Changes in values cognition after rating values-associated feelings

This study investigated values change as an outcome of assessing feelings elicited by contemplating the actualization of the same values. The subjects were divided into an experimental and a control group. They completed three tests in a single session. In the pretest, all subjects were asked to rate the importance of 20 values items on a 4-point scale. Subjects in the experimental group were then asked to rate the degree of pleasure they would feel in actualizing each of the values, while those in the control group rated the degree of inequality they considered women suffer in the actualization of each of the values. The post-test consisted of the same items as the pretest. The subjects in the experimental group completed a second post-test 3 months later. It was found that the experimental procedure produced significant change in the ratings of 15 values at the post-test, whereas the control procedure produced change in only five. The results suggest that rating one's emotional response to a value-related situation can change one's cognition of that value. At the post-test 3 months later, only 3-value ratings remained changed.     

Delayed matching to two-picture samples by individuals with and without disabilities: an analysis of the role of naming

Delayed matching to complex, two-picture samples (e.g., cat-dog) may be improved when the samples occasion differential verbal behavior. In Experiment 1, individuals with mental retardation matched picture comparisons to identical single-picture samples or to two-picture samples, one of which was identical to a comparison. Accuracy scores were typically high on single-picture trials under both simultaneous and delayed matching conditions. Scores on two-picture trials were also high during the simultaneous condition but were lower during the delay condition. However, scores improved on delayed two-picture trials when each of the sample pictures was named aloud before comparison responding. Experiment 2 replicated these results with preschoolers with typical development and a youth with mental retardation. Sample naming also improved the preschoolers' matching when the samples were pairs of spoken names and the correct comparison picture matched one of the names. Collectively, the participants could produce the verbal behavior that might have improved performance, but typically did not do so unless the procedure required it. The success of the naming intervention recommends it for improving the observing and remembering of multiple elements of complex instructional stimuli.     

Rigidity in children's drawings and its relation with representational change

Four studies tested the application of to the drawing domain. In particular, we tested her claim that young children are inhibited in their attempts at changing their graphic representations (representational change) due to being constrained by the order in which the elements of the representation are drawn (procedural rigidity). The first study required 60 children (4- to 6-year-olds and an older comparison group of 8-year-olds) to make three drawings of a familiar and novel topic. From these drawings each child was measured for procedural rigidity. In a further drawing the child was asked to modify their usual representation of each topic. Regression analyses revealed procedural rigidity levels were not predictive of manipulation performance. A second study, testing 75 4- to 6-year-olds and a third study, testing 30 3- to 4-year-olds, revealed that when young children were specifically asked to manipulate rigid sub-procedures on a familiar topic they were indeed able to do so. Finally, a fourth study (testing 40 5-year-olds and 40 8-year-olds) removed the notational trace in drawing (a possible aid for procedural interruption) but this still produced no evidence of a relation between procedural rigidity and representational change. We suggest how the concept of procedural rigidity might be re-interpreted for the drawing domain so that the RR model can remain as a domain-general theory of cognitive development. We also suggest the development of information processing may be crucial for flexibility in drawing.     

Global and local covert visual attention: Evidence from a bayesian hidden markov model

Psychological, psychophysical and physiological research indicates that people switch between two covert attention states, local and global attention, while visually exploring complex scenes. The focus in the local attention state is on specific aspects and details of the scene, and on examining its content with greater visual detail. The focus in the global attention state is on exploring the informative and perceptually salient areas of the scene, and possibly on integrating the information contained therein. The existence of these two visual attention states, their relative prevalence and sequence in time has remained empirically untested to date. To fill this gap, we develop a psychometric model of visual covert attention that extends recent work on hidden Markov models, and we test it using eye-movement data. The model aims to describe the observed time series of saccades typically collected in eye-movement research by assuming a latent Markov process, indicative of the brain switching between global and local covert attention. We allow subjects to be in either state while exploring a stimulus visually, and to switch between them an arbitrary number of times. We relax the no-memory-property of the Markov chain. The model that we develop is estimated with MCMC methodology and calibrated on eye-movement data collected in a study of consumers' attention to print advertisements in magazines.We thank Dominique Claessens of Verify International for making the data available to us.     

