Is it a Container? Young Infants' Understanding of Containment Events

The present research examined how certain features of a box affected 4.5‐month‐old infants' interpretation of containment events the box was involved in. If the box was a regular container, infants did not respond with increased attention when a tall cylinder became fully hidden after being lowered inside the box, consistent with previous research. In contrast, if a three‐sided object (the box without its back) replaced the box, or if shown that the box had a removable back, infants were able to detect the height violations, 3 months earlier than they normally would. These results demonstrate how infants' perception or representation of objects interplays with their interpretation of physical events these objects involve in.     

The Stability of Facial Attractiveness: Is It What You’ve Got or What You Do with It?

Physical attractiveness is suggested to be an indicator of biological quality and therefore should be stable. However, transient factors such as gaze direction and facial expression affect facial attractiveness, suggesting it is not. We compared the relative importance of variation between faces with variation within faces due to facial expressions. 128 participants viewed photographs of 14 men and 16 women displaying the six basic facial expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and a neutral expression. Each rater saw each model only once with a randomly chosen expression. The effect of expressions on attractiveness was similar in male and female faces, although several expressions were not significantly different from each other. Identity was 2.2 times as important as emotion in attractiveness for both male and female pictures, suggesting that attractiveness is stable. Since the hard tissues of the face are unchangeable, people may still be able to perceive facial structure whatever expression the face is displaying, and still make attractiveness judgements based on structural cues.     

Is It Love or Sexual Abuse? Young Adults' Perceptions of Statutory Rape

Adults under age 25 comprise the majority of statutory rape perpetrators, yet we know little about their perceptions of statutory relationships. We assessed 210 (50% male) young adults’ perceptions of statutory rape involving a 15-year-old female adolescent and a male who was either 2, 4, or 6 years older. Across all age gaps, 73.7% of participants felt the relationship should not be a crime. Participants who read about a 4- or 6-year (versus 2-year) age gap perceived the relationship as significantly more of a crime and the older partner as more responsible and in need of legal intervention. Effects were partially mediated by perceptions of the relationship as exploitive. Results suggest a need to educate young adults about statutory rape.     

Counselling and Psychotherapy: Is There a Difference? Does It Matter?

The terms ‘counselling’ and ‘psychotherapy’ are often employed in a loosely interchangeable way, especially in Australia. Where distinctions are made, there has been little agreement on what each term should cover. This article examines several axes on which ‘counselling’ might potentially be distinguished from ‘psychotherapy’; the most promising basis for such a distinction seems to be whether or not the mode of work attempts to access the unconscious. On this basis, several modalities currently termed ‘therapy’ would in fact be classed as types of ‘counselling’, including those modalities of family therapy which aim to engage clients at the level of conscious behaviour change and restructuring. Consideration of how new professionals are trained lends support to a continuum, with short‐term, problem‐focused conscious‐oriented approaches at one end, and longer‐term, transference‐focused, unconscious‐oriented approaches at the other, the dividing line coming at the point where trainees learn the skill of ‘immediacy’.     

Can a Click be a Word?: Infants' Learning of Non‐Native Words

Forms that are nonlinguistic markers in one language (i.e., “tsk‐tsk” in English) may be part of the phoneme inventory—and hence part of words—in another language. In the current paper, we demonstrate that infants' ability to learn words containing unfamiliar language sounds is influenced by the age and vocabulary size of the infant learner, as well as by cues to the speaker's referential intent. When referential cues were available, infants at 14 months learned words with non‐native speech sounds, but at 20 months only those infants with smaller vocabularies succeeded. When no referential cues were present, infants at both 14 and 20 months failed to learn the same words. The implications of the relation between linguistic sophistication and non‐native word learning are discussed.     

Is postmenopausal life-span a gift of modern health or a product of natural selection?

The author discusses how researchers from various scientific disciplines view the origins of and mechanisms (evolutionary as well as physiological) underlying menopause in humans. She describes presentations from a symposium centered around interdisciplinary perspectives on female reproductive aging. Comparative zoology, primatology, and anthropology have much to contribute to our understanding of human menopause; hence the symposium contained speakers representing these subdisciplines, as well as the more typical disciplines of endocrinology and neurobiology.     

Can a Poll Affect Perception of Candidate Traits?

During presidential elections, poll results frequently are presentedin the news. Reporters use these polls to tell the public whatit thinks about the presidential candidates. We argue that pollingresults tell the public what it should think about the presidentialcandidates as well. This study outlines how a character traitthat is not usually used to assess presidential candidates wasput into play during the 2004 presidential campaign. By repeatedlyascribing "stubbornness" to incumbent president George W. Bush,Democratic challenger John Kerry may have prompted this trait’sinclusion in a Los Angeles Times summer 2004 survey. The poll’sevidence that the public saw Bush as more stubborn than Kerrythen produced an attribute agenda-setting effect that strengthenedthe link between that term and Bush. Using data from the NationalAnnenberg Election Survey, we argue that the news coverage ofthis Los Angeles Times poll increased the salience of the trait"stubborn" in assessing President George W. Bush during Juneof the 2004 presidential campaign.     

