The emerging role of school psychology

This report relates personal experiences as they influenced the emerging role of the school psychologist, especially in Pennsylvania and Indiana from 1930 to 1970.     

Envisioning motherhood: Mental-state language in caregiving narratives across the perinatal period

Nancy Suchman's work highlighted the fundamental role of maternal mentalization in maternal addiction, mental health, and caregiving challenges. In this study, we aimed to examine the role of mental-state language (MSL) as a measure of mentalization in prenatal and postnatal narratives and their sentiment in a sample of 91 primarily White mothers from the western United States, followed from the second trimester of pregnancy, through the third trimester, to 4 months postpartum. Specifically, we investigated the use of affective and cognitive MSL in prenatal narratives when mothers visualized caring for their baby and postnatal narratives when mothers compared their prenatal visualization to the current caregiving reality. Results indicated moderate consistency in MSL between the second and third trimesters, but prenatal and postnatal MSL was not significantly correlated. Across all time points, higher use of MSL was related to more positive sentiment, indicating an association between mentalization and positive caregiving representations across the perinatal period. Women used more affective than cognitive MSL in prenatal imagination of caregiving, but this pattern was reversed in their postpartum reflection. Implications on assessing parental mentalization prenatally and considering the relative dominance of affective and cognitive mentalizing are discussed while considering study limitations.     

Spatial stimulus cue information supplying auditory saltation

Auditory saltation is a misperception of the spatial location of repetitive, transient stimuli. It arises when clicks at one location are followed in perfect temporal cadence by identical clicks at a second location. This report describes two psychophysical experiments designed to examine the sensitivity of auditory saltation to different stimulus cues for auditory spatial perception. Experiment 1 was a dichotic study in which six different six-click train stimuli were used to generate the saltation effect. Clicks lateralised by using interaural time differences and clicks lateralised by using interaural level differences produced equivalent saltation effects, confirming an earlier finding. Switching the stimulus cue from an interaural time difference to an interaural level difference (or the reverse) in mid train was inconsequential to the saltation illusion. Experiment 2 was a free-field study in which subjects rated the illusory motion generated by clicks emitted from two sound sources symmetrically disposed around the interaural axis, ie on the same cone of confusion in the auditory hemifield opposite one ear. Stimuli in such positions produce spatial location judgments that are based more heavily on monaural spectral information than on binaural computations. The free-field stimuli produced robust saltation. The data from both experiments are consistent with the view that auditory saltation can emerge from spatial processing, irrespective of the stimulus cue information used to determine click laterality or location.     

Lightness constancy: a direct test of the illumination-estimation hypothesis

Many models of color constancy assume that the visual system estimates the scene illuminant and uses this estimate to determine an object's color appearance. A version of this illumination-estimation hypothesis, in which the illuminant estimate is associated with the explicitly perceived illuminant, was tested. Observers made appearance matches between two experimental chambers. Observers adjusted the illumination in one chamber to match that in the other and then adjusted a test patch in one chamber to match the surface lightness of a patch in the other. The illumination-estimation hypothesis, as formulated here, predicted that after both matches the luminances of the light reflected from the test patches would be identical. The data contradict this prediction. A second experiment showed that manipulating the immediate surround of a test patch can affect perceived lightness without affecting perceived illumination. This finding also falsifies the illumination-estimation hypothesis.     

The brain's hemispheres and controlled search of the lexicon: evidence from fixated words and pseudowords

Difference between the brain's hemispheres in efficiency of intentional search of the mental lexicon with phonological, orthographic, and semantic strategies was investigated. Letter strings for lexical decision were presented at fixation, with a lateralized distractor to the LVF or RVF. Word results revealed that both hemispheres were capable of using each of the three strategies, but the right hemisphere had better baseline processing of orthography and was better at processing semantics. Pseudoword results supported the right hemisphere advantage for orthography and showed a left hemisphere advantage for phonology and assessment of possible semantic relationships. Taken together, the data support the idea that the right hemisphere uses orthography to make efficient decisions about novelty of an item, while the left engages in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion to test hypotheses about unfamiliar items. The convergence of data with previous research reveals that the procedure, as well as analyses of pseudowords, inform laterality research.     

