Gender-bound definitions of mental health

Fifteen male and 15 female American therapists-in-training (clinical and counseling psychology graduate students) were asked to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) under each of two instructional sets. In one set, they were instructed to respond to the items as a healthy male would respond, and in the other, as a healthy female would respond. The MMPI profiles obtained from male and female subjects were not significantly different, indicating that these male and female therapists-in-training did not differ in their perceptions of healthy men and women. When the data for male and female subjects were combined, however, healthy women were perceived differently than healthy men on several scales, although the MMPI profiles obtained under both instructional sets were well within normal limits.     

Do 9-month-olds perceive causation-at-a-distance?

Humans understand mechanical events to involve physical bodies interacting by contact, but intentional events involve agents that can also interact at a distance. We investigated infant sensitivity to causality in a simple event in which one agent appears to react to another without contact. Infants 9 months old were habituated to one of two events involving a computer-animated red square moving nonrigidly--like a caterpillar--towards a green square. In the 'reaction event', the green object moved in turn before the red one stopped, while in the 'pause event' the green object moved after the red one stopped. After habituation, each infant saw the habituation movie played in reverse. This test involved identical spatiotemporal changes for reaction and pause event, but the reversed reaction additionally involved a change in the causal roles. Infants dishabituated to reversal of the reaction but not the pause event, a result which suggests sensitivity to causation-at-a-distance. This ability could support development of social cognition and theory of mind.     

Emerging perception of causality in action-and-reaction sequences from 4 to 6 months of age: Is it domain-specific?

Two experiments (N=136) studied how 4- to 6-month-olds perceive a simple schematic event, seen as goal-directed action and reaction from 3 years of age. In our causal reaction event, a red square moved toward a blue square, stopping prior to contact. Blue began to move away before red stopped, so that both briefly moved simultaneously at a distance. Primarily, our study sought to determine from what age infants see the causal structure of this reaction event. In addition, we looked at whether this causal percept depends on an animate style of motion and whether it correlates with tasks assessing goal perception and goal-directed action. Infants saw either causal reactions or noncausal delayed control events in which blue started some time after red stopped. These events involved squares that moved either rigidly or nonrigidly in an apparently animate manner. After habituation to one of the four events, infants were tested on reversal of the habituation event. Spatiotemporal features reversed for all events, but causal roles changed only in reversed reactions. The 6-month-olds dishabituated significantly more to reversal of causal reaction events than to noncausal delay events, whereas younger infants reacted similarly to reversal of both. Thus, perceptual causality for reaction events emerges by 6 months of age, a younger age than previously reported but, crucially, the same age at which perceptual causality for launch events has emerged in prior research. On our second question, animate/inanimate motion had no effect at any age, nor did significant correlations emerge with our additional tasks assessing goal perception or goal-directed object retrieval. Available evidence, here and elsewhere, is as compatible with a view that infants initially see A affecting B, without differentiation into physical or psychological causality, as with the standard assumption of distinct physical/psychological causal perception.     

Goal attribution to schematic animals: do 6‐month‐olds perceive biological motion as animate?

Infants are sensitive to biological motion, but do they recognize it as animate? As a first step towards answering this question, two experiments investigated whether 6‐month‐olds selectively attribute goals to shapes moving like animals. We habituated infants to a square moving towards one of two targets. When target locations were switched, infants reacted more to movement towards a new goal than a new location – but only if the square moved non‐rigidly and rhythmically, in a schematic version of bio‐mechanical movement older observers describe as animal‐like ( Michotte, 1963 ). Goal attribution was specific to schematic animal motion: It did not occur if the square moved rigidly with the same rhythm as the animate stimulus, or if the square had the same amount of non‐rigid deformation, but in an inanimate configuration. The data would seem to show that perception of schematic animal motion is linked to a system for psychological reasoning from infancy. This in turn suggests that 6‐month‐olds may already interpret biological motion as animate.     

Perceived physical and social causality in animated motions: spontaneous reports and ratings

Michotte argued that we perceive cause-and-effect, without contributions from reasoning or learning, even in displays of two-dimensional moving shapes. Two studies extend this line of work from perception of mechanical to social causality. We compared verbal reports with structured ratings of causality to gain a better understanding of the extent to which perceptual causality occurs spontaneously or depends on instruction or context. A total of 120 adult observers (72 in the main experiment, 48 in an initial experiment) saw 12 (or 8) different computer animations of shape A moving up to B, which in turn moved away. Animations factorially varied the temporal and spatial relations of the shapes, and whether they moved rigidly or in a non-rigid, animal-like manner. Impressions of social as well as physical causality appeared in both free reports and ratings. Perception of physical causality was stronger than perception of social causality, particularly in free reports. No differences of this nature appear in infants and children, so the asymmetry may reflect learnt knowledge. Physical causality was relatively unspecific initially, but discrimination of causal and delayed control events improved with exposure to multiple events. Experience seems to affect the causal illusion even over a short timeframe; the idea of 'one-trial causality' may be somewhat misleading. Regardless of such effects on the absolute level of responses, the different measures showed similar patterns of variation with the spatio-temporal configuration and type of motion. The good fit of ratings and reports validates much recent work in this area.     

Evidence for a distinction between judged and perceived causality

Two experiments investigated Michotte's launch event, in which successive motion of two objects appears to evoke an immediate perception that the first motion caused the second, as in a collision. Launching was embedded in event sequences where a third event (a colour change of the second object) was established as a competing predictor of the second motion, in an attempt to see whether subjects' learning of alternative predictive relationships would influence their causal impressions of launch events. In Experiment 1 subjects saw launch events in which temporal contiguity at the point of impact was varied so that an impact was varied so that an impact itself did not reliably predict when the second object would move. Half of these scenes, however, contained a colour change of the second object which did reliably predict when it would move. In accordance with Michotte's theory, subjects' ratings of the degree of perceived causality were not affected by the colour change. In Experiment 2 subjects saw scenes that contained launch events with or without temporal contiguity and a colour change. These were interspersed with events in which a colour change alone did or did not precede the second motion. Thus, movement of the second object was either contingent on or independent of the impact. Subjects repeatedly (a) rated perceived causality in single launch events and (b) judged the necessity of collisions for movement in the overall set of events. These responses dissociated, in that ratings type (a) showed only a substantial contiguity effect, whereas judgements of type (b) showed both a contingency and a much smaller contiguity effect. These results appear to support a distinction between judged and perceived causality and are discussed with respect to Michotte's theory of direct causal perception.