Thomas K. Saville Is Alive and Well.

The author notes that an announcement published in the American Psychologist, Vol 27(12), December 1972, page 1202, indicating the author is deceased is incorrect. The author is still living. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Marcia K. Johnson: 2006 Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.

Presents the citation to Marcia K. Johnson, who received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions "for raising and illuminating fundamental questions about the cognitive and neural processes that constitute the subjective experience of mental life." A brief profile and a selected bibliography, as well as Johnson's award address, entitled Memory and Reality (see record 2006-21079-028), accompany the citation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology at St. Thomas University.

The history of psychology at St. Thomas University can be viewed in two distinct phases which co-incide with the period from its foundation in 1910 until 1964 when it moved to a new campus in Fredericton. The first phase saw psychology as a branch of philosophy. The second phase, commencing in 1965 has manifested rapid development of the psychology department which seems to indicate the continued interest in psychology by students of the small liberal arts school in Canada. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thomas O. Nelson (1943-2005).

Presents an obituary for Thomas O. Nelson, PhD (1943-2005), editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, who died on January 14, 2005, of complications from an aortic aneurysm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental evolution and development: Evidence for secondary representation in children, great apes, and other animals.

Recent interest in the development and evolution of theory of mind has provided a wealth of information about representational skills in both children and animals. According to J. Perner (1991), children begin to entertain secondary representations in the 2nd year of life. This advance manifests in their passing hidden displacement tasks, engaging in pretense and means-ends reasoning, interpreting external representations, displaying mirror self-recognition and empathic behavior, and showing an early understanding of "mind" and imitation. New data show a cluster of mental accomplishments in great apes that is very similar to that observed in 2-year-old humans. It is suggested that it is most parsimonious to assume that this cognitive profile is of homologous origin and that great apes possess secondary representational capacity. Evidence from animals other than apes is scant. This analysis leads to a number of predictions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of "Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium."

Reviews the book, Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium edited by E. Tory Higgins, C. Peter Herman and Mark P. Zanna (1981). This volume presents the papers from the first Ontario Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology which was held at the University of Western Ontario in 1978. The first five chapters deal with cognitive organization. Chapter 3 provides a broad overview of schemas and their functions and liabilities which is particularly good for the reader who is fairly naive to cognitive psychology. Chapter 2 overlaps with it quite a bit, but is narrower in scope - focusing only on the issue of the relationship of information relevance and congruence to schema memory. Chapter I presents a review of the literature and a series of experiments on cognitive clustering. Chapters 4 and 5 are more conceptual in nature, dealing with respectively, the manner in which schemas govern the encoding and retention of social information and a storage bin model of category accesibility. The second part of the book, chapters 6-11, focuses on specific aspects of cognitive mechanisms, processes and biases. Some of the chapters, such as those on the use of confirmatory strategies in interpersonal hypothesis testing, self-centered biases, and nonverbal behaviour in impression management, are summaries of the authors' own line of research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social cognitive processes mediating the relationship between exposure to television's sexual content and adolescents' sexual behavior.

This study used multiple-group structural equation modeling to test a model explaining the association between exposure to televised sexual content and initiation of intercourse among an ethnically diverse national sample of 1,292 adolescents. The authors hypothesized, on the basis of social-cognitive theory, that exposure to televised sexual content would influence adolescents' safe-sex self-efficacy, sex-related outcome expectancies, and perceived peer norms regarding sex, and that each of these would, in turn, influence intercourse initiation. Findings support a model in which the relationship between exposure to TV's sexual content and intercourse initiation is mediated by safe-sex self-efficacy among African Americans and Whites but not among Hispanics. Outcome expectancies and perceived peer norms may also mediate the link between exposure and intercourse initiation among all 3 racial/ethnic groups, although evidence of this could not be confirmed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Brave new mind: A thoughtful inquiry into the nature of mental life.

