Broken Bounds: Contemporary reflections on the antisocial tendency

When embarking on research into the effectiveness of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the NHS or the application of psychoanalytic principles, researchers come up against a number of hurdles: many clinicians still see empirical research as antithetical or disruptive to the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy; psychoanalytic psychotherapy has previously fared poorly in evidence-based policy guidelines and this can discourage ambition, and there are technical problems of research design, measurement and standardization. Nevertheless, in a political climate which stresses service evaluation, measurable outcomes and empirical evidence, psychoanalytic psychotherapy must participate to survive. There may be gains from conducting research beyond simply meeting the requirement to provide evidence of effectiveness. Research may be viewed by some clinicians as an unwelcome intruder but it may have the potential to offer triangulation, the perspective of the ‘third’, and so strengthen the foundations of clinical practice and the development of psychoanalytic thought.     

An Investigation of Teachers' Concerns About Vocabulary and the Representation of These Concerns in Content Literacy Methodology Textbooks

The purpose of this study was twofold: to (a) find out what questions currently practicing middle grade teachers have about vocabulary instruction and (b) determine what current undergraduate content area textbooks include that provide answers to these vocabulary questions. As researchers and practitioners directly responsible for teaching preservice middle grades teachers, this was a beginning step in examining whether our own teacher preparation programs are meeting the needs of new teachers as they encounter the demands of teaching vocabulary in their content areas. Teacher concerns about vocabulary instruction were determined by a survey instrument administered to 390 middle school teachers to ascertain questions they have about teaching vocabulary. A content analysis of the three leading content area textbooks was then undertaken to determine to what degree the top five concerns of middle grades teachers were addressed in these texts. Though direct information on how to teach vocabulary was provided, the researchers found that twice as much information was presented indirectly, embedded under subheadings where it was mentioned. In other words, only half the time did the texts explain how to teach the principles advocated.     

Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology: Moving Forward

The Special Issue on feminism and evolutionary psychology published by Sex Roles (Smith and Konik 2011) has elicited responses that advance understanding of the debate between evolutionary psychology and feminist perspectives concerning the origins of similarities and differences in the behavior of women and men (Smith and Konik 2013). The further challenges to evolutionary psychology mounted in these responses suggest that the Special Issue has intensified the debate more that it has resolved it. Moving forward requires that feminist psychologists not only add to the considerable body of empirical evidence that challenges evolutionary psychology but also produce alternative evolutionary theories that transcend the nature-nurture controversy that underlies the current debate. To this end, we refer readers to our biosocial constructionist theory in which culture and biology are intertwined in both distal evolutionary processes that shaped human psychology and proximal mechanisms that underlie differences and similarities in male and female behavior (Wood and Eagly 2012).     

Sentencing,severity, and social norms: A rank-based model of contextual influence on judgments of crimes and punishments

Context effects have been shown to bias lay people's evaluations of the severity of crimes and punishments. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind these effects, we develop and apply a rank-based social norms approach to judgments of perceived crime seriousness and sentence appropriateness. In Study 1, we find that (a) people believe on average that 84% of people illegally download software more than they do themselves and (b) their judged severity of, and concern about, their own illegal software downloading is predicted not by its amount but by how this amount is believed (typically inaccurately) to rank within a social comparison distribution. Studies 2 and 3 find that the judged appropriateness of a given sentence length is highly dependent on the length of other sentences available in the decision-making context: The same objective sentence was judged as approximately four times stricter when it was the second longest sentence being considered than when it was the fifth longest. It is concluded that the same mechanisms that are used to judge the magnitude of psychophysical stimuli bias judgments about legal matters.     

Little hans's transference

D. W. Winnicott: Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications, London, 1971. Pp. xiii and 151. Price £2.10.

Louis Minski, M.D., F.R.C.P., D.P.M., and Margaret J. Shepperd, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., D.P.M.: Non-communicating Children. Butterworths, London, 1970. Price £2.50.

I. Salzberger-Wittenberg: Psycho-Analytic Insight and Relationships: A Kleinian Approach. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Price £1.50.

Ed. T. C. N. Gibbens and Robert H. Ahrenfeldt: Cultural Factors in Delinquency. Social Science Paperbacks, Tavistock Publications. Price 75p.     

