Videos by Catherine Caldwell-Harris
I'm a professor at Boston University where I'll be presenting some research on Autistic Women at ... more I'm a professor at Boston University where I'll be presenting some research on Autistic Women at a BU-specific symposium called Research on Tap. The theme is Flourishing in Diverse Populations and Contexts. This lightening talk is supposed to be 4 minutes. For your interest is my initial practice attempt, clocking in at 9 minutes. Feedback welcome.
This is a very preliminary practice talk, I mainly just wanted to share my work and let the long version get some air time. I'll post the 4 minute version once I refine it down... Comments welcome of course.
A couple things I already know to change are:
I won't mention high-functioning (although 10 years ago people used that label). I won't talk about "mental functioning of people that were close to the human standard model" etc.
My 11 year old son coming in and out of my room -- really unnerved me. I thought he was at the neighbor's house so I didn't put any barricades on the door to my bedroom. 12 views
This video is the practice version of what I gave live at Boston University on Nov 3, 2021. I fe... more This video is the practice version of what I gave live at Boston University on Nov 3, 2021. I feel the real talk was a lot better than the practice version, smile. It takes a lot of practice to get really smooth. The time constraints were very tight. No more than 4 minutes. I also posted a really bad 9 minute version, complete with my 11 year old busting in. 35 views
Correlational statements grab the human meaning-making centers, resulting in causal illusions -- ... more Correlational statements grab the human meaning-making centers, resulting in causal illusions -- we intuitively infer a causal relationship when one is not necessarily present. To retreat from accepting these illusions, we need to ask: what non-causal relationships may be at work? This class-based workshop guides the viewer through examples to practice skills needed to understand relationships which are normally not explicitly discussed in psychology and social science methods classes, such as when a variable is an index (or sign-post) of a more complex set of interacting factors.
Example: Why was the presence of a dishwasher in the home of rural Turkish families in the 1990s the best statistical predictor of mothers refraining from using corporal punishment with their children? 26 views
Autism Spectrum: Strength Based Approach by Catherine Caldwell-Harris
The complexity of human organization involves social cooperation and navigating hierarchies (Henr... more The complexity of human organization involves social cooperation and navigating hierarchies (Henrich, 2015). Attaining social status is an adaptive goal for humans. High status ensures access to resources, from food to safety to social alliances (Byrne & Whiten, 1988). Even midlevel social status is adaptive in securing a networking of friends and allies. Because of this, humans in every culture attend to status cues (Maner & Case, 2016). Time is spent in childhood and throughout life how status manifests in their culture, practicing ways to attain it, and pursuing opportunities to gossip, chat, observe, and internalize the myriad aspects of social hierarchy (Dunbar, 2004; Hawley, 2014).
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, March 4, Boston. , 2023
The social challenges of autistic people have long been attributed to deficits in their mentalizi... more The social challenges of autistic people have long been attributed to deficits in their mentalizing abilities. In the last decade, theory-of-mind has been criticized as not plausible as the central deficit underlying autism. One reason is that autistic people typically pass false-belief tasks (setting aside young children and those with intellectual disabilities; Gernsbacher & Yergeau, 2019). Autistic people can find it bewildering to be told that they lack understanding of what other people are thinking (Atherton et al., 2019). Many autistics also consider themselves to be hyper-empathetic. [Need to find a reference and more justification for this.] Other evidence against the theory-of-mind account is autistics can have high levels of communicative success and positive interactions with other autistics (Crompton, 2020) and that neurotypical (NT) individuals can fail to understand the perspective of autistics. The view that effective communication requires perspective-taking by both autistics and NTs has come to be known as the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012). Related to this, autistic people note that intense attunement and mind-reading can occur between autistic friends. Even when autistics are paired with an NT friend, communication and attunement can be high.
Yet autistic sociality is different. Our purpose here is to suggest one type of difference that has received little attention: lack of interest in status and hierarchy. During social interaction, autistics are less concerned, and NTs more concerned, with successfully navigating social hierarchies, as occurs when meeting new people or making small talk at a party. NTs are more concerned with the social status and social usefulness of other people. Autistics, in contrast, are more accepting of diverse presentations in others, and more egalitarian in their social attitudes. They concentrate on the usefulness of the information conveyed, rather than the strategic benefits of associating with this new person.
