Can we imagine how objects look from other viewpoints?

Many psychologists who study cognition believe that perception achieves object-centered representations that make it possible to extract representations of how the object would appear from differing viewpoints. Others believe we can achieve representations of how an object would appear by a process of visualization or mental rotation. We report experiments in which the subject tries to imagine how three-dimensional novel wire objects would appear from positions other than the one they are in. Subjects are unable to perform this task unless they make use of strategies that circumvent the process of visualization. It is suggested that the linear increase in time required to succeed in mental rotation tasks as a function of the angular discrepancy between the figures compared is the result of increasing difficulty rather than of the time required for rotation.     

Congruence reconsidered

Carl Rogers' definitions of congruence are discussed. Four specific requirements are identified for the concept and practice of therapeutic congruence. Drawing on examples from practice, the interface between congruence and the other necessary and sufficient conditions of change is examined.     

The management of innovation: Recasting the role of creativity

Abstract

This article examines difficulties arising from the deep-rooted assumption that the innovation process exists as a phenomenon incorporating two distinct and identifiable stages of creative discovery and subsequent implementation. An alternative perspective is proposed in which innovation is represented as the process whereby individuals enact new social procedures; creativity is the associated process in which the meanings of the enactments are discovered and labelled. Innovation treated in this manner occurs as the streams of human activities and ideas mutually interact. The starting, ending, and bounding of an innovation project are all parts of a unitary process of meaning-creation within social contexts. “Creative” thoughts and actions interact throughout the process. (“Creativity through the finishing line”; “implementation first and last”). Not least, such an interpretive model avoids the difficulties that have been encountered in attempts to treat innovation as a series of objective stages. It furthermore provides a coherent theoretical status for creativity as the meaning-creating processes within all personal discovery and learning activities.     

McEwen-Induced Modulation of Endocrine History: A Partial Review

In endless facets of physiology, there are points of homeostatic balance, such that too much or too litttle of something can both be deleterious (i.e., an "inverse U" pattern). This is particularly true when considering glucocorticoids (GCs), the adrenals steroid secreted during stress. In the first part of this paper, I review a number of realms in which a paucity and an excess of GCs are both damaging. Some findings are classical (for example, concerning GC effects upon body weight), while some are quite recent and have considerable implications for both physiology and pathophysiology (for example, inverse U's of GC actions in the realm of immunity and neuronal survival). The second part of the review considers the far thornier issue of how such inverse U's of GC actions are generated on a cellular and molecular level. One solution that has evolved, primarily in the hippocampus within the nervous system, involves the presence of two different types of receptors for GCs within the same cells; so long as the two receptors have very different affinities and mediate opposing effects on some cellular endpoint, an inverse U will emerge. The second solution, found in a number of peripheral tissues, involves GCs having opposing effects on the amount of some signal being generated (e.g., an immune cytokine) and the sensitivity of target tissues to that signal; under conditions that appear to be physiologically relevant, inverse U's emerge from this pattern as well. The final section of this review considers the enormous role played by Bruce McEwen in the emergence of this literature. I suggest that while much of this obviously has to do with the facts that have come from his group, another substantial contribution is from his steadying and supportive personality, the veritable embodiment of homeostatic balance.     

Chance,Experimental Reproducibility,and Mechanistic Regularity

Examples from the sciences showing that mechanisms do not always succeed in producing the phenomena for which they are responsible have led some authors to conclude that the regularity requirement can be eliminated from characterizations of mechanisms. In this article, I challenge this conclusion and argue that a minimal form of regularity is inextricably embedded in examples of elucidated mechanisms that have been shown to be causally responsible for phenomena. Examples of mechanistic explanations from the sciences involve mechanisms that have been shown to produce phenomena with a reproducible rate of success. By contrast, if phenomena are infrequent to the point that they amount to irreproducible observations and experimental results, they are indistinguishable from the background noise of accidental happenings. The inability to detect or measure the phenomenon of interest against the background noise of accidental correlations makes it impossible to elucidate a mechanism by experimental means, to demonstrate that a proposed mechanism actually produces the phenomenon, and ultimately to justify why a hypothetical scenario involving an irregular mechanism should be preferred over attributing irreproducible happenings to chance.     

Developmental and sex-related differences in preschoolers' affective decision making

This study investigated developmental and sex-related differences in affective decision making, using a two-deck version of Children's Gambling Task administered to 3- and 4-year-old children. The main findings were that 4-year-old children displayed better decision-making performance than 3-year-olds. This effect was independent of developmental changes in inductive reasoning, language, and working memory. There were also sex differences in decision-making performance, which were apparent only in 3-year-old children and favored girls. Moreover, age predicted awareness of task and the correlation between the latter and decision-making performance was significant, but only in 4-year-old children. This study thus indicates that there is a remarkable developmental leap in affective decision making, whose effects are apparent around the age of 4, which according to our results, also marks the age when the correlation of declarative knowledge and decision-making performance becomes significant.     

Differential recall of successes and failures: Its relationship to defensiveness,achievement motivation,and anxiety

Differential recall of completed and incompleted tasks under high and low stress was studied in 157 Ss. On the basis of repression, it would be expected that Ss identified as hysterics would recall fewer incompletions (ego threatening failures) under high than low stress. The results indicated that hysteria was not related to recall. On the other hand, Ss with high achievement motivation or low anxiety recalled more incompletions under high than low stress while there were no differences in their recall of completions under high and low stress. These results offered no support for repression. Furthermore, the relationships between recall and achievement motivation and anxiety suggest that the differential recall is due to differences in the original learning of the completed and incompleted tasks.     

Religious versus Conventional Internet-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression

The accessibility and efficacy of two Internet-supported interventions for depression: conventional cognitive behavioral therapy (C-CBT) and religious CBT (R-CBT) were investigated. Depressed participants (N = 79) were randomly assigned to either active treatment or wait-listed control group. Self-report measures of depression, anxiety, and life quality were collected before, immediately after, and 6 months after the intervention. Significant differences among the three conditions emerged at post-intervention with medium to large effect sizes (Cohen’s d between 0.45 and 1.89), but no differences between the R-CBT and C-CBT were found. However, the addition of religious components to CBT contributed to the initial treatment appeal for religious participants, thus increasing the treatment accessibility.