"Too late": ambivalence about motherhood, choice, and time

This paper explores a particular constellation of fantasies and defenses that in some women leads to the delay of childbearing. Destructive wishes towards the woman's own womb and her mother's lead to behaviors that sabotage fertility and pregnancy. These wishes and behaviors meet up with an unconscious belief in and commitment to time standing still, and with cultural tropes and trends that obscure intrapsychic conflicts and denials about motherhood, aging, and time. Analysis, like childbearing, is constrained by the reality of time, and the complex untangling and connecting of these three not obviously related threads may not occur until it is, for the woman who wants a child, too late.     

Does the effect of familiarity on proofreading change with encoding task and time?

The authors examined whether the beneficial effect of text familiarity on proofreading is dependent on the type of encoding operations performed on the text prior to proofreading (i.e., surface vs. deep), and on the time elapsed between encoding and proofreading. In the present study, familiarity, irrespective of the nature of the encoding operations and delay, improved proofreading times, whereas only surface encoding made proofreading more accurate. These results represent a challenge for the transfer-appropriate processing model of memory.     

Asymmetric interference effects in fragment completion: the consequences of recognition failures and successes

We examined the extent to which implicit and explicit memory performance is susceptible to the effects of proactive and retroactive interference produced by orthographic similarity. Participants studied target and nontarget words that were orthographically similar or dissimilar. At test, they were given fragments of the target words intermixed with fragments of nonstudied words. Participants' initial task was to determine whether each fragment was a studied word. If they recognized it, they were to complete the fragment with the studied word; if not, they were to complete the fragment with the first word that came to mind. Completion rates including both recognized and nonrecognized target fragments provided evidence of proactive but not retroactive interference. The implicit processing engaged by the nonrecognized target fragments was found to be the primary source of the proactive interference effect.     

Gender on the modern-postmodern and classical-relational divide: untangling history and epistemology

This essay considers the historical periodization and epistemology of psychoanalytic thinking about gender. Overlapping historically with feminism itself, psychoanalytic thinking about gender has two periods of efflorescence, the 1920s and 1930s, and the contemporary period beginning in the 1970s. Two divides have characterized our gender thinking, the modern-postmodern and the classical-relational. From the early theorizing of the 1920s and 1930s until around the early 1990s, most psychoanalytic thinking about gender should be considered modernist, as it draws on traditional views of scientific evidence and holds more universalistic and dichotomized conceptions of men and women. In the contemporary period, although postmodernism tends to be associated with relational psychoanalysts and modernist thinking with classical analysts, the divisions overlap. The author argues that considering any psychoanalytic theory as "premodern" is misleading: from its inception, psychoanalysis formed part of modernism.     

Syllable similarity: The effects of differences in vowels, consonants, and order

In five experiments with synthetic and natural speech syllables, a rating task we used to study the effects of differences in vowels, consonants, and segment order on judged syllable similarity. The results of Experiments I-IV support neither a purely phonemic model of speech representation, in which vowel, consonant, and order are represented independently, nor a purely syllabic model, in which the three factors are integrated. Instead, the data indicate that subjects compare representations in which adjacent vowel and consonant are independent of one another but are not independent of their positions in the syllable. Experiment V provided no support for the hypothesis that this position-sensitive coding is due to acoustic differences in formant transitions.     

Study effort versus distinctiveness in the recollection of veridical and illusory memories

In past research, stimulus distinctiveness and study effort have been claimed to promote the development of distinctive memories, which in turn have been considered critical for enhancing veridical recollection and reducing illusory memory experiences. In the present investigation, stimulus distinctiveness, obtained by displaying text-redundant pictorial information at study, was pitted against study effort to determine whether either factor would be more beneficial to veridical recall and more detrimental to illusory recall than the other. Subjects first completed word fragments with or without the aid of an image of each word’s referent and then performed a recall test. It was found that when images were useful to the encoding task (fragment completion), their presence at study enhanced veridical recall and reduced illusory memories more than any additional encoding effort.