The peculiar successes of community psychology: Service delivery to ethnic minorities and the poor

The 20-year history of community psychology is considered with respect to activities on behalf of ethnic minority participation in psychotherapy, increasing cultural diversity, and to a considerably lesser extent, enhancing community systems. A discrepancy was found between community psychology in principle and community psychology in practice. For the future, community psychologists are advised to identify and seek to strengthen (a) indigenous resources for solving personal and community problems; and (b) pathways of help seeking followed by community members. Community psychology is encouraged to reclaim and enact more vigorously its own legacy. To do otherwise, it is argued, forfeits development of potentially significant research and practice and risks continued ambivalence and dissatisfaction despite worthwhile contribution--suffering the peculiar successes of community psychology.     

Identification of visual stimuli is improved by accompanying auditory stimuli: the role of eye movements and sound location

Can auditory signals influence the processing of visual information? The present study examined the effects of simple auditory signals (clicks and noise bursts) whose onset was simultaneous with that of the visual target, but which provided no information about the target. It was found that such a signal enhances performance in the visual task: the accessory sound reduced response times for target identification with no cost to accuracy. The spatial location of the sound (whether central to the display or at the target location) did not modify this facilitation. Furthermore, the same pattern of facilitation was evident whether the observer fixated centrally or moved their eyes to the target. The results were not altered by changes in the contrast (and therefore visibility) of the visual stimulus or by the perceived utility of the spatial location of the sound. We speculate that the auditory signal may promote attentional 'disengagement' and that, as a result, observers are able to process the visual target sooner when sound accompanies the display relative to when visual information is presented alone.     

Can one pay attention to a particular color?

In an array of elements whose colors vary can we selectively choose to process all the items of a particular color preferentially in relation to those of another color? We addressed this question by presenting subjects with arrays containing many elements, and recording reaction times to a luminance change of one of the elements. Half the elements had one color and the other half another color--the spatial distribution being random. In two tasks--a simple detection of this change or a choice reaction time to the polarity of the change--we found that reaction times were independent of the number of items in the array. Cuing the subjects as to the color of the target item had no significant influence on the detection task, but subjects were faster if cued for the discrimination task. A further experiment replicated these findings and examined possible costs and benefits. Our final experiment separated the roles of attentional guidance and postattentional processes by having subjects judge the orientation of the target element and varying the magnitude of the target flash that defined which element was the target. We found that this judgment was also affected by color cuing, and that the size of the effect interacted with the flash strength, suggesting that color cuing has its influence at the stage of attentional guidance. We conclude that subjects can selectively attend to items on the basis of color given the appropriate task and stimulus dynamics.     

Stereoscopic depth cues can segment motion information

Can the motion system selectively process elements at a particular depth? We attempted to answer this question using global coherence tasks in which signal and noise elements could be given different disparities. In experiment 1 we found that, if all the signal elements had a disparity different from that of the noise elements, performance was far better than when they had the same disparity (at least for stereo-normal observers). In a second experiment we found that adding additional noise elements to the motion task had no effect if they had a different disparity (however, they had a marked effect for stereo-blind observers). We conclude that stereo disparity can be used as a segmentation cue by the motion system.     

Famous people knowledge and the right and left temporal lobes

It is generally accepted that the anterior temporal lobes support knowledge of famous people. The specific roles of the right and left temporal lobe remain a subject of debate, with some studies suggesting differential roles based on modality (visual versus verbal information) and others category (person knowledge versus general semantics). The present study re-examined performance of semantic dementia patients with predominantly right and predominantly left temporal lobe atrophy on famous face, famous name and general semantic tasks, with the specific aim of testing the hypothesis that the right temporal lobe has a privileged role for person knowledge and the left temporal lobe for general semantic knowledge. Comparisons of performance rankings across tasks showed no evidence to support this hypothesis. By contrast, there was robust evidence from naming, identification and familiarity measures for modality effects: right-sided atrophy being associated with relatively greater impairment for faces and visual tasks and left-sided atrophy for names and verbal tasks. A double dissociation in test scores in two patients reinforced these findings. The data present a challenge for the influential `semantic hub' model, which views the anterior temporal lobes as an area of convergence in which semantic information is represented in amodal form.     

Motion perception in the ageing visual system: minimum motion, motion coherence, and speed discrimination thresholds

We aimed to address two issues: first, to describe how the perception of motion differs in elderly observers as compared to younger ones; and, second, to see if these changes in motion perception could be accounted for by the known changes in the ability of elderly observers to detect patterns (as indexed via contrast sensitivity). The lower threshold of motion, motion coherence, and speed discrimination were measured, alongside contrast sensitivity, in a group of thirty-two older (mean age 61.5 years) and thirty-two younger (mean age 23.2 years) subjects. The older observers showed losses in their ability to detect slow motions as indexed via the lower threshold of motion for random-dot patterns and for gratings of a range of spatial frequencies. They also were impaired on a test of motion coherence, but only for stimuli of a slow to medium speed, whereas faster speeds showed no decline with age. Finally, at all speeds tested the older observers required greater differences in speed in order to discriminate between patterns moving at different speeds. The pattern of losses on motion perception tasks was not predicted by the deficits of the older groups, such as loss of detection thresholds for high spatial and/or temporal frequencies. It is concluded that these hypotheses do not provide an adequate account of the data, and therefore that the losses occurring with age are complex and probably are a result of the loss of several types of cell.     

Detection and recognition of emotional expressions: Effects of traits of personality disorder and gender

A problem in the processing of emotions has long been thought to be strongly associated with the aetiology and maintenance of personality disorders. Previous research has demonstrated a hyposensitivity to the faces expressing fear in those high on the traits of psychopathy, while patients with BPD have been shown to be hypersensitive to expressions in general. However, many previous studies could be explained by a bias in reporting particular expressions rather than a change in sensitivity to these expressions. Using two tasks, the present study examined both the detection and the recognition of four emotional expressions (anger, happy, sad, and fear) in a community sample of males and females. Measures of self-reported psychopathy and Borderline Personality traits were administered. The results showed marked gender differences. Psychopathy was negatively related to performance in both the detection and recognition of fear, but only for males. Borderline Personality traits were positively related to overall performance in the recognitions task, but only for females. The results suggest strong differences in the role that emotional processing might play between the genders.