Factors Associated with First Session Nonattendance at a University-Based Family Therapy Clinic

Two hundred four consecutive psychotherapy initiators who called for an initial appointment at a university-based family therapy clinic during a one-year period were examined to see what factors influenced nonattendance. Researchers considered factors such as demographics, substance use, medical and psychiatric involvement, clinic practice, and constellation expected to attend. The 118 (58%) initiators who kept their appointment differed significantly from the 86 (42%) who did not in distance to the clinic, partner's age, number of children, marital status, employment, time of appointment, and therapeutic constellation. Divorce, unemployment, having a partner between the ages of 18–24, and having children were significant indicators of nonattendance. An appointment scheduled between 1:00 and 4:59 P.M., seeking conjoint psychotherapy, and living between 6 and 25 miles from the clinic were significant indicators of attendance. Implications for improving initial appointment attendance are presented.     

Teleological Essentialism

Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elaborated by scientific essences. In our view, if placeholders are elaborated, they are elaborated by Aristotelian essences, a telos. Utilizing the same kind of experiments used by traditional essentialists—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), acquired traits (study 3), and inferences about offspring (study 4)—we find support for the view that essences are elaborated by a telos. And we find evidence (study 5) that teleological essences may generate category judgments.     

Neuroscientific Prediction and the Intrusion of Intuitive Metaphysics

How might advanced neuroscience—in which perfect neuro‐predictions are possible—interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and importing effects in the context of scenarios depicting perfect neuro‐prediction. In light of our findings, we suggest that the intuitive commitment to indeterminist free will may be resilient in the face of scientific evidence against such free will.     

More than Just the Breadwinner: The Effects of Fathers' Parenting Stress on Children's Language and Cognitive Development

Despite numerous studies on parenting stress suggesting negative influences on parent–child interactions and children's development, the majority of these studies focus on mothers' parenting stress with little or no acknowledgement of fathers. Using data from the National Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, this study examined (i) the effects of fathers' parenting stress during toddlerhood on children's language and cognitive outcomes when children are 3 years old (ii) whether the effects of fathers' parenting stress on children's language and cognitive development vary by child gender? Results from mixed linear models showed fathers' parenting stress predicted children's lower cognitive scores, but there were no gender differences in the effects of fathers' parenting stress on children's cognitive outcomes. In the language domain, boys, not girls, were found to be more susceptible to the effects of fathers' parenting stress. These findings indicated that fathers, in addition to mothers, should be included in early parenting research and interventions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Cost of Accessing an Object's Feature Stored in Visual Working Memory

The effects of accessing or retrieving information held in working memory are poorly understood compared to what we know about the nature of information storage in this limited-capacity memory system. Previous studies of object-based attention have often relied upon memory-demanding tasks, and this work could indicate that accessing a piece of information in visual working memory may have deleterious effects upon the other representations being maintained. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that accessing a feature of an object represented in visual working memory degrades the representations of the other stored objects' features. Our findings support this hypothesis and point to important new questions about the nature of effects resulting from accessing information stored in visual working memory.     

Escher in color space: Individual-differences multidimensional scaling of color dissimilarities collected with a gestalt formation task

The structure of color perception can be examined by collectingjudgments about color dissimilarities. In the procedure used here, stimuli are presented three at a time on a computer monitor and the spontaneous grouping of most-similar stimuli into gestalts provides the dissimilarity comparisons. Analysis with multidimensional scaling allows such judgments to be pooled from a number of observers without obscuring the variations among them. The anomalous perceptions of color-deficient observers produce comparisons that are represented well by a geometric model of compressed individual color spaces, with different forms of deficiency distinguished by different directions of compression. The geometrical model is also capable of accommodating the normal spectrum of variation, so that there is greater variation in compression parameters between tests on normal subjects than in those between repeated tests on individual subjects. The method is sufficiently sensitive and the variations sufficiently large that they are not obscured by the use of a range of monitors, even under somewhat loosely controlled conditions.     

Norms with feeling: towards a psychological account of moral judgment

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g. hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g. playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g. Cognition 57 (1995) 1; Ethics 103 (1993) 337). Recent evidence indicates that affect plays a crucial role in mediating the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction. However, the prevailing account of the role of affect in moral judgment is problematic. This paper argues that the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction depends on both a body of information about which actions are prohibited (a Normative Theory) and an affective mechanism. This account leads to the prediction that other normative prohibitions that are connected to an affective mechanism might be treated as non-conventional. An experiment is presented that indicates that "disgust" violations (e.g. spitting at the table), are distinguished from conventional violations along the same dimensions as moral violations.     

Selective attention to the parts of an object

Recent empirical results suggest that there is a decrement in dividing attention between two objects in a scene compared with focusing attention on a single object. However, objects can be made of individual parts. Is there a decrement for dividing attention across different parts of a single object? We addressed this question in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that attention can exhibit part-based selection—that is, the subjects were more accurate in reporting two attributes from the same part of an object than they were in reporting attributes from different parts of an object. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that part-based attentional decrements occurred simultaneously with object-based attentional decrements. The results from Experiment 2 demonstrated that part-based attention is evident at the same time as objects are processed as coherent wholes. Our results imply that there is an attentional mechanism that can select either objects or their parts.     

Effects of divided attention and speeded responding on implicit and explicit retrieval of artificial grammar knowledge

The artificial grammar (AG) learning literature (see, e.g., Mathews et al., 1989; Reber, 1967) has relied heavily on a single measure of implicitly acquired knowledge. Recent work comparing this measure (string classification) with a more indirect measure in which participants make liking ratings of novel stimuli (e.g., Manza & Bornstein, 1995; Newell & Bright, 2001) has shown that string classification (which we argue can be thought of as an explicit, rather than an implicit, measure of memory) gives rise to more explicit knowledge of the grammatical structure in learning strings and is more resilient to changes in surface features and processing between encoding and retrieval. We report data from two experiments that extend these findings. In Experiment 1, we showed that a divided attention manipulation (at retrieval) interfered with explicit retrieval of AG knowledge but did not interfere with implicit retrieval. In Experiment 2, we showed that forcing participants to respond within a very tight deadline resulted in the same asymmetric interference pattern between the tasks. In both experiments, we also showed that the type of information being retrieved influenced whether interference was observed. The results are discussed in terms of the relatively automatic nature of implicit retrieval and also with respect to the differences between analytic and nonanalytic processing (Whittlesea & Price, 2001).