Individuals with Autism can Categorize Facial Expressions

The ability of high-functioning individuals with autism to perceive facial expressions categorically was studied using eight facial expression continua created via morphing software. Participants completed a delayed matching task and an identification task. Like undergraduate male participants (N = 12), performance on the identification task for participants with autism (N = 15) was predicted by performance on the delayed matching task for the angry-afraid, happy-sad, and happy-surprised continua. This result indicates a clear category boundary and suggests that individuals with autism do perceive at least some facial expressions categorically. As this result is inconsistent with findings from other studies of categorical perception in individuals with autism, possible explanations for these findings are discussed.     

Neuropsychological impairment as a consequence of football (soccer) play and football heading: a preliminary analysis and report on school students (13-16 years).

Footballers run the risk of incurring mild head injury from a variety of sources, including the intentional use of the head to play the ball, known as heading. This paper presents a preliminary exploratory analysis of data collected to examine whether cumulative incidence of mild head injury, or cumulative heading frequency, are related to neuropsychological functioning in male adolescent footballers. In a quasi-experimental cross-sectional design, neuropsychological test scores of school team footballers were compared with those of similarly aged rugby players and noncontact sport players. Cumulative mild head injury incidence was estimated using self-reports, and cumulative heading was estimated using a combination of observation and self-reports. No participants had sustained a head injury within 3 months of testing. There was no relationship between head injury and neuropsychological performance, and there were no decrements in either the footballers or the rugby players in comparison with the noncontact sport players. Within the footballers, cumulative heading did not predict any of the neuropsychological test scores. These findings indicate the absence of neuropsychological impairment arising due to cumulative mild head injury incidence, or cumulative heading. Although these null findings may be reassuring to players, parents, and football organizers, we stress that they are preliminary. Further data is being collected from the same populations to provide more reliable effect estimates.     

Perceptions of Organizational Politics: A Meta-analysis of Outcomes

Organizational researchers during the past few decades have increasingly focused on the role of subjective work issues and their impact on important worker-related outcomes. One of the most prominently studied factors, perceptions of organizational politics, has received much recent conceptual and empirical attention. In an effort to better understand the relationship between perceptions of organizational politics and key outcomes, we apply meta-analysis on 79 independent samples from 59 published and unpublished studies involving 25,059 individual participants. Results indicate strong negative relationships between POP and job satisfaction and between POP and organizational commitment, moderately positive relationships between POP and the outcomes of job stress and turnover intentions, and a non-significant relationship between POP and in-role job performance. Moderator tests show that age, work setting (i.e., public sector or private sector), and cultural differences (i.e., domestic sample or international sample), have contingent effects on certain POP relationships.     

Imbalanced word-reading profiles in eighth-graders

This current study introduced a new method to investigate the prevalence and correlates of significant imbalances in the relative accuracy with which eighth-graders read nonwords (e.g., prauma) and exception words (e.g., vaccine). Substantial proportions of students showed imbalanced word-reading profiles, but these were not strongly tied to differences in reading and spelling achievement. Of the students without reading difficulties, 19% had imbalanced word-reading profiles favoring exception words and 17% had imbalanced word-reading profiles favoring nonwords. Of the poor readers, 39% met the criterion for phonological dyslexia (with imbalanced word-reading profiles favoring exception words) and 14% met the criterion for surface dyslexia (with imbalanced word-reading profiles favoring nonwords) in relation to the eighth-grade benchmark readers, but the incidence of these types of dyslexia varied with verbal ability. Of the poor readers with normal verbal ability, 60% were classified as phonological dyslexics and none was classified as surface dyslexic. In students low in verbal ability, surface dyslexia was more common. However, when imbalanced word-reading profiles were defined in relation to fourth-grade reading-level controls, only 12 phonological dyslexics and 1 surface dyslexic were identified. Relatively few cases of either type of developmental dyslexia appeared to be "pure."