Knowledge that Transforms

This study was based on the measurement of 126 eriminals with three methods: the questionnaire method of YG test, the performance test of UchidaKraepelin Test and the projective method of Color Pyramid Test. The result showed that the performance test and the projective test complemented and verified each other, and revealed the characteristics of criminal personality. But the results of the questionnaire test was negative. More measurement methods should be used in studying criminal personality.

This commentary highlights potential applications of behavioral decision research to treatments for substance abuse and related risky behaviors Some research questions are suggested to help determine how risk information developed with behavioral decision methods could be used with maximal impact to treat and prevent substance use The relevance of behavioral decision research treatments for other problems such as anxiety is briefly discussed The important and direct applicability of behavioral decision methods to informed consent for research participants also is noted

The work of Baker and his colleagues indicates that a broadened view of withdrawal that recognizes its probable affective bases will suggest new treatment strategies for the treatment of smoking and, by extension, drug dependence This commentary briefly reviews the current status of treating drug dependence by addressing negative affect and emphasizes that clinical research which allows for building more complex models of individual change over time holds promise for clearer understanding of the role of negative affect among drug abusers and thus more effective treatments Although clinical treatments for drug dependence have long recognized the significance of negative affect we are far from a thorough understanding of the role of negative affect in withdrawal, craving, and relapse to drug use

Automatic processes are characterized as being rapid, as requiring little attentional effort, and as obligatory (once initiated, the activity cannot be inhibited or controlled) In contrast, controlled processes are slower, require attention, and are non-obligatory This distinction appears in the Stroop effect the interference that appears when a person tries to name the color of the ink in which a word is printed when the word spells the name of a different color This effect has historically been attributed to an automatic reading of the color name interfering with the slower, less automatic, naming of the ink color (MacLeod, 1991, Stroop, 1935) In this report, we describe a patient with focal brain atrophy whose speed of reading was no faster than his speed of naming colors, but who still showed the classic Stroop effect This finding critically challenges the traditional identification of automaticity with processing speed

The work of Swann and his colleagues suggests that a desire for self-verification is a ubiquitous human motive, as important as the desire for positive evaluations When the self-view is negative, the reinforcement value of self-verification can lead individuals to maintain lifestyles and seek out other individuals who will maintain the negative self-view Trying to change negative self-views by simple verbal invalidation is not often successful The reinforcing qualities of self-verification for most individuals and the apparently aversive qualities of invalidating an individual s self-views have potentially important implications for treatment of drug abusers This commentary briefly reviews self-verification research and discusses implications of findings for psychotherapy, particularly as they relate to strengthening clinical progress and attachment to therapy and to giving feedback to clients

An exploratory factor analysis of the reflectance spectral distributions of a sample of natural and man-made objects yields a factor pattern remarkably similar to psychophysical color-matching curves. The goodness-of-fit indices from a maximum likelihood confirmatory factor model with fixed factor loadings specified by empirical trichromatic color-matching data indicate that the human visual system performs near to an optimum value for an ideal trichromatic system composed of three linear components. An unconstrained four-factor maximum likelihood model fits significantly better than a three-factor unconstrained model, suggesting that a color metric is better represented in four dimensions than in a three-dimensional space. This fourth factor can be calculated as a nonlinear interaction term between the first three factors: thus, a trichromatic input is sufficient to compute a color space of four dimensions. The visual system may exploit this nonlinear dependency in the spectral environment in order to obtain a four-dimensional color space without the biological cost of a fourth color receptor.

Dealing with the problems of substance abuse requires both an appreciation of clinical reality and an understanding of basic psychosocial principles Each of the conference presentations of theory and research most of them nonapplied in nature, created a welcome and rare occasion for experimental and clinical psychologists (and hybrids) to reflect together on the applied implications of some basic research and on the research implications of some applied professional activities Among the issues found especially noteworthy by this discussant were the following the return of cognition and rational decision making as legitimate and critical foci in behavior therapy, the role of exposure to aversive events in reducing their fearsomeness, the advantages of not working doggedly to achieve goals that are better approached with a nonachievement attitude the possibility that the difficulty in altering pathological behavior derives from the properties of human language, appreciation of individual differences in psychotherapy outcome research, the importance of considering the meaning that therapeutic ministrations can have for certain patients, and the need to reexamine the utility of patients expressing their concerns

An abundance of research from diverse areas of psychological science is potentially relevant to behavioral therapy development research The National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health convened a workshop to reinforce the connection between basic behavioral and therapy development research The articles in this Special Section are the product of this workshop Several lines of basic behavioral research are described, and implications for the development of behavioral therapies are discussed This Special Section highlights the notion that strengthening the bond between behavioral therapy development research and basic behavioral science will accelerate the advancement of knowledge about behavior, behavioral change and therapeutic interventions

Recent research with visual objects has delineated important representational differences between memory measures that tap identification (implicit tests) and measures that require episodic recognition (explicit tests) We investigated whether these differences reflect a fundamental architecture for the representation of object information in memory In the present experiment, we contrasted identification and episodic recognition for haptically presented two-dimensional patterns Haptic identification was not affected by elaborative processing at study, whereas haptic episodic recognition was enhanced by elaborative processing This finding suggests important similarities in the organization of object information in the visual and haptic modalities