Biological determinism redux: Comment on Silverstein (1993).

L. B. Silverstein (see record 1994-17264-001) criticizes some sociobiologists and psychologists for inferences that are not consistent with the more recent scholarship. In this commentary, it is shown that sociobiology is widely misunderstood. Contrary to popular belief, sociobiologists are not determinists. Instead, most sociobiologists emphasize the important role of environmental factors in shaping the manifestations of endogenous tendencies (not imperatives). In addition, the empirical evidence (e.g., M. E. Lamb and W. A. Goldberg, 1992) fails to support the deterministic view that male primates are predestined to be uninvolved in child care. Even when correctly represented, however, it does not appear that sociobiology can play a useful role in directing public policy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Promoting father involvement: An analysis and critique: Comment on Silverstein (1993).

In analyzing the forces that undermine greater fathering involvement in American society, L. B. Silverstein (see record 1994-17264-001) critiques the views of R. Trivers (1972), J. Belsky, L. Steinberg, and P. Draper (1991), and many sociobiological thinkers regarding the determinants of parenting. Despite the shared view regarding the value of promoting greater father involvement, there are several problems with Silverstein's analysis: (1) casting conservatives as extremists who deny the role of environment in shaping fathering; (2) omitting from the analysis of sociobiology the core notion that organisms adjust their behavior in response to environmental forces in the service of biological, that is, reproductive-fitness, goals; and (3) characterizing the Belsky et al theory of socialization as one that minimizes the role of the environment and implies that intervention efforts to foster father involvement are ineffective for biological and developmental reasons. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Father absence, mother love, and other family issues that need to be questioned: Comment on Silverstein (1993).

Additional information is added to L. B. Silverstein's (see record 1994-17264-001) article regarding human fathers' involvement with their children. It is argued that the "cad–dad" dichotomy should be conceptualized as a continuum to reflect the varying degrees of paternal involvement with children in a variety of family constellations. In addition, H. F. Harlow's (1958) classic research on contact comfort is discussed in relation to misrepresentation of research results on the basis of historical context. Finally, suggestions are provided to expand the reciprocity hypothesis in humans to include other benefits from family involvement, such as emotional connectedness and personal satisfaction from sharing with others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Vocational psychology in the postmodern era: Comment on Richardson (1993).

M. S. Richardson (see record 1994-07341-001) has proposed that vocational psychology be repositioned to a new theoretical location from which to produce knowledge about work in people's lives. This article underscores the importance of Richardson's proposal and comments on 3 features of the new location that is mapped out for vocational psychology: defining work as a social activity of everyday life, using multiple realities constructed by perspectivity, and legitimizing knowledge by its usefulness in practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evolutionary Psychology and Developmental Dynamics: Comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003).

Evolutionary psychology provides a cogent metatheory for psychological science. It has furnished compelling theories of major domains of human functioning, including mating, parenting, kinship, morality, cooperation, conflict, aggression, and aesthetics. It has produced hundreds of empirical discoveries missed entirely by prior psychologists. Developmental dynamics, properly conceived, can add to the theoretical foundation of evolutionary psychology. But it has not provided alternative theories capable of explaining the many detailed empirical discoveries made by evolutionary' psychologists. Nor has it generated a comparable bounty of new empirical discoveries. By critical scientific standards--theoretical cogency, predictive accuracy, interdisciplinary consistency, and empirical harvest--modern evolutionary psychology fares well compared with alternatives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Construct your reality and show us its benefits: Comment on Richardson (1993).

M. S. Richardson (see record 1994-07341-001) has argued that counseling psychologists are resistant to new ideas, resulting in the field's premature rigidity in career development theory, orientation toward White middle-class individuals, and delay in the incorporation of advances in developmental psychology into its theory and research. It is argued that career psychologists suffer less from an adherence to established theories than from the lack of systematic, theory-based research programs. The most effective way to improve theory and research in vocational psychology is to identify new theoretical insights that merit attention and to teach scholars new methods of investigation. Also, people focus on that which they find interesting, and vocational psychology will make significant progress in issues that are relevant to minorities and working-class individuals when people who have intrinsic interests in issues facing these populations have been educated as psychologists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Regulation of drug-maintained behavior: Comment on Meisch (2000).

