‘Why should we talk to you? You'll only tell the Court!’ On being an informer and a family therapist

The family therapy literature recognizes the constraints imposed on a therapist's freedom and impartiality in a statutory agency. This paper shows that clinical settings that are apparently independent are not free of such constraints. The wider professional welfare system has confused expectations of a clinical agency that it should provide simultaneously both therapy and a measure of social control. An account is given of one hospital-based family therapy team's struggles to find manoeuvrability in child-focused statutory cases, so as to be helpful both to families and referrers. One method of working is illustrated with a case example.     

Minimal cues in the vocal communication of affect: Judging emotions from content-masked speech

Vocal expressions of emotions taken from a recorded version of a play were content. masked by using electronic filtering, randomized splicing and a combination of both techniques in addition to a no-treatment condition in a 2×2 design. Untrained listener-judges rated the voice samples in the four conditions on 20 semantic differential scales. Irrespective of the severe reduction in the number and types of vocal cues in the masking conditions, the mean ratings of the judges in all four groups agreed on a level significantly beyond chance expectations on the differential position of the emotional expressions in a multidimensional space of emotional meaning. The results suggest that a minimal set of vocal cues consisting of pitch level and variation, amplitude level and variation, and rate of articulation may be sufficient to communicate the evaluation, potency, and activity dimensions of emotional meaning. Each of these dimensions may be associated with a specific pattern of vocal cues or cue combinations. No differential effects of the type of content-masking for specific emotions were found. Systematic effects of the masking techniques consisted in a lowering of the perceived activity level of the emotions in the case of electronic filtering, and more positive ratings on the evaluative dimension in the case of randomized splicing. Electronic filtering tended to decrease, randomized splicing tended to increase inter-rater reliability.This research was supported by a research grant (GS-2654) from the Division of Social Sciences of the National Science Foundation to Robert Rosenthal.     

The three bears are all boys: Mothers' gender labeling of neutral picture book characters

Two studies examined mother's labeling of gender-neutral characters in young children's picture books. In the first study, mothers and their 18- to 38-month-old children looked at three popular children's books together. The mothers' use of masculine or feminine names or pronouns to refer to gender-neutral characters was recorded. The data revealed an extreme masculine bias: 95% of all characters of indeterminate gender were referred to by the mothers as males. In a second study, specially prepared picture books were used to examine the effect of gender-relevant variables on the mothers' labeling. The results replicated Study 1 in showing a strong bias toward referring to neutral pictures with masculine labels: The incidence of masculine labels was again high and, in addition, was relatively impervious to most of the gender-relevant manipulations included in the books. The one variable that had a strong, consistent effect on the mothers' labeling was the presence of an adult in the pictures: Child Characters were nearly always referred to as males when they appeared alone; they were more likely to be given feminine or neutral lables when they were pictured in the presence of an adult. This result is related to Carpenter's [Activity Structure and Play: Implications for Socialization, in M. Liss (Ed.), Social and Cognitive Skills: Sex Roles and Childrens Play, New York: Academic Press, 1983] model of the development of sex-typed behavior. The data are also discussed with respect to the well-documented sexist bias in picture books for preschool children.This research was support in part by Grants HD-05951 from NICHHD and R01 MH33082-01 from NIMH to the first and third authors, respectively. We wish to thank Linda Roots and Elizabeth Lewis for their assitance with data analyses.     

The influence of concurrent load on mouthed and vocalized modality effects

A visual search task was coupled with the serial recall of words to assess the extent to which modality effects mediated by vocalizing and silent mouthing reflect an automatically activated preattentive process. Overall, serial position functions systematically changed as concurrent task demands increased, but the magnitude of the modality effect associated with both mouthing and vocalizing was not altered, regardless of whether or not subjects simultaneously searched for digits. These results support the notion that modality effects index a preattentive process that can be activated automatically by either spoken input or gestural cues associated with speech.     

Detection of noisy visual targets: Models for the effects of spatial uncertainty and signal-to-noise ratio

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 An “extreme-detector” model for detecting spatially uncertain targets in noisy backgrounds predicts how both detection and localization abilities are degraded by increasing the number of possible target locations. Experiments 1 and 2 show that the model accurately predicts detection and localization performance in tasks with two, four, and eight locations from d’ estimates of the observer’s ability to detect the target in a known spatial location. These predictions can be linked to the physical stimuli by combining the extreme-detector model with a “psychophysical” model that specifies how stimulus measures determine the target’s detectability in a given location. Single-parameter fits of four such combined models were compared with estimates of detection and localization performance in Experiment 3, which manipulated the target’s physical signal-to-noise ratio across various conditions of an eightlocation task.     

Problem solving in hyperactive,normal, and reading-disabled boys

Diagnostic problem solving was examined in groups of hyperactive, normal, and nonhyperactive reading disabled boys matched on age and verbal IQ. On the matrix solution task employed (a version of the game of 20 Questions) hyperactives used less efficient questions and strategies than the other two groups, in spite of the task being designed to maximize the performance of the hyperactives. Readingdisabled children were not significantly worse than normal children on the task. The results were interpreted as suggesting that the attentional difficulties of hyperactives retard the development of strategies for solving complex problems. Nonhyperactive reading disabled children may be less affected in this area because of the absence of significant attentional difficulties.This article is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research of McGill University by the first author. We are grateful to the students, teachers, and principals of the following schools in the Montreal area: Allancroft, Beacon Hill, Briarwood, Cedar Park, Greendale, Hillcrest, Lakeside Heights, Martinvale, Sunny Dale, Thomas H. Bowes, and Vivian Graham. Special thanks are due Rhonda Amsel, John MacNamara, and Chet Olsen for their help and advice.     

Children as psychologists: The later correlates of individual differences in understanding of emotions and other minds

Abstract

The sequelae of individual differences in children's understanding of emotions and of other minds were investigated in a longitudinal study of 46 children. At 40 months, differences in the children's understanding of emotions were not significantly related to their ability to explain behaviour in terms of beliefs within a false belief paradigm. Follow-up in kindergarten showed that early emotion understanding was related to children's positive perception of their peer experiences, to their understanding of mixed emotions, and their moral sensibility as kindergarteners. Early understanding of other minds was, in contrast, related to negative initial perceptions of school, and sensitivity to teacher criticism. These differences in sequelae highlight the importance of differentiating the emotional and cognitive components of social understanding in framing developmental questions.     

The non-symbolic level of psychical reality

Freud introduced the concept of psychical reality as a consequence of abandoning the theory of seduction, and although this meant a turning point in his theoretical thinking he never defined the concept concisely and systematically. Thus it is possible to delineate at least two meanings of psychical reality that run through Freud´s writings as well as the writings of contemporary analysts. On the one hand psychical reality encompasses the whole field of subjective experiences. On the other, it is understood more narrowly as a transformation of experiences in the unconscious.

Substituting the idea of different meanings ascribed to Freud´s concept this article proposes to differentiate between levels in the psyche with the main focus on the unconscious level of the dream and of phantasy and the real unconscious. Starting from the most superficial level of subjective reality the text moves to that of fantasy formation illustrated by primarily Freud´s text on `A child is being beaten´. Adding Laplanche´s translational model the article ends up at the deepest level represented by the late Lacan and his concept of the real Unconscious.

The paper concludes that the term real points to something exceeding symbolization and the imaginary—thus escaping comprehension—and yet is absolutely indispensable to the organization of unconscious processes.