Feedback by Any Other Name Is Still Interactivity: A Reply to Roelofs (2004).

In his comment, A. Roelofs claimed that a feedforward-only theory of spoken word production (WEAVER + +) can account for certain basic facts of spoken word production that B. Rapp and M. Goldrick (2000) argued could not be accounted for by feedforward-only theories. Rapp and Goldrick argued that to account for these facts, mechanisms such as feedback and cascading activation are required. In this reply, the authors discuss difficulties with Roelofs's argumentation and point to recent relevant empirical evidence. The authors conclude that Roelofs failed to disprove Rapp and Goldrick's claims and, furthermore, failed to provide strong evidence of the specific feedback characteristics in WEAVER + +. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Counselor recognition of transference reactions: Reply to Mallinckrodt (1996) and Carter (1996).

J. A. Carter (see record 199600458-003) and B. Mallinckrodt (see record 199600458-002) have provided thought-provoking critiques of the article (K. D. Multon, M. J. Patton, & D. M. Kivlighan; see record 199600458-001) that described the development of the Missouri Identifying Transference Scale. This reply attempts to address the issues of construct definition noted by both respondents, argues for the importance of a multimethod approach in describing transference, and attempts to differentiate transferential aspects of the relationship from other relational components. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The search for the canonical experience: Reply to Pennebaker and Memon (1996).

In response to J. W. Pennebaker and A. Memon ( see record 199601402-002), the authors reflect on the debate concerning recovered-false memories of childhood sexual abuse by adults in psychotherapy. They discuss the difficulties of discriminating between problematic and false claims about truth and to evaluating problematic claims about truth. The authors emphasize the importance of recognizing the asymmetrical nature of the patient-therapist relationship and the power of suggestive influences in psychotherapy. They conclude their remarks by endorsing a combination of clinical observation and experimental methodology as providing the best hope for eventually resolving complex issues such as the recovered-false memory debate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distortions in visual memory: Reply to Engebretson and Huttenlocher (1996).

P. H. Engebretson and J. Huttenlocher (see record 83-25317) commented on an article by the authors (B. Tversky and D. Schiano, 1989) in which the authors reported that the same lines or curves were distorted in memory differently when interpreted as graph elements than as map elements. In subsequent work (D. Schiano and B. Tversky, 1992), the authors found a different pattern of error for meaningless lines, a pattern consistent with a well-known perceptual effect, the tilt illusion. Engebretson and Huttenlocher's comment was primarily directed at this tilt-illusion account. The comment presented an alternative explanation that was based on a model of J. Huttenlocher, L. V. Hedges, and S. Duncan (1991) and reported 2 experiments on uninterpreted stimuli. The results of those experiments, however, are consistent with established findings in the tilt-illusion and memory-interference literatures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The probative value of simultaneous contradictory belief: Reply to Gigerenzer and Regier (1996).

G. Gigerenzer and T. Regier (see PA, Vol 83:21892) are uneasy about the vagueness of the dichotomy the author (S. A. Sloman; see PA, Vol 83:21925) sets up between associative and rule-based processing that results, they argue, from collapsing too many different distinctions. The author's intent was not to collapse but rather to abstract from those distinctions. Both the author and Gigerenzer and Regier do agree on how best to characterize associative computation: by using principles of similarity and temporal contiguity. Gigerenzer and Regier also offer alternative interpretations of the author's primary form of evidence, simultaneous contradictory belief. This phenomenon does not, by itself, force an interpretation in terms of associative and rule-based processing. Nevertheless, the alternatives they offer suffer from conceptual flaws and unfavorable empirical consequences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prospects and possibilities: Next steps in sound understanding of youth violence: Reply to Kuperminc and Reppuci (1996), Henggeler (1996), Dakof (1996), and McCord (1996).

Four issues regarding family influences and youth violence are discussed: (a) the need to consider family processes and influences on development in a more complex fashion than generally has occurred in risk and intervention models, (b) theoretical implications of methods used to assess family processes, (c) construction of risk models and translation of risk models to intervention design, and (d) inclusion of developmental theory and contextual influences in risk and intervention models of youth violence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Correction to Rilling (1996).

