A psychotic gynemimetic: I just had a pregnant thought.

Nomothetic and idiographic content analytic approaches to the Rorschach are used in complementary fashion to explore the psychotic personality structure and primitive interpersonal models in a 37-year-old biologically normal male, who was a gynemimetic, that is, a transvestite who aspired to have the genetalia of a woman. The Rorschach was riddled with psychotic verbalizations and imagery suggesting inadequate differentiation from the original symbiosis, inadequate symbiosis anxiety, and significant separation anxiety--a constellation culminating in the transsexual fantasy of fusion with the mother.     

Probabilistic causality reexamined

According to Nancy Cartwright, a causal law holds just when a certain probabilistic condition obtains in all test situations which in turn satisfy a set of background conditions. These background conditions are shown to be inconsistent and, on separate account, logically incoherent. I offer a corrective reformulation which also incorporates a strategy for problems like Hesslow's thrombosis case. I also show that Cartwright's recent argument for modifying the condition to appeal to singular causes fails.Proposed modifications of the theory's probabilistic condition to handle effects with extreme probabilities (0 or 1) are found unsatisfactory. I propose a unified solution which also handles extreme causes. Undefined conditional probabilities give rise to three good, but non-equivalent, ways of formulating the theory. Various formulations appear in the literature. I give arguments to eliminate all but one candidate. Finally, I argue for a crucial new condition clause, and show how to extend the results beyond a simple probabilistic framework.     

GENDER BIASES IN TEXTBOOKS FOR INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Because of spreading concerns about gender stereotypes in textbooks, in 1975 an American Psychological Association Task Force recommended changes in the type of language that should be used to report research findings and in the type of information that should be included in reports of psychological research. These recommendations also applied to the presentation of psychological information in textbooks. Studies in the subsequent 7 years indicated some decrease in the use of sex-stereotyped language and some decrease in gender-biased content. Researchers typically concluded, however, that although some improvements had occurred, gender biases and stereotypes still occurred in texts. The present study reports an extensive content analysis of current textbooks for introductory psychology and human development courses. Representation of the work, theory, and behavior of males continues to significantly exceed the representation of the work, theory, and behavior of females, and females continue to be portrayed in negative and gender-biased ways.     

Effect of backward priming on word recognition in single-word and sentence contexts

Backward priming was investigated under conditions similar to those used in lexical ambiguity research. Subjects received prime-target word pairs that were associated either unidirectionally (BABY-STORK) or bidirectionally (BABY-CRY). In the first experiment, targets were presented 500 ms following the onset of visual primes, and subjects made naming or lexical decision responses to the targets. Forward priming was obtained in all conditions, while backward priming (i.e., priming for pairs in which there was a unidirectional target-to-prime association, as in BABY-STORK) occurred only with lexical decision. In the second experiment, primes were presented auditorily, either in isolation or in a sentence. Targets followed the offset of the primes either immediately or after 200 ms. Backward priming occurred with both response tasks, but only when the prime was an isolated word. In addition, backward priming decreased over time with the naming task, but not with lexical decision. These results suggest that the locus of the backward priming effect is different for the two response tasks. Further, the lack of a backward priming effect with sentence contexts suggests that backward priming cannot account for the demonstrations of multiple access in the lexical ambiguity literature. These results, therefore, support a context-independent view of lexical access.