at least six months following the end of counselling. Conclusions: The provision of time‐limited counselling by employers is an effective support for personal difficulties affecting work.