Background: User-led autism discussion forums provide a wealth of information about autistic live... more Background: User-led autism discussion forums provide a wealth of information about autistic lived experiences, albeit oriented toward those who regularly use computers. We contend that healthcare professionals should read autism discussion forums to gain insight, be informed, and in some cases, to correct assumptions about autistic persons' lives and possibilities. But experts may be dismissive of user-led forums, believing forums to be filled with myths, misinformation, and combative postings. The questions motivating our research were: Do online forums raise issues that are educational for clinicians and other stakeholders? Are forums useful for those who do empirical research? Method: Content analysis was conducted on 300 posts (62,000 words) from Reddit, Quora, and Wrong Planet. Forums were sampled to reflect broad topics; posts were selected sequentially from the identified forums. The authors read through posts in the Excel sheet, highlighting statements that were the main ideas of the post, to discern both broad categories of topics and more specific topics. We coded content pertinent to classic autism myths and analyzed attitudes towards myths such as 'lack emotion' and 'can't form relationships.' To document whether forum posts discuss topics that are not widely known outside of elite experts, we compared discussion content to new material about autism contained in the March 2022 DSM 5 Text revision. Results: Classic autism myths were discussed with examples of when elements of myths may be valid. Posters described cases where parents or therapists believed myths. Experts may believe autism myths due to rapid changes in diagnostic practices and due to their lack of knowledge regarding the characteristics of autistic people who have typical intellectual abilities. We conclude that forums contain highvalue information for clinicians because all concepts in the DSM 5 text revision were discussed by posters in the years before the text revision appeared. Ideas that are only slowly becoming part of the research literature are discussed at length in forums. Reading and analyzing forums is useful for both clinicians and scientists. In addition, the relative ease of forum analysis lowers the bar for entry into the research process.
Little is known about how persons with autism spectrum conditions acquire foreign languages. To... more Little is known about how persons with autism spectrum conditions acquire foreign languages. To augment the literature with the experiences of autistic persons, trained raters coded discussion forum posts for categories such as method of learning, number of languages mentioned, and outcomes of learnings. Compared to forum posts on non-autism websites, posts on autism forums were more likely to report reading and writing as strengths and listening/speaking as deficits. Autistic posters more often reported intrinsic motivation for learning, being a polyglot, and having a special interest in learning language; they were also less likely to report attaining fluency. These reported experiences provide a foundation for future quantitative research.
Eastern Psychological Association, 2022
A primary strategy for success was to flip conventional workplace negatives into positives. Foru... more A primary strategy for success was to flip conventional workplace negatives into positives. Forums posters characterized what could be viewed as social deficits as strengths, using terms such self-reliant, honest, independent thinker, nonconformist, logical. They noted that they do well with structure, can hyper-focus, and take pride in doing a job correctly and thoroughly. One poster wrote, "Identify the parts making it hell …look for jobs that reduce the hellish aspects and highlight what you can manage or even enjoy. …niche-finding and niche-making…"
Eastern Psychological Association, 2022
The topics of interest are distinctive and range from psychology and science fiction to true crim... more The topics of interest are distinctive and range from psychology and science fiction to true crime and artwork. The intensity of interests in highly specific domains, including scientific domains, should be of interest to employers who want workers with relevant expertise and a capacity to learn new technical information.
Autistic women’s special interests differ from neurotypical women’s hobbies by being particularly information-rich and conducive to systemizing. A novel finding is that true crime and interest in people/celebrities allows autistic women to learn about how other people’s minds work. The intense interest in systemizing the social and psychological world may reflect autistic women’s intuitions that this is a growth area for them.
