Conservation or conversation? Contextual facilitation of inappropriate conservation judgments

Recent studies have shown that children who fail Piagetian conservation tasks may succeed if the transformation of materials is made to seem accidental, or incidental to some other activity. In the present study, 46 children, mean age 6 years, were randomly assigned to either a standard or a modified testing condition. In both, the child first made a judgment as to the equality in area of two square fields, each made up from eight interlinked fence sections. Then the child saw one of the fields transformed into a rectangle, without the fences being disconnected, and was asked for a second judgment as to the equality of the fields. In the modified condition the transformation made sense in terms of creating a space for the farmhouse. Significantly higher levels of “conserving” judgments were obtained in the modified than in the standard condition. However, it should be noted that area is not in fact conserved in this case. The implications of this for the status of precociously correct conservation judgments are discussed.     

Rereading sophistical arguments: A political intervention

This essay argues that Aristotle's categories of oratory are not as useful in judging the methods of Sophistical rhetoric as his presentation of time. The Sophistical argumentative method of making the weaker the stronger case is re-evaluated as a political practice. After showing this argument's relation to power and ideology, Aristotle's philosophy, which privileges a procedure of argument consistent with the politics of a polis-ideal rhetoric, is offered as reason for objecting to Sophistical rhetoric. The essay concludes that Sophistical rhetoric prefers the concept of possibility over Aristotelian actuality, and offers a need for an ideological space of radical, generative possibility in rhetorical theory.     

The Two Faces of Codependent Relating: A Research-Based Perspective

Using an overview of the controversial concept of codependency as a backdrop, the paper summarizes outcomes of a project devoted to developing and applying a technique for assessing codependent relating. Results support the clinically based contention that there is a pattern of relating in dysfunctional relationships that warrants the label codependent, and that some (but not all) cases of such relating stem from a distinctive codependency personality syndrome. These results gave rise to a perspective that combines a relational process with a dispositional view of codependent relating, and proposes that codependency may be either endogenous (chronic) or exogenous (reactive).     

Bringing “The Dead” to Life: Reading James Joyce

The author offers a personal reading of James Joyce's The Dead. She focuses on how the sounds of the language are used to portray the main character's deadness and his beginning to come to life once the barriers to inner self and self-knowledge are broken.     

Five-months-olds' attention and affective responses to still-faced emotional expressions

Mothers posed happy, sad, or neutral still-faces (SFs) between periods of normal interactions. Lowered infant attention and affect and increased grimacing occured during SF regardless of emotional expression posed during the SF period. Different static expressions elicited differential smiling; infants smiled slightly but significantly more to happy SFs. Greater differences occured with changes in contingent aspects of interactions.     

Conditioned and unconditioned defensive burying in the rat

When rats first encountered a mouse-trap or a flashbulb in a chamber to which they had been habituated, they buried it with bedding material from the floor of the chamber, whereas rats previously habituated to the trap or the flashbulb did not. Conversely, rats did not bury a stationary, wire-wrapped wooden prod or a length of polyethylene tubing, even on first encounter. However, almost every rat struck by the trap, shocked by the prod, exposed to an airblast from the tube, or to a flash of the bulb, buried the respective source of aversive stimulation with the bedding material, even when a comparable control object was present during conditioning and testing. Thus, the phenomenon of defensive burying is not restricted to situations in which neutral objects serve as the source of painful electric shock. Rats seem to enter the experimental environment with an already established tendency to bury some objects (unconditioned defensive burying) but not others, and they readily learn to selectively bury an object that has been the source of any one of a variety of aversive stimuli (conditioned defensive burying).     

The effects of suggestion structure and hypnotic vs task-motivation instructions on response to hallucination suggestions

Hypnotic and task-motivated subjects were given both auditory and visual hallucination suggestions that were either Brief, Long, or provided an imaginary Context. The Long and Context suggestions were equated for length. Task-motivated subjects scored higher than hypnotic subjects on both auditory and visual hallucination suggestions. Suggestion-type (Brief, Long, Context) affected response to the auditory but not the visual suggestion. Hypnotic and task-motivated hallucinators were equally likely to describe their images as being transparent. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Left hemisphere selectivity for processing duration in normal subjects

The role of the left cerebral hemisphere for the discrimination of duration was examined in a group of normal subjects. Two tasks were presented: the first required a reaction-time response to the offset of monaural pulse sequences varying in interpulse duration, and the second required the discrimination of small differences in durations, within a delayed-comparison paradigm. In each task a right-ear advantage was obtained when the durations were 50 msec or less. No ear advantage was obtained for the larger durations of 67 to 120 msec. Since the perceptual distinctiveness of phonemes may be provided by durations approximating 50 msec, the nature of the relationship between the left hemisphere's role in temporal processing and speech processing may be elaborated.     

Priming effects with food and water reinforcers in hamsters

Hamsters were tested in a square maze with either food or water in each corner compartment. A substantial priming effect (runway times increase as intertrial interval increases) was demonstrated using both food and water reinforcers. A lengthy period of free access to food and water (satiation) immediately abolished the priming effect, although runway times in general remained relatively rapid for some time. Extinction of rapid runway times proceeded more slowly under food than under water deprivation. It is concluded that priming is a widespread phenomenon associated with the presentation of a reinforcing stimulus to an appropriately deprived animal.     

Spatial depth relationships in young children's drawings

Previous research suggests that young children do not attempt to represent depth relationships between objects in their drawings. The present study, however, showed that when both objects are visible and the children's attention is drawn to the depth relationship between them, most 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds do attempt to portray this relationship.