In his article, R. A. Meisch (see record 2000-00465-009) introduces a concept termed relative persistence of behavior , a measure obtained by comparing rates of behavior under high-response costs to rates obtained under lower response costs. In this commentary, relative persistence of behavior is discussed in terms of behavioral regulation theory, in which responding is allocated in such a way as to maintain a stable balance point. Meisch's relative persistence of behavior may be analogus to the free (paired) baseline technique necessary for testing hypotheses based on behavioral regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic abstraction of stimulus structure from episodes: Comment on Whittlesea and Dorken (1993).

B. W. Whittlesea and M. D. Dorken's (see record 1993-36194-001) experiments were designed to examine whether implicit learning reflects automatic abstraction of the structure underlying stimuli or instead reflects task-dependent encoding of particular experiences. Their episodic approach presents 2 difficulties: One problem is their assumption that automatic abstraction implies abstraction of knowledge directly from the stimulus rather than from memory representations of experiences. A 2nd problem is that they dichotomized information (item information and global regularities) that is naturally and easily acquired simultaneously. Purely episodic systems become inefficient and waste resources in real-life situations involving high levels of experience. It is argued that it is more fruitful to view memory as a conceptualizer that enables efficient interactions with the environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

TODAM and the list-strength and list-length effects: Comment on Murdock and Kahana (1993a).

B. B. Murdock and M. J. Kahana (see record 1993-32216-001) presented a continuous memory version of the theory of distributed associative memory (TODAM) model. They claimed that this model predicts list-strength and list-length findings, including those reported by R. Ratcliff (1990) and K. Murnane and R. M. Shiffrin (1991). This model is quite similar to one discussed by Shiffrin et al (1990), who rejected the model on the basis of its inability to predict both an absent or negative list-strength effect (when strength is varied by repetitions) and a present list-length effect. This comment elaborates the earlier discussion and demonstrates that the version of TODAM proposed by Murdock and Kahana indeed fails for this reason. This is shown first for a somewhat simplified version of the model for which derivations are obvious and then in a simulation of the complete version using the parameter values suggested by Murdock and Kahana. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evolutionary Psychology From a Developmental Systems Perspective: Comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003).

Although agreeing with R. Lickliter and H. Honeycutt (2003; see record 2003-09105-001) that evolutionary psychology lacks and should adopt a coherent developmental model to explain how evolved mechanisms become expressed in phenotypes, it is argued that adhering to the principles of developmental systems theory, despite enhancing evolutionary psychology, would not change appreciably its basic focus. The concepts of innateness and modularity, what is inherited and what evolves, as well as the possible role of developmental plasticity in the evolution of human cognition are discussed. It is proposed that evolutionary psychology can incorporate the developmental systems perspective into its theorizing, with the end result being a science that more closely reflects human nature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integrating complexity into the study of life events: Comment on Suedfeld and Bluck (1993).

Increasingly, researchers are becoming sensitive to the conceptual and methodological problems that arise when data are stripped from their historical and interpersonal contexts. Careful attention to the importance of grounding theory in participants' experiences can enhance all research, regardless of its underlying paradigm. This comment examines P. Suedfeld and S. Bluck's (see record 1993-21556-001) study on integrative complexity as a case in point to highlight the importance of taking context and phenomenological experience into account. In particular, 2 methodological considerations central to personal document analysis are discussed: (a) the role that intentions, relationships, and sociohistorical context play in shaping the content of personal documents and (b) the problems of classifying diverse human experiences without regard to their meaning for the people who lived through them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Abnormality of the difference and the WISC-R: Comment on Silverstein.

Discusses reactions by C. R. Reynolds (see record 1979-27697-001) and A. B. Silverstein (see PA, Vol 66:00000) to an earlier article by the present author (see record 1979-12366-001) that examined the size of abnormal differences between WISC-R subtest scaled scores and Verbal–Performance IQ scores. An error is acknowledged in the presentation of the Verbal–Performance IQ differences, and the validity of the abnormality of the difference statistic for examining subtest scaled scores is discussed. (7 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Genetics and human agency: Comment on Dar-Nimrod and Heine (2011).

