Hearing by eye

Recent work on integration of auditory and visual information during speech perception has indicated that adults are surprisingly good at, and rely extensively on, lip reading. The conceptual status of lip read information is of interest: such information is at the same time both visual and phonological. Three experiments investigated the nature of short term coding of lip read information in hearing subjects. The first experiment used asynchronous visual and auditory information and showed that a subject's ability to repeat words, when heard speech lagged lip movements, was unaffected by the lag duration, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This suggests that lip read information is immediately recoded into a durable code. An experiment on serial recall of lip read items showed a serial position curve containing a recency effect (characteristic of auditory but not visual input). It was then shown that an auditory suffix diminishes the recency effect obtained with lip read stimuli. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that seen speech, that is not heard, is encoded into a durable code which has some shared properties with heard speech. The results of the serial recall experiments are inconsistent with interpretations of the recency and suffix effects in terms of precategorical acoustic storage, for they demonstrate that recency and suffix effects can be supra-modal.     

DISORDERED EATING, ACCULTURATION, AND TREATMENT-SEEKING IN A COMMUNITY SAMPLE OF HISPANIC, ASIAN, BLACK, AND WHITE WOMEN

The purpose of this study was to examine disordered eating, acculturation, and treatment-seeking in a community sample of Hispanic, Asian, Black, and White women. Participants were 118 women with disordered eating (49 Hispanic, 21 Asian, 23 Black, and 25 White) and 118 healthy controls. Interviews were conducted to assess eating and weight-related behaviors, psychiatric symptoms, acculturation, and health care usage. Results indicated that the four ethnic groups were equally likely to present behavioral symptoms of bulimia, anorexia, or a binge-eating disorder. Hispanics were the most likely to use diuretics, and Black women were the most likely to use laxatives. Despite psychological distress among the eating disorder group, only a small percentage had received treatment during the past year; the eating disorder group was more likely than the controls to report that they had been denied treatment. More acculturated individuals were more likely to suffer from eating problems, and among the eating disorder group, less acculturated individuals were less likely to have received treatment.     

Evaluating an innovative counselling service for children of divorce

An evaluation of the first counselling service in Britain for children of divorce is reported. In a previous article, the quantitative outcomes of counselling were outlined, which included such data as the children's self-esteem and perceptions of divorce. Here the focus is on the qualitative outcomes of the counselling evaluation: namely, the children's and mother's satisfaction with the counselling, and the counsellor's opinion of its success. The conclusions of the study and their implications for practice are discussed.     

The Early Intellectual Careers of Bakhtin and Herzen: Towards a Philosophy of the Act

The article explores common ground shared by Alexander Herzen's `Dilettantism in Science' (1843) and Mikhail Bakhtin's `Towards a Philosophy of the Act' (1919) in the context of the Russian intellectual tradition as a whole. The primary aim is to explore in many ways, perhaps, unlikely affinities between two very different writers in the early stage of their careers. The secondary aim is to explore identifiably `Russian' motifs which may be said to call into question conventional typologies of Russian thought based on the progressive/conservative divide.     

How people cope with uncertainty due to chance or deception

In making social judgments people process effects caused by humans differently from effects caused by non-human agencies. We assume that when they have to predict outcomes that are attributed to non-human causes, people acknowledge their ignorance and try to focus on what is most diagnostic. However, when events are attributed to human agency, they believe that nothing is arbitrary and that one can understand the decision situation well enough to eliminate error. If so, then people should behave differently when an uncertainty is attributed to chance (a non-human agency) or to deception (a human agency). We tested this prediction using the probability-matching paradigm and found reasonable support for our analysis in four experiments. Individuals who attributed uncertainty to deception were less likely to adopt the optimal rule-based strategy than those who attributed it to chance. Indeed, only when the former were prevented from thinking about and elaborating the outcomes (the high-interference condition in Experiment 3) was their performance comparable to the level of individuals in the chance condition.     

The Suppression of Inferences From Counterfactual Conditionals

We examine two competing effects of beliefs on conditional inferences. The suppression effect occurs for conditionals, for example, “if she watered the plants they bloomed,” when beliefs about additional background conditions, for example, “if the sun shone they bloomed” decrease the frequency of inferences such as modus tollens (from “the plants did not bloom” to “therefore she did not water them”). In contrast, the counterfactual elevation effect occurs for counterfactual conditionals, for example, “if she had watered the plants they would have bloomed,” when beliefs about the known or presupposed facts, “she did not water the plants and they did not bloom” increase the frequency of inferences such as modus tollens. We report six experiments that show that beliefs about additional conditions take precedence over beliefs about presupposed facts for counterfactuals. The modus tollens inference is suppressed for counterfactuals that contain additional conditions (Experiments 1a and 1b). The denial of the antecedent inference (from “she did not water the plants” to “therefore they did not bloom”) is suppressed for counterfactuals that contain alternatives (Experiments 2a and 2b). We report a new “switched-suppression” effect for conditionals with negated components, for example, “if she had not watered the plants they would not have bloomed”: modus tollens is suppressed by alternatives and denial of the antecedent by additional conditions, rather than vice versa (Experiments 3a and 3b). We discuss the implications of the results for alternative theories of conditional reasoning.