Eastern Psychological Association, 2022
Autistic people had a bimodal distribution on a foreign-language aptitude test; whereas the NTs h... more Autistic people had a bimodal distribution on a foreign-language aptitude test; whereas the NTs had a normal distribution
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2022
Little is known about how persons with autism spectrum conditions experience the process of learn... more Little is known about how persons with autism spectrum conditions experience the process of learning foreign languages. To augment the research literature (reviewed here) with the experiences of autistic persons, online autism forums were scrutinised. Discussions pertinent to language learning were identified in English, Spanish, French and German, with 169 posts analysed. Thematic analysis revealed 8 themes. Three themes concerned ease and difficulty of learning. Reading and writing were strengths, due to their offline nature. Listening comprehension was difficult, especially with background noise. Speaking was difficult, due to demands of immediacy. Four interrelated themes could be understood as positive outcomes of autistic traits. Languages were a special interest, and many posters reported being self-taught. Posters often listed many languages but acknowledged that learning their full list was impractical. Posters reported being interested in diverse aspects of language structure, suggesting that languages were compelling because they provided an opportunity for systemising. Finally, posters discussed how autism conferred both advantages and disadvantages for language learning. Some posters discussed their engagement in terms reminiscent of polyglots and mild forms of linguistic savantism. This analysis revealed a group of curious learners whose abilities and strengths are mostly unknown to applied linguists.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2022
This is a more extensive list of quotes than was provided in Table 3 of my published journal arti... more This is a more extensive list of quotes than was provided in Table 3 of my published journal article, Passionate about Languages, But Listening and Speaking -- ¡Ay, Caramba! Autistic Adults Discuss Foreign Language Learning
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
Summary
Clare Harrop, a leading researcher of restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs), wrote w... more Summary
Clare Harrop, a leading researcher of restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs), wrote with her colleagues, “.as a field we do not understand what causes RRBs, and this is particularly difficult to ascertain when children are minimally verbal.” (1). The current account is a response to this request for new ideas about the cause of repetitive behaviors. Motor repetitions in autism are an alternative phenotype which has adaptive and functional consequences: fueling trial-and-error tinkering which could lead to inventions, i.e., novel, useful configurations of objects. This hypothesis is consistent with the proposed mechanism of heterochrony (11), and is complementary to other theories which take a strength-based approach to autism (8, 19). This hypothesis helps explain similarities between motor repetitions and circumscribe interests, illuminates parents' observations of their child's motor repetitions [e.g., (30)], and has heuristic value in providing ideas for therapists to introduce flexibility into the motor routines of minimally verbal children.
Background: Studies of autistic children’s writing have long focused on weaknesses in structural ... more Background: Studies of autistic children’s writing have long focused on weaknesses in structural complexity, organization and taking readers’ perspectives. In contrast, awareness is growing that writing is a strength for many autistic adults, as suggested by research on autistic memoirs and autistic college students. Less is known about how well autistic individuals write when they use language for their own purposes, such as writing a blog.
Method: We analyzed the word usage patterns of 30 self-identified autistic bloggers and 30 age and gender-matched non-autistic bloggers, assumed to be neurotypical (NT). Blog content was analyzed using qualitative methods.
Results: Compared to NT bloggers, autistic bloggers wrote in a more complex manner. Autistic bloggers often wrote about science or other abstract topics rather than discussing daily life events.
Conclusion: One subset of autistic individuals, those who write blogs, wrote in a more complex style than did typically developed peers. This may reflect autistic bloggers being an elite subset of autistic individuals, or a cognitive style that includes intellectual interests.
Special interests are frequently developed by individuals with autism spectrum disorder, expresse... more Special interests are frequently developed by individuals with autism spectrum disorder, expressed as an intense focus on specific topics. Neurotypical individuals also develop special interests, often in the form of hobbies. Although past research has focused on special interests held by children with autism spectrum disorder, little is known about their role in adulthood. The current study investigated differences in the content, number, and specificity of the special interests held by adult individuals with autism spectrum disorder and neurotypical individuals, using Internet discussion forums as a data source. Quantitative analysis of forum posts revealed significant differences between the diagnostic groups. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder reported having more interests in systemizing domains, more specific interests, and a greater number of interests overall than neurotypical individuals. Understanding special interests can lead to the development of educational and therapeutic programs that facilitate the acquirement of other important social and communication skills.
The cognitive science of religion is a new field which explains religious belief as emerging from... more The cognitive science of religion is a new field which explains religious belief as emerging from normal cognitive processes such as inferring others' mental states, agency detection and imposing patterns on noise. This paper investigates the proposal that individual differences in belief will reflect cognitive processing styles, with high functioning autism being an extreme style that will predispose towards nonbelief (atheism and agnosticism). This view was supported by content analysis of discussion forums about religion on an autism website (covering 192 unique posters), and by a survey that included 61 persons with HFA. Persons with autistic spectrum disorder were much more likely than those in our neurotypical comparison group to identify as atheist or agnostic, and, if religious, were more likely to construct their own religious belief system. Nonbelief was also higher in those who were attracted to systemizing activities, as measured by the Systemizing Quotient.
