Apparent movement and change in perceived location of a simulus produced by a change in accommodative vergence

Using a psychophysical method of adjustment, 175 Ss, ranging in age from 3 to 20 years, made four adjustments each of a luminous line to subjective vertical, horizontal, and 45-deg tilts in the dark. There were no significant differences in mean errors of adjustment to the vertical and horizontal over the ages tested. There were significant differences in intra-S variability of adjustment to the horizontal and vertical, with the greatest improvement occurring before age 10. Older children and adults produced significantly larger mean errors of adjustment to the 45-deg tilt than did the younger children; but the variability of settings by younger children was very high, indicating that they did not discriminate the 45-deg tilt more accurately than the older groups. The intra-S variability at all ages showed that adjustment was more accurate to the horizontal and vertical than to the 45-deg tilt.     

Family assessment: a review

This article is a review of developments in the assessment of the family in recent years. The review is selective, in order to draw out certain themes and principles from the literature.     

The dreaming mind-brain: a Jungian perspective

In this paper I discuss the nature and role of dream and the dreaming process in Jungian clinical practice in the light of neuroscience. Insights from contemporary neuroscience support rather than contest Jung's view that emotional truth, not censorship or disguise, underpins the dreaming process. I use clinical material to illustrate how work with dreams within the total interactive experience of the analytic dyad enables the development of the emotional scaffolding necessary for the development of 'mind'. Large scale evidence-based research reveals that dreaming is caused by brain activity during sleep that is both biochemically and regionally different from that of waking states. Recent imaging studies confirm that dreams are the mind's vehicle for the processing of emotional states of being, particularly the fear, anxiety, anger or elation that often figure prominently. Dream sleep is understood as also being the guardian of memory, playing a part in forgetting, encoding and affective organization of memory. In the clinical section of the paper I let a series of dreams speak for themselves, revealing the emotionally salient concerns of the dreamer, weaving past and present, transference and reality together in a way that demonstrates the healthy attempt of the brain-mind to come to terms with difficult emotional experience from the past. The dreams become dreamable as part of the meaning-making process of analysis.     

The components of sexual orientation, religiosity, and heterosexuals' impressions of gay men and lesbians

In 2 studies, the authors explored whether emphasizing the sexual behavior of gay men and lesbians influences heterosexuals' impressions of gay male and lesbian targets. In both studies, participants read short vignettes of heterosexual and gay male or lesbian targets that described their sexual histories using information restricted to only 1 component of sexual orientation (emotion, behaviors, or fantasies). The results of Study 1 showed that participants rated a behavioral gay male target more negatively than they did the emotions and fantasy targets, and this difference was a function of participant religiosity. In Study 2, participants rated the behavioral lesbian target more negatively than they did the emotions and fantasy targets; however, these differential ratings of the lesbian targets were not affected by participant religiosity.     

Body Hair Removal: The ‘Mundane’ Production of Normative Femininity

Although womens body hair removal is strongly normative across contemporary Western cultures, only two studies of mundane depilation have been published, and they were based on data from the US (Basow, 1991) and Australia (Tiggemann & Kenyon, 1998), respectively. The present survey, comprised of a sample of 678 women, extends this work. We investigated UK practices, a wider array of body regions and removal methods, and the relationship between depilation and age. Over 99% of participants reported removing some hair, most commonly from the underarms, legs, pubic area, and eyebrows. Shaving and plucking were the most common removal methods. Significant relationships between age and leg, pubic, and facial depilation were found. Results document the normativity of hair removal, and we argue that hair removal is part of the taken-for-granted work of producing an acceptable femininity.     

How Children with Head Injury Represent Real and Deceptive Emotion in Short Narratives

Narratives are not only about events, but also about the emotions those events elicit. Understanding a narrative involves not just the affective valence of implied emotional states, but the formation of an explicit mental representation of those states. In turn, this representation provides a mechanism that particularizes emotion and modulates its display, which then allows emotional expression to be modified according to particular contexts. This includes understanding that a character may feel an emotion but inhibit its display or even express a deceptive emotion. We studied how 59 school-aged children with head injury and 87 normally-developing age-matched controls understand real and deceptive emotions in brief narratives. Children with head injury showed less sensitivity than controls to how emotions are expressed in narratives. While they understood the real emotions in the text, and could recall what provoked the emotion and the reason for concealing it, they were less able than controls to identify deceptive emotions. Within the head injury group, factors such as an earlier age at head injury and frontal lobe contusions were associated with poor understanding of deceptive emotions. The results are discussed in terms of the distinction between emotions as felt and emotions as a cognitive framework for understanding other people's actions and mental states. We conclude that children with head injury understand emotional communication, the spontaneous externalization of real affect, but not emotive communication, the conscious, strategic modification of affective signals to influence others through deceptive facial expressions.     

The after effect of seen movement on a plain field

Twenty laboratory subjects were asked to fixate the centre of a rotating spiral disc, under conditions where all of them, on stopping the disc, obtained the well known illusion of apparent expansion outwards. In this experiment, instead of stopping the disc, a completely uniform white surface was substituted and it was found that though the borders of the surface appeared to remain still, the surface itself showed apparent expansion in nearly all cases.     

Drawing up boundaries: a technique

A technique is described for eliciting information about family structure in terms of boundaries and alliances through an individual session with a child using the medium of drawing. An advantage of this approach is that the child's perspective is elicited through a medium with which the child feels familiar and at ease, which can subsequently be taken further with the child in or out of the family.