A social-cognitive theory of depression in reaction to life events.

Presents a theory of reaction to life events based on epidemiological evidence. Depression occurs with events that disrupt roles by which people define their worth, if these people lack alternative sources of self-definition. A disruption has its effect when there is a major discrepancy between the perceived actions of a role other and the cognitive representation of that other. Symptoms of reactive depression occur in 3 sets: a set of cognitive symptoms due to loss or damage of the sense of self, a set of intense emotions, and a set of interpersonal strategies. Data from a study by G. W. Brown and T. Harris (1978) of the link between depression and a provoking agent in the presence of a vulnerability factor are reviewed. Other retrospective and prospective studies of depression and triggering events are also noted. It is proposed that provoking agents increase the risk of depression by posing threats to selfhood, when the sense of self is realized in a role. (105 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Writing as thinking.

Writing is analyzed as thinking that uses paper or other media to externalize and manipulate symbolic expressions. Mental operations of natural language can occur somewhat independently, and they communicate well with language that has been written, but for skilled writing these operations need elaborate installation in the mind. We explore four methods to see how expert writers externalize thoughts and interact with them: laboratory comparisons of novices and experts, interviews with accomplished writers (mostly of prose fiction), biographical analysis of Jane Austen's development as a writer, and consideration of Gustave Flaubert's notes and drafts. Writers can use paper to extend their thinking, and to create frameworks of cues that enable readers of a story to construct mental models that they may enter empathetically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Insulin and glucostatic control of feeding.

Conducted 2 experiments which attempted to determine the role of endogenous insulin in short-term feeding control. Results show that acute diabetes produced by mannoheptulose did not attenuate the ability of 2 deoxy-D-glucose (50 mg. ip) to induce feeding or the ability of intragastric loads of d-glucose (5 ml., 25% weight to volume) to inhibit feeding in 6 male hooded Lister and 30 male albino Sprague-Dawley rats. The data indicate that glucostatic control of feeding is probably not dependent on the availability of insulin. (22 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Book reviews

Home Truths: Property Ownership and Housing Wealth in Australia. Blair Badcock and Andrew Beer. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000. ISBN 0522848931 (paperback). 212 pp.; bibliography and index. RRP $38.45.

Cities for Children: Children's Rights, Poverty and Urban Management. Sheridan Bartlett, Roger Hart, David Sattherwaite, Ximena de la Barra and Alfredo Missair. Earthscan, London, 1999. ISBN 185383470X. 305 pp. RRP $39.95

The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes. John Forester. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999. ISBN 0262062070. 305 pp.; bibliography and index. RRP $54.95

Spaces of Hope: David Harvey. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000. ISBN 0748612688. 293 pp.. RRP $44.00

The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. Charles Landry. Comedia and Earthscan, Stroud and London, 2000. ISBN 1853836133 (paperback). 300 pp.; bibliography and index. RRP $48.50

Urban Regeneration: A Handbook. Peter Roberts and Hugh Sykes (eds). Sage, London, 2000. ISBN 0761967176 (paperback). 320 pp.; bibliography and index. $65.00

Sydney: The Emergence of a World City. John Connell (ed.). Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2000. ISBN 0195507487 (paperback). 381pp.; bibliography and index. RRP $35.00

Cultural Geography: Themes, Concepts, Analyses. William Norton. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. ISBN 0195413075 (paperback). 379 pp.; bibliography, glossary and index. RRP $50.95     

Robert Plutchik (1927-2006).

Presents an obituary for Robert Plutchik, who died in Sarasota, Florida, on April 29, 2006, at the age of 78. Dr. Plutchik was a pioneer in emotion theory, and his influence on the discipline of psychology runs both wide and deep. In his wise, gentle, and graceful way, Dr. Plutchik exerted a powerful influence on the spread of the study of emotion from a sideline to a main concern not only in psychology, but in biology, in the social sciences, in psychiatry, and even in the humanities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation.

Although fiction treats themes of psychological importance, it has been excluded from psychology because it is seen as involving flawed empirical method. But fiction is not empirical truth. It is simulation that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers. In any simulation, coherence truths have priority over correspondences. Moreover, in the simulations of fiction, personal truths can be explored that allow readers to experience emotions-their own emotions-and understand aspects of them that are obscure, in relation to contexts in which the emotions arise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Measuring the learnability of spreadsheets in inexperienced users and those with previous spreadsheet experience

The issues of 'usability' and 'learnability' are assuming an increasingly important role for both the designers of software and their prospective customers. Objective measures of the interaction between system and user are important for the development of software that is both easy to learn and pleasurable to use. In this study we apply a set of five measures to evaluate users' interactions with spreadsheet software, and to compare two spreadsheet packages. We tested 16 people with no previous experience of spreadsheets and 16 with experience of spreadsheets generally though not of the spreadsheet we gave them. Half were allocated to learn Excel and half to learn Wingz, running on Apple Macintosh computers. A standard task was constructed to assess understanding of the basic concepts involved in the use of • spreadsheets. Users' previous experience of spreadsheet use was the most salient factor in the scores achieved on the task. The brand of spreadsheet had no significant effect on task performance. Implications for designers of software and users of spreadsheet packages are discussed.     

Osmotic inhibition of eating as a subtractive process.

Conducted 2 experiments in which 28 male hooded Listar strain rats maintained on food-deprivation schedules received 2-ml intraperitoneal injections of hypertonic (6%) or isotonic (.9%) NaCl. Hypertonic injections produced inhibition of eating. Allowing Ss to drink water ad lib completely canceled the inhibition, but for Ss without water each milliliter of water deficit produced had the effect of subtracting approximately 1/3 gm. of food from the amount eaten. The size of this effect was entirely independent of the level of food deprivation. Allowing an inhibited S to drink measured quantities of water produced disinhibition at the same rate (i.e., approximately .33 gm. of food/1 ml. of water). Changes in body fluid composition induced by food eaten also inhibited intake in exactly the same fashion. Results indicate that states of the body fluids that produce thirst inhibit feeding, and for lower levels of hypertonicity this inhibition is approximately constantly proportional to the water deficit. A direct subtractive neural inhibition arising from the system controlling drinking upon the system controlling eating adequately explains these results. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Crimes analysis software: ‘pins in maps’, clustering and Bayes net prediction

The OVER Project was a collaboration between West Midlands Police, UK, the Centre for Adaptive Systems, and Psychology Division, from the University of Sunderland. The Project was developed primarily to assist the Police with the high volume crime, burglary from dwelling houses. A developed software system enables the trending of historical data, the testing of ‘short term’ hunches, and the development of ‘medium’ and long term’ strategies to burglary and crime reduction, based upon victim, offender, location and details of victimisations. The software utilises mapping and visualisation tools and is capable of a range of sophisticated predictions, tying together statistical techniques with theories from forensic psychology and criminology.

The statistical methods employed (including multi-dimensional scaling, binary logistic regression) and ‘data-mining’ technologies (including neural networks) are used to investigate the impact of the types of evidence available and to determine the causality in this domain. The final predictions on the likelihood of burglary are calculated by combining all of the varying sources of evidence into a Bayesian belief network. This network is embedded in the developed software system, which also performs data cleansing and data transformation for presentation to the developed algorithms.

It is important that derived statistics from the software and predictions are interpretable by the intended users of the decision support system, namely Police sector managers, and this paper includes some of the design decisions based upon the forensic psychology and criminology literature, including the graphical representation of geographic data and presentation of results of analyses.