Instructional control of an autonomic sexual response

Four of seven human male subjects developed full penile erections when exposed to erotically stimulating motion pictures. Changes in penile size were detected by a mercury strain gauge transducer and automatically recorded on a continuous paper record. When instructed to inhibit penile erection in the presence of such effective stimulus films, every subject was able to reduce his erection by at least 50%. This inhibition was apparent as long as the instructions were in effect; when the instructions were removed and the film reshown, the erection returned almost to its maximum state. This was true whether the films were presented as few as three or as many as nine times in succession. When instructed to develop an erection in the absence of a film, every subject was able to do so, each reaching a peak of about 30% of his maximum. Such erections had longer latencies to the peak produced and lower maximum levels than those elicited by a film.     

Identity and Immigrant Stereotypes: A Study Based on the Ego-Ecological Approach

Based on the ego-ecological approach, which views identity as deeply interconnected with the social environment via group memberships, this study reconstructed the psychosocial identity of a group of Sri Lankan immigrants who settled in Naples, Italy, with the aim of detecting resonances between their self-representations and the stereotypes circulating in the receiving society. Fifty-one Sri Lankan immigrants completed a shortened version of the Multistage Investigator of Social Identity (MISI) with the following two stimulus groups: “Sri Lankans” (i.e., ethnocultural identity) and “immigrants.” Analyses revealed an implication of the self in both groups (i.e., Sri Lankans and immigrants), with the represented immigrant self more negatively connoted than the ethnocultural self. The contents of the self-representations showed resonances with both the stereotypes associated with immigrants in Italian society and the specific stereotype associated with the Sri Lankan community, thereby empirically confirming that in the immigrant experience identity feels the effect of the attitudes of the receiving context.     

Capturing environmental affordances: Low‐income families identify positive characteristics of a hotel housing solution

This qualitative study describes the positive characteristics of an extended‐stay hotel as identified by low‐income families that resided there. Interviews were conducted with ten hotel residents using a semi‐structured interview guide and participant photographs to elicit a deeper understanding of experiencing home at a hotel. Framed in the theoretical perspective of environmental affordances, findings suggest that despite discomforts of the hotel environment, residents were still able to enjoy family independence, social engagement, a sense of safety and connection to a community context. The findings of this study may help practitioners gain a balanced perspective of non‐ideal housing conditions for planning interventions. Even in these conditions, positive characteristics can be identified to reinforce family functioning and well‐being. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Retrospective assessment of childhood sexual and physical abuse: a comparison of scaled and behaviorally specific approaches

This study compared retrospective reports of childhood sexual and physical abuse as assessed by two measures: the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), which uses a Likert-type scaling approach, and the Computer Assisted Maltreatment Inventory (CAMI), which employs a behaviorally specific means of assessment. Participants included 1,195 undergraduate students recruited from three geographically diverse universities. Agreement was high across the two measures in the classification of victim status (92% and 80% for sexual and physical abuse, respectively). However, the CTQ classified more participants as sexually abused than did the CAMI, whereas the opposite trend was found for physical abuse. For child physical abuse, many participants reporting abusive acts on the CAMI scored below the cut-point for physical abuse on the CTQ. Classification differences for both types of abuse were largely unrelated to demographic factors, socially desirable responding, or self-reported withholding of information. The implications of these results are discussed in light of future research using retrospective methods of assessing childhood abuse.     

Basic-level visual similarity and category specificity

The role of visual crowding in category deficits has been widely discussed (e.g.,;; ). Most studies have measured overlap at the superordinate level (compare different examples of 'animal') rather than at the basic level (compare different examples of 'dog'). In this study, we therefore derived two measures of basic-level overlap for a range of categories. The first was a computational measure generated by a self-organising neural network trained to process pictures of living and non-living things; the second was a rating of perceived visual similarity generated by human subjects to the item names. The computational measure indicated that the pattern of crowded/uncrowded does not honour a living/non-living distinction. Nevertheless, different superordinates showed varied degrees of basic-level overlap, suggesting that specific token choice affects some superordinates more than others e.g., individual fruit and vegetable tokens show greater variability than any other items, while tools and vehicles produce more reliable or overlapping basic-level visual representations. Finally, subject ratings correlated significantly with the computational measures indicating that the neural model represents structural properties of the objects that are psychologically meaningful.     

Compared to what? Effects of categorization on hedonic contrast

Test stimuli are rated less “good” following very good context stimuli than when presented either alone or following neutral context stimuli. This diminution in rating is calledhedonic contrast. In two experiments, the degree of hedonic contrast depended on how subjects were instructed to categorize context and test stimuli. Contrast was substantially attenuated if context and test stimuli were said to belong to different categories. The effect was demonstrated for beverages (Experiment 1) and birds (Experiment 2). Stimuli’s hedonic ratings were far less affected by other stimuli declared to belong to a different category than by stimuli declared to belong to a common category.     

Face Perception During Early Infancy

Previous studies of face perception during early infancy are difficult to interpret because of discrepant results and procedural differences. We used a standardized method based on the Teller acuity card procedure to test newborns, 6-week-olds, and 12-week-olds with three pairs of face and nonface stimuli modified from previous studies. Newborns' preferences were influenced both by the visibility of the stimuli and by their resemblance to a human face. There appears to be a mechanism, likely subcortical, predisposing newborns to look toward faces. Changes in preferences at 6 and 12 weeks of age suggest increasing cortical influence over infants' preferences for faces.     

The Props are Falling Down and We Want to Make Music: A Narrative Perspective on Organisations in Transition (Violins/Violence in Organisations)

While South African society finds itself in the throes of political changes, therapists working within organisations in transition find themselves challenged by the turbulence of transformation. The authors are a group of therapists attempting to understand, from a narrative perspective, the organisational context within which they work. This paper recounts the processes around the design, implementation, and outcomes of a workshop on this theme. The main body of the paper consists of a letter that was sent to participants after the workshop. The reader is invited to join collaboratively in our reflections so as to continue an open-ended, creative process.     

The (HI)Stories We Live by: Power/Knowledge and Family Therapy in Africa

There is a need to Africanise family therapy so as to serve the interest of local communities. Western approaches to family therapy have been accused of being irrelevant to African contexts. They are seen as forming part of a dominant scientific knowledge which invalidates local folk and cultural psychologies and thereby continuing a historical tradition of oppressive colonial power relations. This paper aims at archaeologising and evaluating such criticism by situating family therapy within different fields of knowledge that have emerged historically and are currently co-existing in Africa. The advantages and disadvantages of dominant family therapy approaches in African contexts are explored by focussing on power relations between different knowledges in Africa. It is argued that many global narratives of family therapy offer congenial companionship to many local African narratives, but that family therapists should pay more attention to local spiritual and political narratives so as to attain more legitimacy and validation by local communities.     

Linguistic Basicness and Colour Information Processing

Berlin and Kay's notion of basicness was defined by a combination of linguistic and psychological criteria, but they suggested that the psychological criteria might be extended. The experiments reported here were designed to explore a possible extension by searching for perceptual effects of basicness. Russian speakers who have two basic terms for the blue region of colour space were compared with English speakers who have only one basic term for the same region on two perceptual tasks. The first two experiments sought for greater Stroop interference for the Russians than for the English for the critical “blue” stimuli, and the third experiment sought greater perceptual differentiation for the Russians in the blue region. All experiments clearly replicated standard findings, but all singularly failed to find the predicted differences between the two groups. It is argued that whilst the results are consistent with there being no psychological effect of basicness, it is necessary to search for possible effects in other domains, such as recognition memory, before accepting this conclusion.