Obituaries: Leo Joseph Postman (1918-2004).

Presents the obituary of Leo Joseph Postman, one of the most prolific psychologists of the last century. With over 250 publications to his credit, Postman died on April 22, 2004, of heart failure in Marblehead, Massachusetts, at the age of 85. His life and career accomplishments are discussed. Postman is best known for his interests in perception, serial learning, memory, and interference theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional arousal, client perceptual processing, and the working alliance in experiential psychotherapy for depression.

Early-, middle-, and late-phase client emotional arousal, perceptual processing strategies, and working alliance were examined in relation to treatment outcome on 4 measures in 32 clients who previously underwent experiential therapy for depression. Hierarchical regression analyses relating these variables to outcome indicated that results varied depending on the therapeutic process, phase of treatment, and outcome measure involved in the analyses. Mid-therapy arousal predicted improvements in self-esteem, whereas mid- and late treatment perceptual processing predicted reductions in client interpersonal dysfunction. Emotional arousal in conjunction with perceptual processing during mid-therapy predicted reductions in depressive and psychopathological symptomatology better than either of these variables alone. The implications of these findings for psychotherapy research and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"I'm OK but You're Not" and Other Peer-Relational Schemas: Explaining Individual Differences in Children's Social Goals.

This study examined the links among 5th and 6th graders' (279 girls and 310 boys) self- and peer perceptions, social goals, and social behavior. Social goals mediated the effects of self- and peer perceptions on 3 types of behavior: proactive aggression, prosocial behavior, and withdrawal. In addition to their main effects (self-perception predicting variance in agentic goals, peer perception being related to communal goals), self- and peer perception interacted in influencing social goals; for instance, the effects of a positive view of oneself were different in the contexts of a positive versus a negative perception of peers. It is suggested that in order to predict children's social behavior more accurately, researchers should investigate children's dual perceptions of themselves and of their peers--that is, their peer-relational schemas--instead of assessing self-perception and peer perception in isolation from each other. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociating Processes Supporting Causal Perception and Causal Inference in the Brain.

An understanding of relations between causes and effects is essential for making sense of the dynamic physical world. It has been argued that this understanding of causality depends on both perceptual and inferential components. To investigate whether causal perception and causal inference rely on common or on distinct processes, the authors tested 2 callosotomy (split-brain) patients and a group of neurologically intact participants. The authors show that the direct perception of causality and the ability to infer causality depend on different hemispheres of the divided brain. This finding implies that understanding causality is not a unitary process and that causal perception and causal inference can proceed independently. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Functional Projection: How Fundamental Social Motives Can Bias Interpersonal Perception.

Results from 2 experimental studies suggest that self-protection and mate-search goals lead to the perception of functionally relevant emotional expressions in goal-relevant social targets. Activating a self-protection goal led participants to perceive greater anger in Black male faces (Study 1) and Arab faces (Study 2), both out-groups heuristically associated with physical threat. In Study 2, participants' level of implicit Arab-threat associations moderated this bias. Activating a mate-search goal led male, but not female, participants to perceive more sexual arousal in attractive opposite-sex targets (Study 1). Activating these goals did not influence perceptions of goal-irrelevant targets. Additionally, participants with chronic self-protective and mate-search goals exhibited similar biases. Findings are consistent with a functionalist, motivation-based account of interpersonal perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus Selectivity of Figural Aftereffects for Faces.

Viewing a distorted face induces large aftereffects in the appearance of an undistorted face. The authors examined the processes underlying this adaptation by comparing how selective the aftereffects are for different dimensions of the images including size, spatial frequency content, contrast, and color. Face aftereffects had weaker selectivity for changes in the size, contrast, or color of the images and stronger selectivity for changes in contrast polarity or spatial frequency. This pattern could arise if the adaptation is contingent on the perceived similarity of the stimuli as faces. Consistent with this, changing contrast polarity or spatial frequency had larger effects on the perceived identity of a face, and aftereffects were also selective for different individual faces. These results suggest that part of the sensitivity changes underlying the adaptation may arise at visual levels closely associated with the representation of faces. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naive Beliefs in Baseball: Systematic Distortion in Perceived Time of Apex for Fly Balls.

When fielders catch fly balls they use geometric properties to optically maintain control over the ball. The strategy provides ongoing guidance without indicating precise positional information concerning where the ball is located in space. Here, the authors show that observers have striking misconceptions about what the motion of projectiles should look like from various perspectives and that they estimate when the physical apex of a fly ball occurs to be far later than actual, irrespective of baseball experience. Their estimations are consistent with the highest point they are looking at as the ball approaches, not with the physical apex. These findings introduce a new and robust effect in intuitive perception in which people confuse their perceptual perspective with the physical situation that they mentally represent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

风光摄影的表现艺术

风光摄影的艺术目的和审美表现，是使自然之美符合人的心灵审美需要，使人们的审美感受和审美观呈现为完美、和谐、统一的形式。本文论述风光摄影在感性认识上的升华必须以把握复杂多样的理性创造来显现。     

计算间接测量误差的Mathematica程序包设计

利用Mathematica的符号计算功能，设计出了一个能计算间接测量误差的通用Mathematica程序包，它把间接量的函数形式作为输入，通用性比一般的数值型误差计算程序要好。     

Decorating tokens to facilitate recognition of ambiguous language constructs

Software tools are fundamental to the comprehension, analysis, testing and debugging of application systems. A necessary first step in the development of many tools is the construction of a parser front‐end that can recognize the implementation language of the system under development. In this paper, we describe our use of token decoration to facilitate recognition of ambiguous language constructs. We apply our approach to the C++ language since its grammar is replete with ambiguous derivations such as the declaration/expression and template‐declaration/expression ambiguity. We describe our implementation of a parser front‐end for C++, keystone, and we describe our results in decorating tokens for our test suite including the examples from Clause Three of the C++ standard. We are currently exploiting the keystone front‐end to develop a taxonomy for implementation‐based class testing and to reverse‐engineer Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.