Assessing Adolescent and Adult Attachment: A Review of Current Self-Report Measures

Increased interest in attachment theory among counseling researchers and practitioners has led to the development of several measures of attachment-related constructs. Following a brief overview of the theoretical foundations of attachment theory as conceptualized by Ainsworth (1989) and Bowlby (1988), the authors of this article review four self-report measures of adolescent and adult attachment. Many considerations for the selection and use of these instruments in future counseling research and assessment are discussed.     

Colour vision,evolution, and perceptual content

Computational models of colour vision assume that the biological function of colour vision is to detect surface reflectance. Some philosophers invoke these models as a basis for externalism about perceptual content (content is distal) and objectivism about colour (colour is surface reflectance). In an earlier article (Thompson et al. 1992), I criticised the computational objectivist position on the basis of comparative colour vision: There are fundamental differences among the colour vision of animals and these differences do not converge on the detection of any single type of environmental property. David R. Hilbert (1992) has recently defended computational objectivism against my comparative argument; his arguments are based on the externalist approach to perceptual content originally developed by Mohan Matthen (1988) and on the computationally inspired theory of the evolutionary basis for trichromacy developed by Roger N. Shepard (1990). The present article provides a reply to Hilbert with extensive criticism of both Matthen's and Shepard's theories. I argue that the biological function of colour vision is not to detect surface reflectance, but to provide a set of perceptual categories that can apply to objects in a stable way in a variety of conditions. Comparative research indicates that both the perceptual categories and the distal stimuli will differ according to the animal and its visual ecology, therefore externalism and objectivism must be rejected.Versions of this article were read to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and to the Department of Philosophy at Boston University. I am grateful to the audiences for the discussions that ensued. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for constructive criticism of certain points in the article. Special thanks are due to my comparative colour vision collaborators, Adrian Palacios and Francisco Varela.     

“My big sister the town supervisor”: Family leadership training is not just for boys

This study investigates gender similarity in the effects of birth order upon political leadership. Town supervisors were the leaders studied as there are a considerable number of women who attain this level of leadership. Questionnaires about birth order and family size were gained from 66 women who were town supervisors in New York State in 1992, and compared to a randomly selected sample of 57 male town supervisors. It was found that women as well as men town supervisors were more likely to have been first born in their families. However, whereas gender does not apparently influence the relevance of birth order for leadership, it clearly does exert an influence on the level of political leadership attained. Women town supervisors gained their positions in towns that were considerably smaller than the towns led by the male supervisors. Discussion concerned the nature of family experiences that contribute to leadership training, including those that may be different for girls and boys. Further research is needed to clarify barriers to female assertion of political leadership at more senior levels, because as this study shows, female leadership is being trained in families.     

Folk personality psychology: mindreading and mindshaping in trait attribution

Character-trait attribution is an important component of everyday social cognition that has until recently received insufficient attention in traditional accounts of folk psychology. In this paper, I consider how the case of character-trait attribution fits into the debate between mindreading-based and broadly ‘pluralistic’ approaches to folk psychology. Contrary to the arguments of some pluralists, I argue that the evidence on trait understanding does not show that it is a distinct, non-mentalistic mode of folk-psychological reasoning, but rather suggests that traits are ordinarily understood as mentalistic dispositions. I also examine several ways in which trait attribution might also serve regulative, ‘mindshaping’ functions by promoting predictable norm-governed behavior, and argue that mindreading plays several important roles in these cases as well. I conclude that an appreciation of the relationship between trait attribution and mindreading is crucial to understanding the role it plays in our folk psychology.

     

Age influences domestic dog cognitive performance independent of average breed lifespan

Animal Cognition - Across mammals, increased body size is positively associated with lifespan. However, within species, this relationship is inverted. This is well illustrated in dogs (Canis...     

Perceptual processes in matching and recognition of complex pictures

The role of perceptual feature sampling in speeded matching and recognition was explored in 4 experiments. Experiments 1-3 involved a perceptual matching task with pictures of various objects and scenes. In Experiments 2 and 3, same-different judgments were given under time pressure. The main objective of the matching task was to obtain measures of the perceptual processing rates of different object features. Experiment 4 was an old-new recognition experiment, in which the same stimuli as those in the matching task were used. Response signals were used to limit processing time in the recognition task. The results demonstrated that it is possible to predict speeded recognition performance from performance in perceptual matching. A simple stochastic feature-sampling model provides a unified account of the data from the 4 experiments.     

Associative recognition: A case of recall-to-reject processing

Two-process accounts of recognition memory assume that memory judgments are based on both a rapidly available familiarity-based process and a slower, more accurate, recall-based mechanism. Past experiments on the time course of item recognition have not supported the recall-to-reject account of the second process, in which the retrieval of an old item is used to reject a similar foil (Rotello & Heit, 1999). In three new experiments, using analyses similar to those of Rotello and Heit, we found robust evidence for recall-to-reject processing in associative recognition, for word pairs, and for list-discrimination judgments. Put together, these results have implications for two-process accounts of recognition.