Reviews the book, Brave new mind: A thoughtful inquiry into the nature of mental life by Peter Dodwell (see record 2000-08633-000). The author poses the major question for cognitive science: "Can mental life be exhaustively studied as a purely natural phenomenon, or must we go beyond the mundane, the merely physical, to grasp its reality?" (p. viii). His answer is, that "absolutely no psychological consequence follows from a model couched in exclusively algorithmic, physical, or physiological terms, which is the way contemporary cognitive science proceeds" (p. 190). Planned as a history of cognitive science, and its contributory disciplines of psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and computing science, and a contemporary survey of its strengths and weaknesses, the project, according to its author, one of this country's most respected researchers, "got out of hand" (p. vii). While documenting the achievements of cognitive science, this volume is much more a mature retrospective on its limitations and, implicitly, its failures of intent, and this by a participant in the enterprise whose reflections reach back more than 40 years to the beginning of his academic career. It is a courageous endeavour and deserves to be read not only as a critique of cognitive science, of the reductionism of the standard model, but as an autobiographical account of the enlightenment of one participant in that science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Go with the flow: How to master a nonlinear multiple-cue judgment task.

The authors examined the cognitive processes that participants use in linear and nonlinear multiple-cue judgment tasks, hypothesizing that people are unable to use explicit cue abstraction in a nonlinear task, instead turning to exemplar memory. Experiment 1 confirmed that people are unable to use cue abstraction in nonlinear tasks but failed to confirm the hypothesized, spontaneous shift to exemplar memory. Instead, the participants appeared to be trapped in persistent and futile attempts to abstract the cue-criterion relations. Only after being instructed to rely on exemplar memory in Experiment 2 did they master the nonlinear task. The results suggest that adaptive shifts of representation need not occur spontaneously and that analytical thought may sometimes harm performance in nonlinear tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imagining stereotypes away: The moderation of implicit stereotypes through mental imagery.

Research on implicit stereotypes has raised important questions about an individual's ability to moderate and control stereotypic responses. With few strategies shown to be effective in moderating implicit effects, the present research investigates a new strategy based on focused mental imagery. Across 5 experiments, participants who engaged in counterstereotypic mental imagery produced substantially weaker implicit stereotypes compared with participants who engaged in neutral, stereotypic, or no mental imagery. This reduction was demonstrated with a variety of measures, eliminating explanations based on response suppression or shifts in response criterion. Instead, the results suggest that implicit stereotypes are malleable, and that controlled processes, such as mental imagery, may influence the stereotyping process at its early as well as later stages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Award for distinguished contribution to research in public policy: Thomas Grisso.

Presents the citation, biography, and selected bibliography of Thomas Grisso, one of the recipients of the American Psychological Association's Awards for Distinguished Contribution to Research in Public Policy. From the awardee's citation: "For pioneering the introduction of rigorous empirically based psychological assessment methods into real-world forensic contexts. His studies of the competence of adolescents to waive legal rights broke new ground in psycholegal research and have been widely cited by courts and advocates. His impact on improving standards of forensic ethics has been profound and pervasive. His contributions to the advancement of professional training and service delivery by mental health professionals in the legal system have been equally deep and widespread. Along with Paul Appelbaum, he has articulated a model of the competence of persons with mental disorder to accept or refuse treatment that stands as a permanent contribution to the psychology of law." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developing and testing a model of loneliness.

This article presents a model of loneliness that incorporates characteristics of the social network, background variables, personality characteristics, and evaluative aspects. The most salient aspect of this approach is its emphasis on cognitive processes that mediate between characteristics of the social network and the experience of loneliness. A total of 554 adult men and women served as respondents. The program LISREL, a causal modelling approach, was used to analyze the data. The LISREL program includes a goodness-of-fit test that indicates the degree of fit between a particular model and the data. The hypothesized model made a valuable contribution to the understanding of loneliness: It accounted for 52.3% of the variance in the data set. One of the model's major advantages is its ability to disentangle both the direct and the indirect causal influences of the various factors on loneliness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A distinction between dogmatic and rigid thinking.

"The purpose of this study was to investigate certain cognitive aspects of the phenomenon of dogmatism, to distinguish such aspects from rigidity, and to demonstrate the operation of personality organization upon cognitive behavior." The findings are in accord with the hypotheses posed and lend support to the validity of the formulation of the construct of dogmatism and its differentiation from rigidity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Code duelling.