Learning and Individual Differences, 29, 98–105
Special interests have been studied in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but not in ad... more Special interests have been studied in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but not in adults. Using an online survey, it was found that individuals with ASD reported more intense interests in systemizable domains, relative to neurotypical adults. Self-reported systemizing preference was correlated with intensity of interest in systemizable domains both for those with ASD and for neurotypical young adults. Few gender differences were found in the neurotypical group in the expected categories of machines, technology and vehicles, where gender differences have been found in children. Gender differences in these categories did appear for the ASD group. We propose a strength-based model of special interests, with the hobbies of neurotypical forming a continuum with the special interests of ASD.
Cross-cultural Psychology by Catherine Caldwell-Harris
The Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2013
Transcultural psychiatry, Jan 1, 2006
International Journal of Intercultural …, Jan 1, 2010
Whether immigrants to the U.S. from collectivist cultures will adopt American individualist value... more Whether immigrants to the U.S. from collectivist cultures will adopt American individualist values is an important question at the intersection of theories on acculturation and individualism/collectivism. According to the assimilation hypothesis, Turkish immigrants to the U.S. should become more individualistic with increasing length of stay. Alternatively, the immigrant interdependence hypothesis proposes that the exigencies of immigration require retaining or increasing collectivist values and behaviors, especially the willingness to rely on others. Measures of individualism and collectivism were obtained from Turkish immigrants to the U.S., Turks residing in Istanbul, and residents of Boston. Bostonians and Istanbul residents differed primarily on vertical collectivism, which is the tendency to subordinate ones own goals to those of in-group authority figures. Immigrants' values did not change with increasing length of stay in the U.S., refuting the assimilation hypothesis. When immigrants were compared to non-immigrants, immigrants endorsed stronger horizontal and vertical collectivism and more desire to both give and receive, consistent with the immigrant interdependence hypothesis. However, this hypothesis was not uniformly supported. Compared to non-immigrants, immigrants reported more self-reliance with competition, and more internal locus of control, indicating a sense of agency and responsibility. Findings are consistent with the view that immigrants adjust in complex ways to their new society, and may have different temperaments than non-immigrants.
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Videos by Catherine Caldwell-Harris
This is a very preliminary practice talk, I mainly just wanted to share my work and let the long version get some air time. I'll post the 4 minute version once I refine it down... Comments welcome of course.
A couple things I already know to change are:
I won't mention high-functioning (although 10 years ago people used that label). I won't talk about "mental functioning of people that were close to the human standard model" etc.
My 11 year old son coming in and out of my room -- really unnerved me. I thought he was at the neighbor's house so I didn't put any barricades on the door to my bedroom.
Example: Why was the presence of a dishwasher in the home of rural Turkish families in the 1990s the best statistical predictor of mothers refraining from using corporal punishment with their children?
Autism Spectrum: Strength Based Approach by Catherine Caldwell-Harris
Yet autistic sociality is different. Our purpose here is to suggest one type of difference that has received little attention: lack of interest in status and hierarchy. During social interaction, autistics are less concerned, and NTs more concerned, with successfully navigating social hierarchies, as occurs when meeting new people or making small talk at a party. NTs are more concerned with the social status and social usefulness of other people. Autistics, in contrast, are more accepting of diverse presentations in others, and more egalitarian in their social attitudes. They concentrate on the usefulness of the information conveyed, rather than the strategic benefits of associating with this new person.
Autistic women’s special interests differ from neurotypical women’s hobbies by being particularly information-rich and conducive to systemizing. A novel finding is that true crime and interest in people/celebrities allows autistic women to learn about how other people’s minds work. The intense interest in systemizing the social and psychological world may reflect autistic women’s intuitions that this is a growth area for them.