Narrating survival and change in Guatemala and South Africa: the politics of representation and a liberatory community psychology

Peace accords and international interventions have contributed to the suspension of armed conflict and the censuring of repressive regimes in many parts of the world. Some governments and their opposition parties have agreed to the establishment of commissions or other bodies designed to create historical records of the violations of human rights and foster conditions that facilitate reparatory and reconciliatory processes. This paper explores selected roles that community psychologists have played in this process of remembering the past and constructing new identities towards creating a more just future. With reference to two community groups (in Guatemala and South Africa) we show how efforts to speak out about one's own experiences of political and military repression involve complex representational politics that go beyond the simple binary opposition of silencing versus giving voice. The Guatemalan group consisted of Mayan Ixil women who, together with the first author, used participatory action research and the PhotoVoice technique to produce a book about their past and present struggles. The South African group, working within the ambit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in collaboration with the third author and others, explored ways of speaking about their roles in apartheid and post-apartheid society. Although both these initiatives can be seen as moments in on-going struggles to overcome externally-imposed repressive practices that censor the voices of marginalized communities, they also serve to dispel overly romanticized notions of univocal communities now liberated to express themselves in an unmediated and unequivocal fashion. The paper discusses how each group of women instead entered into subtly nuanced relationships with community psychologists involving a continual interplay between the authenticity of their self-representational accounts and the requirements of the discursive technologies into which they were being inducted and the material conditions within their sites of struggle. In both cases the group's agenda also evolved over time, so that what emerged was not so much a particular account of themselves, or even the development of a particular voice for speaking about themselves, but an unfolding process—for the groups and for the community psychologists who accompanied them—of becoming active players in the postmodern, mediated world of self-representational politics and social struggle.     

Children Exposed to Domestic Violence and Child Abuse: Terminology and Taxonomy

Three definitional issues regarding children exposed to domestic violence are examined. First, the multiple ways in which a child can be exposed to violence is discussed. A taxonomy of 10 types of exposure is proposed. Nine key characteristics of domestic violence, as they relate to children and children's exposure, are then outlined. The third issue addressed concerns why children who are exposed to domestic violence can be considered victims of child maltreatment. These children, by nature of their experience in the home, are psychologically maltreated and are also at high risk for physical abuse and some risk for sexual abuse. Empirical questions concerning these definitions and taxonomies and their interrelations are discussed.     

Introduction

This issue of Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, Children Exposed to Domestic Violence: Current Status and Research Directions, addresses the current status of our knowledge as well as critical research needs in the area of children exposed to domestic violence. Although much has been learned in recent years about children exposed to violence, significant research gaps remain, the identification of which may help to build a more complete and rigorous science base in this area. This journal issue represents the distillation of a 3-day workshop on children exposed to violence, held in July of 2002, that identified what is known about children exposed to violence and what this information tells us about future research directions. Although many federal agencies have supported some research in this area, there is a need for more targeted attention on the topic, particularly with regard to measurement, sampling, and interventions/services. The papers in this issue were selected with these themes in mind. Although no single issue could cover the entire field, we intend to offer a representative sample of where we are and where we need to go with the hope of stimulating additional thought, collaboration, and research in this important area.     

Towards a research programme for ethics and technology

In this editorial contribution, two issues relevant to the question, what should be at the top of the research agenda for ethics and technology, are identified and discussed. Firstly: can, and do, engineers make a difference to the degree to which technology leads to morally desirable outcomes? What role does professional autonomy play here, and what are its limits? And secondly, what should be the scope of engineers' responsibility; that is to say, on which issues are they, as engineers, morally obliged to reflect? The research agendas proposed by the authors contributing to this special section, implicitly, give different answers to these questions. We suggest that an explicit discussion of these issues would greatly help in constructing a common research agenda.     

Happiness, Materialism, and Religious Experience in the US AND SINGAPORE

This study examines relationships between three central human concepts. From national probability samples of adults in the United States and in Singapore, we measured happiness, materialism (operationalized as the three sub-scales of possession-defined success, acquisition centrality, and acquisition as the pursuit of happiness), and religious experience (using three scales measuring intrinsic religiosity, extrinsic religiosity, and religion as quest). It was expected and found that happiness is negatively related to overall materialism in both the US and in Singapore, although happiness" relationship with the three materialism sub-scales was mixed. We observed that adults in Singapore are less happy and more materialistic than those in the US It was expected that happiness would have a positive relationship with intrinsic religiosity and extrinsic religiosity, but a negative relationship with religion as quest. Though our results largely support these hypotheses, they produce some unexpected differences between the two countries and across the three religiosity dimensions. We conclude that happiness is not associated with people's material accumulation but with their perceived inner world. And happy people see their religion not so much as something they do as what they are.     

Examining the effectiveness of a community-based self-help program to increase women's readiness for smoking cessation

This study investigated the effectiveness of two components of a smoking cessation intervention: a reading manual and a series of televised programs. Female smokers in the Chicago metropolitan area with a high school education or less were interviewed at 4 different times: baseline, immediate postintervention, and 6 and 12 months. We examined the effects of several baseline measures (race, age, number of cigarettes smoked, and stage of readiness to change) and exposure to the intervention components on subsequent stage of change. Race, baseline smoking rate, baseline stage, and exposure to both intervention components had direct effects on stage at immediate postintervention, with both intervention components increasing readiness to quit. Furthermore, exposure to the manual interacted with baseline stage, such that the manual benefited women at earlier stages more than women at later stages. Effects of both components were sustained at 6 months, and the effects of the manual were sustained at 12 months.