Internet Safety and the Silver Surfer: The Relationship Between Gist Reasoning and Adults' Risky Online Behavior

Currently, fewer older adults are online compared with younger generations. However, with many new initiatives aiming to significantly increase the number of older internet users, they will increasingly be exposed to potential victimisation from internet fraud, a fundamental issue affecting all adult internet users. Despite this, little research has examined online risk‐taking across the adult lifespan or adults' reasoning about risky online behaviors. Using fuzzy trace theory, we investigated adults' online risk‐taking behavior and intentions, and whether these behaviors were related to different ways of reasoning about risk, namely, gist reasoning (using qualitative, intuitive knowledge) and verbatim reasoning (using quantitative, specific knowledge). Participants (326 adults, 18–79 years old, M_age = 49.54 years) reported their past risk‐taking behavior, future online risk intentions, gist and verbatim reasoning about online risk, sensation seeking, and time spent online. Age was negatively correlated with past risk‐taking, time online, future risk intentions, and sensation seeking. However, time spent online was positively related to future risk intentions, suggesting that spending more time using the internet could lead individuals to take more risks. Increased verbatim reasoning predicted increased intentions to take online risks, while gist reasoning predicted reduced intentions to take risks online. Our findings extend online risk research applying fuzzy trace theory to adolescents and young adults and suggest that online safety training incorporating gist‐based reasoning strategies could benefit all adults and, in particular, older generations. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reconciling change blindness with long-term memory for objects

How can we reconcile remarkably precise long-term memory for thousands of images with failures to detect changes to similar images? We explored whether people can use detailed, long-term memory to improve change detection performance. Subjects studied a set of images of objects and then performed recognition and change detection tasks with those images. Recognition memory performance exceeded change detection performance, even when a single familiar object in the postchange display consistently indicated the change location. In fact, participants were no better when a familiar object predicted the change location than when the displays consisted of unfamiliar objects. When given an explicit strategy to search for a familiar object as a way to improve performance on the change detection task, they performed no better than in a 6-alternative recognition memory task. Subjects only benefited from the presence of familiar objects in the change detection task when they had more time to view the prechange array before it switched. Once the cost to using the change detection information decreased, subjects made use of it in conjunction with memory to boost performance on the familiar-item change detection task. This suggests that even useful information will go unused if it is sufficiently difficult to extract.     

A longitudinal study of children's text messaging and literacy development

Recent studies have shown evidence of positive concurrent relationships between children's use of text message abbreviations ('textisms') and performance on standardized assessments of reading and spelling. This study aimed to determine the direction of this association. One hundred and nineteen children aged between 8 and 12 years were assessed on measures of general ability, reading, spelling, rapid phonological retrieval, and phonological awareness at the beginning and end of an academic year. The children were also asked to provide a sample of the text messages that they sent over a 2-day period. These messages were analyzed to determine the extent to which textisms were used. It was found that textism use at the beginning of the academic year was able to predict unique variance in spelling performance at the end of the academic year after controlling for age, verbal IQ, phonological awareness, and spelling ability at the beginning of the year. When the analysis was reversed, reading and spelling ability were unable to predict unique variance in textism usage. These data suggest that there is some evidence of a causal contribution of textism usage to spelling performance in children aged 8-12 years. However, when the measure of rapid phonological retrieval (rapid picture naming) was controlled in the analysis, the relationship between textism use and spelling ability just failed to reach statistical significance, suggesting that phonological access skills may mediate some of the relationship between textism use and spelling performance.     

From movements to actions: two mechanisms for learning action sequences

When other individuals move, we interpret their movements as discrete, hierarchically-organized, goal-directed actions. However, the mechanisms that integrate visible movement features into actions are poorly understood. Here, we consider two sequence learning mechanisms – transitional probability-based (TP) and position-based encoding computations – that have been studied extensively in the domain of language learning, and investigate their potential for integrating movements into actions. If these learning mechanisms integrate movements into actions, then they should create memory units that contain (i) movement information, (ii) information about the order in which movements occurred, and (iii) information allowing actions to be recognized from different viewpoints. We show that both mechanisms retain movement information. However, only the position-based mechanism creates movement representations that are view-invariant and contain order information. The TP-based mechanism creates movement representations that are view-dependent and contain no order information. We therefore suggest that the TP-based mechanism is unlikely to play an important role for integrating movements into actions. In contrast, the position-based mechanism retains some of the types of information needed to represent goal-directed actions, which makes it an attractive target for further research to explore what, if any, role it plays in the perception of goal-directed actions.