Reviews the book, Mental representations: A dual coding approach by Allan Paivio (1986). Is there a common code that underlies all thought? The claim that there exists such an abstract language of thought, distinct from natural languages and imagery, has a long and impressive history. In this book, the author continues his longstanding argument against the existence of such a common abstract language of the mind. The chapters on episodic memory, bilingualism, and image manipulation give excellent accounts of experimental results and provide the foundation for a defense of dual coding theory that should intimidate all but the most dedicated adherents to the common code. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive processes and interpersonal predictions.

An investigation of the cognitive process by which one observer makes predictions about another person in a social situation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Testing the efficacy of theoretically derived improvements in the treatment of social phobia.

Recent theoretical models of social phobia suggest that targeting several specific cognitive factors in treatment should enhance treatment efficacy over that of more traditional skills-based treatment programs. In the current study, 195 people with social phobia were randomly allocated to 1 of 3 treatments: standard cognitive restructuring plus in vivo exposure, an “enhanced” treatment that augmented the standard program with several additional treatment techniques (e.g., performance feedback, attention retraining), and a nonspecific (stress management) treatment. The enhanced treatment demonstrated significantly greater effects on diagnoses, diagnostic severity, and anxiety during a speech. The specific treatments failed to differ significantly on self-report measures of social anxiety symptoms and life interference, although they were both significantly better than the nonspecific treatment. The enhanced treatment also showed significantly greater effects than standard treatment on 2 putative process measures: cost of negative evaluation and negative views of one's skills and appearance. Changes on these process variables mediated differences between the treatments on changes in diagnostic severity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Defense processes can be conscious or unconscious.

Comments on an article by P. Cramer (see record 2000-15774-007) which discussed renewed interest in the concept of defense mechanisms. The author dissents from two proposals made by Cramer: (1) that defense mechanisms are used nonintentionally and (2) that they are necessarily unconscious processes. It is argued that Sigmund Freud's position—that defense, including repression, could be conscious or unconscious—is the viable position. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The silence of the library: Environment, situational norm, and social behavior.

On the basis of the idea that situational norms are mentally represented as associations between environments and normative behavior, it was proposed that an environment can automatically direct normative behavior. More specifically, when situational norms are well-established (e.g., when entering the library, one should be silent), an environment is capable of automatically activating mental representations of normative behavior and the behavior itself. In these experiments, participants were exposed to pictures of environments, and effects on accessibility of representations of normative behavior and on actual behavior were assessed. Results indicated that representations of behavior and actual behavior itself are activated automatically when (a) goals to visit the environment are active and (b) strong associations between environment and normative behavior are established. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thomas E. Ludwig: Charles L. Brewer Award for Distinguished Teaching in Psychology.

The American Psychological Foundation (APF) Charles L. Brewer Award for Distinguished Teaching in Psychology recognizes an outstanding career contribution to the teaching of psychology. The 2005 recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award is Thomas E. Ludwig. Dorothy W. Cantor, president of the APF, will present the Charles L. Brewer Award for Distinguished Teaching in Psychology at the 113th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association on August 19, 2005, at 4:00 p.m. Members of the 2005 APF Board of Trustees are Dorothy W. Cantor, president; Norman Abeles, secretary; Charles L. McKay, treasurer; Elisabeth R. Straus, executive vice president/executive director; Norman Anderson; Camilla Benbow; Patrick H. DeLeon; Ronald E. Fox; William C. Howell; Steven E. James; Joseph D. Matarazzo; Martin E. P. Seligman; Robert J. Sternberg; and Philip G. Zimbardo. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The unconscious status of defense mechanisms.

Responds to L. S. Newman's and M. H. Erdelyi's comments (see records 2001-18061-011 and 2001-18061-012, respectively) on the P. Cramer article (see record 2000-15774-007). The author maintains that to consciously and intentionally modify one's thinking, affect, or behavior (i.e., to cope) so as to manage a stressful situation is an inherently different process than the unintentional cognitive distortion that occurs on an unconscious level when a defense mechanism is used. Furthermore, it is argued that the features of being unconscious and unintentional are critical for defining the defense mechanism and for differentiating this process from other methods of adaptation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)