Is It Abuse,Alienation, and/or Estrangement?

Abstract

Allegations of family violence, child abuse, and alienation often occur in the same contested child custody case. Custody eval-uators often are poorly trained in forensic assessment of allegations of domestic violence and allegations of alienation. The authors of this article suggest language that is designed to differentiate between cases in which the term alienation is appropriate, as in non-abuse cases, and when it is best to use other language such as estrangement sabotaging, and counter productive protective parenting in cases where there is abuse. This article describes a decision tree that is designed to assist evaluators in identifying the causes of multiple allegations of maltreatment and abuse.     

Is Poker a Game of Skill or Chance? A Quasi-Experimental Study

Due to intensive marketing and the rapid growth of online gambling, poker currently enjoys great popularity among large sections of the population. Although poker is legally a game of chance in most countries, some (particularly operators of private poker web sites) argue that it should be regarded as a game of skill or sport because the outcome of the game primarily depends on individual aptitude and skill. The available findings indicate that skill plays a meaningful role; however, serious methodological weaknesses and the absence of reliable information regarding the relative importance of chance and skill considerably limit the validity of extant research. Adopting a quasi-experimental approach, the present study examined the extent to which the influence of poker playing skill was more important than card distribution. Three average players and three experts sat down at a six-player table and played 60 computer-based hands of the poker variant “Texas Hold’em” for money. In each hand, one of the average players and one expert received (a) better-than-average cards (winner’s box), (b) average cards (neutral box) and (c) worse-than-average cards (loser’s box). The standardized manipulation of the card distribution controlled the factor of chance to determine differences in performance between the average and expert groups. Overall, 150 individuals participated in a “fixed-limit” game variant, and 150 individuals participated in a “no-limit” game variant. ANOVA results showed that experts did not outperform average players in terms of final cash balance. Rather, card distribution was the decisive factor for successful poker playing. However, expert players were better able to minimize losses when confronted with disadvantageous conditions (i.e., worse-than-average cards). No significant differences were observed between the game variants. Furthermore, supplementary analyses confirm differential game-related actions dependent on the card distribution, player status, and game variant. In conclusion, the study findings indicate that poker should be regarded as a game of chance, at least under certain basic conditions, and suggest new directions for further research.     

Becoming Dialogical: Psychotherapy or a Way of Life?

After birth the first thing we learn is becoming a participant in dialogue. We are born in relations and those relations become our structure. Intersubjectivity is the basis of human experience and dialogue the way we live it. In this paper the dilemma of looking at dialogue as either a way of life or a therapeutic method is described. The background is the open dialogue psychiatric system that was initiated in Finnish Western Lapland. The author was part of the team re‐organizing psychiatry and afterwards became involved in many different types of projects in dialogical practices. Lately the focus has shifted from looking at speech to seeing the entire embodied human being in the present moment, especially in multifarious settings. Referring to studies on good outcomes in acute psychosis, the contribution of dialogical practice as a psychological resource will be clarified.     

Turkey's Response to Sex Trafficking of Migrant Women: Is It Efficient Enough?

Human trafficking for sexual exploitation is a serious problem affecting especially women and children. Turkey has been particularly affected by sex trafficking because of the large numbers of female migrants that it receives. This article aims to critically assess the effectiveness of Turkey's current policies against sex trafficking using a feminist theoretical perspective with a particular focus on migrant women. To this end, the scope of the problem in Turkey, the supply and demand sides of sex trafficking, and the existing policies are discussed. Sex trafficking is examined at the intersection of Turkey's migration and prostitution regimes. It is argued that Turkey's response to sex trafficking has been inefficient because it currently focuses only on the economic supply side of the problem, ignoring the patriarchal demand side of it. The article concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations for Turkey that could help reduce sex trafficking in this country.     

Developmental Change in Action Perception: Is Motor Experience the Cause?

Human actions are complex stimuli containing several perceptual dimensions an observer could attend to. Research indicates that attention to the perceptual dimensions of action undergoes a process of perceptual narrowing between 4 and 10 months, during which infants’ attention to configural and temporal information in action decreases over time, while attention to hand information is maintained. This research explored whether infants’ active experience with grasping is related to perceptual narrowing in action. Across two studies, we tested 6‐month‐old infants’ attention to changes in these action dimensions and also assessed their grasping ability. Infants who were more proficient at grasping showed a pattern more consistent with perceptual narrowing (decreasing attention to configural and temporal information) relative to those less proficient at grasping, especially for attention to configural information. In addition, attention to hand information appears to undergo U‐shaped development between 4 and 10 months, as 6‐month‐olds did not recover attention to the hand change. These findings add to a growing body of research showing that infants’ motor experience broadly influences their perception of others’ action and may follow a complex developmental pathway that diverges from perceptual narrowing over the first year.