When the smile is a cue to familiarity

The question discussed in the two following experiments concerns the effect of facial expressions on face recognition. Famous and unknown faces with neutral or smiling expression were presented for different inspection durations (15 ms vs 1000 ms). Subjects had to categorise these faces as famous or unknown (Experiment 1), or estimate their degree of familiarity on a rating scale (Experiment 2). Results showed that the smile increased ratings of familiarity for unfamiliar faces (Experiments 1 and 2) and for famous faces (Experiment 2). These data are discussed in the framework of current face-recognition models and are interpreted in terms of social value of the smile. It is proposed that the smiling bias found here acts at the level of the decision process.     

Early Termination from Couple Therapy in a Naturalistic Setting: The Role of Therapeutic Mandates and Romantic Attachment

Drawing on a series of 141 couple therapy cases, the main goal of the present study was to determine whether romantic attachment, pre-treatment relationship distress and therapeutic mandates (i.e., reduction of couple distress or ambivalence resolution) are prognostic indicators of early termination. Couples completed the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier 1976) and the Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire (Brennan et al. 1998) at intake, whereas therapists filled in the Classification of Therapeutic Mandates (Poitras-Wright and St-Père 2004) after the 4th session. Results showed that an ambivalence resolution mandate, elevated couple distress and higher levels of attachment anxiety were associated with early termination. The implications of these findings to further understand early termination in couple therapy are discussed.     

Assessment of Personality Organization in Couple Relationships: Factorial Structure of the Inventory of Personality Organization and Incremental Validity Over Neuroticism

Summary: Creative thinking was explored from several approaches to further understanding of the interrelationship of perception, personality, and cognition. College students (N = 45) were administered the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), the Remote Associates Test (RAT), a questionnaire concerning RAT strategy, and two self-report scales. Field independent subjects were found to be significantly (p < .001) more creative than field dependents. Correlations between the RAT and GEFT and the self-report measures of conformity and creativity, while largely nonsignificant, were in the predicted directions. Results demonstrated that advanced strategy levels and insightful responses were significantly related to high performance on the RAT. Theoretical links between cognitive style and Piagetian concepts were discussed in regard to creative thought. Overall, these findings support the contention that the creative processes should be studied, not as isolated structures, but with relational and multifaceted emphasis.     

Rapid processing of letters,digits and symbols: what purely visual‐attentional deficit in developmental dyslexia?

Visual‐attentional theories of dyslexia predict deficits for dyslexic children not only for the perception of letter strings but also for non‐alphanumeric symbol strings. This prediction was tested in a two‐alternative forced‐choice paradigm with letters, digits, and symbols. Children with dyslexia showed significant deficits for letter and digit strings but not for symbol strings. This finding is difficult to explain for visual‐attentional theories of dyslexia which postulate identical deficits for letters, digits and symbols. Moreover, dyslexics showed normal W‐shaped serial position functions for letter and digit strings, which suggests that their deficit is not due to an abnormally small attentional window. Finally, the size of the deficit was identical for letters and digits, which suggests that poor letter perception is not just a consequence of the lack of reading. Together then, our results show that symbols that map onto phonological codes are impaired (i.e. letters and digits), whereas symbols that do not map onto phonological codes are not impaired. This dissociation suggests that impaired symbol‐sound mapping rather than impaired visual‐attentional processing is the key to understanding dyslexia.     

Validation of the WHOQOL-BREF in a Sample of Male Treatment-Seeking Veterans

We examined the psychometric properties of a quality of life measure, the WHOQOL-BREF, in male treatment-seeking veterans. A sample of 131 veterans at an outpatient clinic completed a mail-in survey that included the WHOQOL-BREF as well as measures of posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety symptoms, and functional health status. The WHOQOL-BREF showed evidence of good internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability. In addition, analysis of results demonstrated evidence of construct, convergent, and discriminant validity. The results suggest that the WHOQOL-BREF is a reliable and valid measure that can be used in the planning of psychological services provided to veterans with mental health problems.     

Refining Therapeutic Mandates in Couple Therapy Outcome Research: A Feasibility Study

Using a series of 59 cases of couple therapy, we studied the nature, frequency, and pre-treatment correlates of therapeutic mandates. Following intake, therapists coded mandate and couples completed the Dyadic Adjustment Scale and the Relationship Attribution Measure. The distribution of therapeutic mandates showed that 45.8% wished to improve an overtly conflictual relationship, 28.8% consulted to remedy a lack of love and/or desire, and 25.4% aimed to change a specific aspect of an otherwise well-functioning relationship. Over the course of treatment, in 20% of cases, the therapeutic mandate was revised and adjusted. The results of a logistic regression analysis showed that mandate subgroups, men's marital satisfaction, women's responsibility attributions, and women's income are significantly associated with termination status.     

An ERP investigation of location invariance in masked repetition priming

In an experiment combining masked repetition priming and the recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) the location of prime stimuli relative to centrally located target words was manipulated. Prime words could appear at the same location as targets or shifted one letter position to the right or to the left. Repetition priming effects (amplitude differences across the repeat vs. unrelated prime conditions) were found in a series of ERP components starting at around 100 msec posttarget onset. The earliest of these, the N/P150 component, was found to be sensitive to prime location. Repetition priming was only apparent with centrally located primes in this component. Repetition priming effects in later components (N250 and N400), on the other hand, were not affected by prime location. The results are interpreted in terms of location-specific letter detectors that map onto a higher level, location-invariant orthographic code for printed words.     

Theft in the information age: Music, technology, crime, and claims-making

This paper examines the construction of claims in an effort to mobilize state activity and criminal sanction to control a newly problematized form of behavior, the sharing of musical files over the World Wide Web. With documents from Canada, the United States, and other countries a process of redefinition of technologies, practices, and multiple other elements such as benefits, harm, competition, etc. is identified and analyzed. The conclusion shows that the problem and its solutions, especially those involving recourse to the criminal justice system, stem from this process rather than from objectively identifiable facts, conditions, or situations. Stéphane Leman-Langlois has earned a BSc, a MSc, and a Ph.D. in criminology. He is now a professor at the University of Montreal’s School of Criminology. He works on policing, terrorism, technology, and alternatives to penal justice.     

Efficiency of retrieval correlates with "logical" reasoning from causal conditional premises

In two experiments, we examined the prediction that there should be a relation between the speed with which subjects can retrieve potential causes for given effects and their reasoning with causal conditional premises (if cause P, then effect Q). It was also predicted that when subjects are given effects for which there exists a single strongly associated cause, speed of retrieval of a second potential cause should be particularly related to reasoning with invalid logical forms--namely, affirmation of the consequent and denial of the antecedent. In the first experiment, 49 university students were given both retrieval tasks and conditional reasoning problems. The results were generally consistent with the predictions. The second experiment, involving 57 university students, replicated the first, with some methodological variations. The results were also consistent with the predictions. An analysis of the combined results of the two experiments indicated that individual differences in efficiency of retrieval of information from long-term memory did predict performance on the invalid logical forms in the predicted ways. These results strongly support a retrieval model for conditional reasoning with causal premises.     

Presence as determined by fractal perceptual-motor dynamics.

This paper presents a tentative model of the role of perceptual-motor dynamics in the emergence of the feeling of presence. A new method allowing the measure of how gaze probes three-dimensional space in immersion is used to support this model. Fractal computations of gaze behavior are shown to be more effective than standard computations of eye movements in predicting presence.