Dar-Nimrod and Heine (2011) decried genetic essentialism without denying the importance of genetics in the genesis of human behavior, and although I agree on both counts, a deeper issue remains unaddressed: how should we adjust our cognitions about our own behavior in light of genetic influence, or is it perhaps not necessary to take genetics into account at all? I suggest that the genetics of behavior does have important implications for how we understand ourselves, the differences among us, and the ethical implications of our actions, but that the usual metric for these considerations, the heritability coefficient, is not the correct one. I propose an alternative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Negative affect and sexual risk behavior: Comment on Crepaz and Marks (2001).

In this commentary, the authors highlight the findings of the meta-analysis by N. Crepaz and G. Marks (see record 2001-11106-006). The role of affect in sexual risk behavior, although intuitively obvious, is not well understood and has been largely ignored by HIV prevention researchers in favor of social-cognitive models of behavior. Crepaz and Marks synthesized the results from studies that have examined the relation of negative affect (e.g., depression, anxiety, anger) to sexual risk behavior and concluded that in the literature to date, these variables appear unrelated. The authors suggest that the Crepaz and Marks findings are not surprising given the methods used in the reviewed studies and suggest methodological approaches that will allow more sensitive analyses of the association between affect and sexual risk behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fictions and Facts About Evolutionary Approaches to Human Behavior: Comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003).

Six misconceptions about evolutionary approaches to human behavior are exposed. Evidence is adduced to support the assertions that evolutionary approaches do not (a) adopt a reductionistic "gene-centered" level of analysis, (b) assume that natural selection is the only process that creates and designs ontogenetic processes and phenotypic outcomes, (c) assume that genes are the only agents responsible for the transgenerational inheritance of phenotypic traits and characteristics, (d) assume that genes are self-contained and impervious to extragenetic influences, (e) posit a strong form of genetic determinism, or (f) pay lip service to the role of the environment. Building straw men and knocking them down is an inherently destructive enterprise; integrating different approaches is a more constructive way of contributing to the growth of knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The problem of differing false-alarm rates for the process dissociation procedure: Comment on Verfaellie and Treadwell (1993).

Results reported by M. Verfaellie and J. R. Treadwell (see record 1993-18420-001) contain an interesting paradox: Under standard study conditions in which Ss read words, amnesic patients and control Ss performed identically, both in terms of overall recognition hit rate and when the data were decomposed by L. L. Jacoby's (see record 1992-07943-001) process dissociation procedure into consciously controlled and automatic components of performance. One reason for this curious outcome is that false-alarm rates differed considerably between amnesic patients and control Ss, which is not taken into account in Verfaellie and Treadwell's application of the process dissociation procedure. Considered in this article are 3 possible reactions to the problem of false-alarm rates differing between S groups (or between experimental conditions) for the process dissociation procedure. A correction can be applied either (a) before the process dissociation procedure is used or (b) after the consciously controlled component has been estimated from the procedure. Alternatively, (c) data with this problem may simply be uninterpretable through analysis with the process dissociation procedure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Problems in the application of structural equation modeling: Comment on Randhawa, Beamer, and Lundberg (1993).

Critique methodological aspects of B. S. Randhawa's et al (see record 1993-23567-001) structural equation modeling (SEM) of relations between self-efficacy, attitudes, and achievement in mathematics. Major findings of their study were that self-efficacy mediated the effects of attitudes on achievement and that self-efficacy and attitudes were more strongly related to achievement for boys than for girls. The authors' reanalysis of their data does not substantiate these conclusions. Rather, it identifies inappropriate applications of SEM and the consequent misinterpretations of results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Prolegomenon for a Viable Evolutionary Psychology-The Myth and the Reality: Comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003).

R. Lickliter and H. Honeycutt (2003; see record 2003-09105-001) attempted to create a dynamic developmental systems theory of evolutionary psychology. In this commentary, the author argues that the quality of their reasoning, their conflation of evolution and evolution by natural selection, their failure to explain the relative importance of multilevel, epigenetic interactions, their lack of population thinking, and their failure to define adaptation undermines their endeavor. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comment on Natterson (2003).

The author views J. M. Natterson's (2003) article as a return to Freud's emphasis on the centrality of love in psychoanalysis freshly conceptualized within a contemporary intersubjective perspective. Natterson's definition of love is viewed by the author as consisting of 3 independent components (attachment, recognition, and mutuality) that may harmonize or conflict. The author notes the rarity of Natterson's intimate disclosure of the specifics of his own subjectivity to the reader, and their value in advancing the understanding of psychoanalytic process and theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)