Reports an error in the original article by M. Rilling (American Psychologist, 1996[Jun], 51[6], 589–598). On page 590, the 1st full paragraph should read "Robert [not Richard] Thompson, the senior author with James McConnell (Thompson & McConnell, 1995) on a now-classic study on learning in planaria, studied with Lashley.' The correct reference for the Thompson and McConnell study is also provided (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1996-04950-001). During the 1960s, at a time of skepticism about the possibility of invertebrate learning, James McConnell and other researchers attracted to the glamour created by McConnell for planarian learning established invertebrate learning with a Pavolovian conditioning paradigm and a wide variety of control groups and procedures that are still used today in work on the biochemistry of learning and memory. McConnell abandoned his dream to transfer memory from one organism to another through RNA as a "memory molecule.' As a science writer and "pop' psychologist, McConnell was a public relations genius who oversold planarian learning and, later, behavior modification. This article solves the mystery of why the Unabomber tried unsuccessfully to kill McConnell with a letter bomb. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Process, not representation: Reply to Radavansky (1999).

The size of fan effects is determined by processes at retrieval, not by whether or not information is represented as situations. Evidence contradicts G. A. Radvansky's (see record 1999-05245-005) claim that time to retrieve information from a situation does not depend on the number of elements in the situation. Moreover, Radvansky's principles for ascribing situational models to experiments appear to be post hoc ways of redescribing the data. On the other hand, the evidence does support the Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational (ACT-R) assumption that participants can adjust their attentional weightings and so produce differential fan effects. Moreover, the ACT-R theory of the fan effect is consistent with many other findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reply to Strain, Patterson, and Seidenberg (2002).

E. Strain, K. E. Patterson, and M. S. Seidenberg (2002) reported an effect of imageability and a Regularity X Imageability interaction in a regression analysis of naming latencies to 120 words. One of their items (couth) was named correctly by just 5 of their 24 participants, and its reaction time was an outlier on their distribution. When that single item is removed, the significant predictors are age of acquisition (AoA), word frequency, regularity, and length. Analyses of the combined data from J. Monaghan and A. W. Ellis's (2002) Experiments 1-3 indicate that AoA predicts naming latencies for exception words but not consistent words. E. Strain et al.'s other points are considered in the light of these observations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The phoenix of bipolarity: Reply to Watson and Tellegen (1999).

In their commentary on our review (J. A. Russell & J. M. Carroll, 1999; see record 1998-03256-001), D. Watson and A. Tellegen (1999; see record 1999-03909-006) agreed that when various factors, including activation, are taken into account, the structure of self-reported affect includes a bipolar dimension contrasting pleasant with unpleasant feelings. Agreement on this the central conclusion of our review may surprise readers familiar with the widespread claim that pleasant and unpleasant affect are not bipolar opposites but are largely independent of one another. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive concomitants of life events—finding a balance between generalizability and contextualization: Reply to Pennell (1996).

G. E. Pennell (see record 84-03947) focused on the importance of considering the contextual aspects of psychological research on life experiences, using P. Suedfeld and S. Bluck (see record 1993-21556-001) as an example where these aspects are insufficiently emphasized. The authors do consider sociohistorical context and idiographic variables important; however, overestimating their role is dangerous. The extreme contextualist position makes all generalization impossible and replaces scientific investigation with biography or even autobiography. It also opens the door for severe researcher bias effects. Scholars must be free to establish the balance between nomothetic and idiographic approaches where they think appropriate. The optimal compensation for a leaning in either direction is for colleagues to broaden the literature through individual and collaborative research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Occlusion, symmetry, and object-based attention: Reply to Saiki (2000).

J. Saiki (see record 2000-13210-027) argued that, because the stimuli used by M. Behrmann, R. S. Zemel, and M. C. Mozer (see record 1998-04674-001) were confounded by symmetry, conclusions about whether amodally completed objects can benefit from object-based attention are unwarranted. Here, the authors, examine J. Saiki's claim further and expand on their view of the mechanisms underlying object-based attention, suggesting that perceptual organization is the process whereby features from a single object are selectively attended. In light of this, they claim that heuristics such as symmetry and collinearity play an important role in the facilitation of features from a single object. In support of this claim, they present data from a further experiment using displays that exploit common fate, another grouping heuristic, and show that, under these conditions, the hallmark of object-based attention, a single-object advantage, is obtained for the occluded (amodally completed) shapes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mentalism, mechanisms, and medical analogues: Reply to Wakefield (1998).

