The Meaning and Impact of Head and Neck Cancer: An Interpretative Phenomenological and Repertory Grid Analysis

This study explores the personal meaning of head and neck cancer for individuals, with particular reference to the impact on the self. It employs interpretative phenomenological and repertory grid analysis with 10 people, all of whom have undergone surgical treatment for head and ceck cancer. Four themes emerged: namely, destruction of self, altered relations with the body, disenfranchised self, and conservation of self. Repertory grid analysis validated and enriched understanding of these findings. Participants described how head and neck cancer inflicted a fundamental attack on their sense of self. Nonetheless, participants were dynamic in their self-management and detailed an active process to retain a positive sense of self.     

Robust inference processes in expository text comprehension

Expository text offers particular challenges to the reader because of the abstract and unfamiliar concepts that it presents and its distinctive structure. The present study had three interrelated aims: (1) It examined the impact of appropriate connectives on the reader's derivation of causal bridging inferences from expository text. (2) It scrutinised texts longer than the ones that we had previously examined (Singer, Harkness, & Stewart, 1997), which in turn made it possible to (3) evaluate the impact of position in the text on inference processing. In Experiments 1a and 1b, a joint profile of target reading times and inference answer times indicated that the inspected inferences reliably accompanied reading only in the presence of appropriate causal connectives. The connective-present conditions of Experiment 1 replicated our previous findings using shorter texts (Singer et al., 1997). Experiment 2 indicated that these inference processes are unaffected by text position. We interpreted these findings with reference to the inference validation model (Singer, Halldorson, Lear, & Andrusiak, 1992).     

Daydreaming, Consciousness, and Self-Representations: Empirical Approaches to Theories of William James and Sigmund Freud

In honor of Saul Rosenzweig's lifelong efforts to provide empirical tests of psychoanalytic theories, this paper has focused on a series of research approaches to examining the concepts of William James and Sigmund Freud relating to waking fantasy, ongoing thought, and beliefs about the self. Studies involving projective methods, psychometric analyses of self-report questionnaires, laboratory tests of daydreaming during signal-detection tasks, thought-sampling during natural daily activities and psychological correlates of actual-self and ideal-self discrepancies are described. Clinical applications of these methods are also presented. The findings in general point to the value of James's conception of conscious thought as an important basis along with cognitive unconscious processes for studying clinical phenomena, personality, and even the metaphors of dreams. Rosenzweig's emphasis on formal research testing of psychoanalytic processes is supported.     

From children's hands to adults' ears: gesture's role in the learning process

Children can express thoughts in gesture that they do not express in speech--they produce gesture-speech mismatches. Moreover, children who produce mismatches on a given task are particularly ready to learn that task. Gesture, then, is a tool that researchers can use to predict who will profit from instruction. But is gesture also useful to adults who must decide how to instruct a particular child? We asked 8 adults to instruct 38 third- and fourth-grade children individually in a math problem. We found that the adults offered more variable instruction to children who produced mismatches than to children who produced no mismatches--more different types of instructional strategies and more instructions that contained two different strategies, one in speech and the other in gesture. The children thus appeared to be shaping their own learning environments just by moving their hands. Gesture not only reflects a child's understanding but can play a role in eliciting input that could shape that understanding. As such, it may be part of the mechanism of cognitive change.     

Understanding Psychological Safety in Health Care and Education Organizations: A Comparative Perspective

Psychological safety plays a vital role in helping people overcome barriers to learning and change in interpersonally challenging work environments. This article focuses on two such contexts—health care and education. The authors theorize differences in psychological safety based on work type, hierarchical status, and leadership effectiveness. Consistent with prior research, the authors employ cross-industry comparison to highlight distinctive features of different professions. The goal is to illuminate similarities and differences with implications for future psychological safety research. To do this, the authors review relevant literature and present analyses of large data samples in each industry to stimulate further research on psychological safety in both sectors, separately and together.     

The Effects of a Mental Health Video on the Social Skills Knowledge and Attitudes of Mexican Immigrants1

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a Spanish mental health video, “Cuida Su Salud Mental”, on the relationship attitudes and social skills knowledge of a Mexican immigrant sample. Subjects consisted of 72 Spanish speaking English as a second language (ESL) students recruited from the Paramount Adult School, in the county of Los Angeles. The Solomon (1949) Four Group Design was used. Half of the subjects were pretested on knowledge and attitudes about effective communication skills and relationships, respectively. All subjects view either the mental health video or a control video, and then were posttested on knowledge and attitudes. Results indicated that the mental healthy video (MHV) group exhibited more knowledge, F(1, 62) = 10.61, p= 0.002, and less risky attitudes, F(1, 62) = 4.29, p= 0.043, than the control video group. The MHV group also showed an increase in knowledge from the pretest to the posttest, F(1, 35) = 7.36, p= 0.01. Finally, both video groups reported a decrease in risky attitudes from pretest to posttest, F(1, 34) = 18.21, p= 0.001. These results support the use of “Cuida Su Salud Mental” as a productive and cost-effective mental health intervention that can be used to reach a large segment of the Spanish speaking community.     

Selective adaptation of English consonants using real speech

Most English consonant-vowel (CV) syllables have other CV syllables embedded within them. For example, splicing sufficient energy from the onset of [k^ha] yields [p^ha], splicing into [ma] or [va] yields [ba], and splicing into [?a] yields [da]. We spliced successively longer segments from naturally spoken CV syllables to produce sequences of CV syllables which varied in discrete acoustic steps from [k^ha] to [p^ha], from [?a] to [da], from [ma] to [ba], from [fa] to [ba], and from [va] to [ba]. Random presentation of syllables in each series resulted in identification functions with typically sharp phoneme boundaries. For example, in the seven-syllable [?a]-[da] series (where [?a] was the original or first syllable), there were98% [?a] responses to Syllable 3, but only 12% [?a] responses (88% [da] responses) to Syllable 5. Following the identification test, subjects listened to 180 repetitions of either the first or last syllable in the test series, and were again required to identify randomly presented syllables from the test series. A shift in the phoneme boundary toward the repeated (adapting) syllable was observed for 11 of the 12 repeated syllables. Repeated presentation of [?a], for example, resulted in fewer [?a] responses to syllables in the [?a]-[da] series, compared to performance on the previous identification test. Likewise, repeated listening to [da] resulted in a decrease in [da] responses. Adaptation was selective in that syllables near the phoneme boundary were most affected by the adapting syllable. A shift in the phoneme boundary was also observed for two different continua when the adapting stimulus contained an acoustic feature identical to syllables in the test series. Thus, selective adaptation was found along a [ma]-[ba] continuum following repeated presentation of [na] and following repeated presentation of nasal resonance removed from its syllable context. A second major result, observed in five different experiments, was an asymmetrical adaptation effect. A greater shift in the phoneme boundary was observed following repeated presentation of the first syllable in each series (e.g., [?a]) than for the final embedded syllable (e.g., [da]). The results were discussed in terms of two different models of-selective adaptation.