J. C. Wakefield's (1998) critique of W. C. Follette and A. C. Houts's (1996) article is addressed by raising questions about (a) mentalism as a framework for studying psychopathology, (b) the nature of inferred mechanisms and the process of making such inferences, and (c) the accuracy of claiming that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; American Psychiatric Association) expansion is analogous to the success of physical medicine. The authors argue that Wakefield's analysis of mental disorders leads to the conclusion that the modern DSMs are not reflective of the progress of physical medicine. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reply to Pariser (2005).

The author responds to Michael Pariser's critique (see record 2005-01622-013) of her original article (see record 2003-99989-005) by distinguishing between reduction and reductionism, by refusing to see philosophy and neuroscience as competitors, by rejecting the call to adapt psychoanalysis to the demands of managed care, and by using the ideas of Wittgenstein to point out the problems of too-facile translation between the languages of neuroscience and of emotional-relational experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reply to Alpert (1995).

Replies to J. L. Alpert's (see record 1995-44717-001) comment on Brenneis' (see record 1995-18442-001) article concerning the relation of dreams to early childhood trauma. Brenneis addresses Alpert's (1) dispute of the findings on the relation of dream content to traumatic experience; (2) argument that clinicians, in reconstructing trauma, work from a broader context than dreams; and (3) insistence that clinical findings discrepant from research findings not be summarily dismissed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reply to Shill (2004).

Shill's (see record 2004-11107-008) claim that the intersubjective perspective does not address conflict and defense is glaringly mistaken. In his article on signal anxiety, Shill (2004) declared that "the intersubjectivist approach does not address issues of conflict and defense at all" (p. 119). Astoundingly, he seems to have made this absurd pronouncement without being aware of any of the numerous articles and chapters my collaborators and I have written on the subject of psychological conflict and defense over the past three decades, one of which was published in this very journal (Stolorow & Brandchaft, 1987). Our aim has never been to defocus emotional conflict but rather to contextualize it-that is, to locate it within constitutive intersubjective systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The hide-and-seek of hidden covariation detection: Reply to Lewicki, Hill, and Czyzewska (1997).

P. Lewicki, M. Czyzewska, and H. Hoffman (see record 1997-02349-013) argued that H. Hendrickx, J. De Houwer, F. Baeyens, P. Eelen, and E. Van Avermaet's (see record 1997-02349-012) failures to replicate hidden covariation detection (HCD) were due to procedural weaknesses. They also discuss theoretical arguments and evidence supposedly supportive of the generality and robustness of the phenomenon. In the current article, the authors argue that the boundary conditions Lewicki et al. proposed are not based on experimental evidence, that they are too vague, and that the criteria they give for obtaining HCD are applied in a highly selective way. Further, Lewicki et al. did not take alternative explanations of the null results into account. The authors conclude that HCD is not as general and robust as previously suggested and that research efforts must be directed at identifying its boundary conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stress and specificity: Reply to Miller (2009).

T. F. Denson, M. Spanovic, and N. Miller (see record 2009-19763-001) meta-analytically tested the hypotheses that specific appraisals and emotions would predict cortisol and immune responses to laboratory stressors and emotion inductions. Although the cortisol data supported the integrated specificity hypothesis, G. E. Miller (see record 2009-19763-002) raised questions concerning the extent to which the immunity data supported specificity. The authors respond to these concerns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The keyword method and presentation rates: Reply to Pressley (1987).

We suggest that item differences between experiments may account for observed differences in the effectiveness of the keyword mnemonic. Specifically, the keyword mnemonic may be executed more readily (and rapidly) with items that contain obvious keywords than with a broader cross-section of items. We also point out several instances in which positions were incorrectly attributed to us (Hall & Fuson, 1986) in Pressley's (1987) article. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)