Clare Harrop, a leading researcher of restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs), wrote with her colleagues, “.as a field we do not understand what causes RRBs, and this is particularly difficult to ascertain when children are minimally verbal.” (1). The current account is a response to this request for new ideas about the cause of repetitive behaviors. Motor repetitions in autism are an alternative phenotype which has adaptive and functional consequences: fueling trial-and-error tinkering which could lead to inventions, i.e., novel, useful configurations of objects. This hypothesis is consistent with the proposed mechanism of heterochrony (11), and is complementary to other theories which take a strength-based approach to autism (8, 19). This hypothesis helps explain similarities between motor repetitions and circumscribe interests, illuminates parents' observations of their child's motor repetitions [e.g., (30)], and has heuristic value in providing ideas for therapists to introduce flexibility into the motor routines of minimally verbal children.
Method: We analyzed the word usage patterns of 30 self-identified autistic bloggers and 30 age and gender-matched non-autistic bloggers, assumed to be neurotypical (NT). Blog content was analyzed using qualitative methods.
Results: Compared to NT bloggers, autistic bloggers wrote in a more complex manner. Autistic bloggers often wrote about science or other abstract topics rather than discussing daily life events.
Conclusion: One subset of autistic individuals, those who write blogs, wrote in a more complex style than did typically developed peers. This may reflect autistic bloggers being an elite subset of autistic individuals, or a cognitive style that includes intellectual interests.
Cross-cultural Psychology by Catherine Caldwell-Harris
This is a very preliminary practice talk, I mainly just wanted to share my work and let the long version get some air time. I'll post the 4 minute version once I refine it down... Comments welcome of course.
A couple things I already know to change are:
I won't mention high-functioning (although 10 years ago people used that label). I won't talk about "mental functioning of people that were close to the human standard model" etc.
My 11 year old son coming in and out of my room -- really unnerved me. I thought he was at the neighbor's house so I didn't put any barricades on the door to my bedroom.
Example: Why was the presence of a dishwasher in the home of rural Turkish families in the 1990s the best statistical predictor of mothers refraining from using corporal punishment with their children?
Yet autistic sociality is different. Our purpose here is to suggest one type of difference that has received little attention: lack of interest in status and hierarchy. During social interaction, autistics are less concerned, and NTs more concerned, with successfully navigating social hierarchies, as occurs when meeting new people or making small talk at a party. NTs are more concerned with the social status and social usefulness of other people. Autistics, in contrast, are more accepting of diverse presentations in others, and more egalitarian in their social attitudes. They concentrate on the usefulness of the information conveyed, rather than the strategic benefits of associating with this new person.
Autistic women’s special interests differ from neurotypical women’s hobbies by being particularly information-rich and conducive to systemizing. A novel finding is that true crime and interest in people/celebrities allows autistic women to learn about how other people’s minds work. The intense interest in systemizing the social and psychological world may reflect autistic women’s intuitions that this is a growth area for them.
Clare Harrop, a leading researcher of restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs), wrote with her colleagues, “.as a field we do not understand what causes RRBs, and this is particularly difficult to ascertain when children are minimally verbal.” (1). The current account is a response to this request for new ideas about the cause of repetitive behaviors. Motor repetitions in autism are an alternative phenotype which has adaptive and functional consequences: fueling trial-and-error tinkering which could lead to inventions, i.e., novel, useful configurations of objects. This hypothesis is consistent with the proposed mechanism of heterochrony (11), and is complementary to other theories which take a strength-based approach to autism (8, 19). This hypothesis helps explain similarities between motor repetitions and circumscribe interests, illuminates parents' observations of their child's motor repetitions [e.g., (30)], and has heuristic value in providing ideas for therapists to introduce flexibility into the motor routines of minimally verbal children.
Method: We analyzed the word usage patterns of 30 self-identified autistic bloggers and 30 age and gender-matched non-autistic bloggers, assumed to be neurotypical (NT). Blog content was analyzed using qualitative methods.
Results: Compared to NT bloggers, autistic bloggers wrote in a more complex manner. Autistic bloggers often wrote about science or other abstract topics rather than discussing daily life events.
Conclusion: One subset of autistic individuals, those who write blogs, wrote in a more complex style than did typically developed peers. This may reflect autistic bloggers being an elite subset of autistic individuals, or a cognitive style that includes intellectual interests.
tested the urbanization hypothesis, which is that residents of urban areas will be more individualistic and less
collectivistic than rural residents. Individualism, collectivism and family-consciousness were assessed in college
students in several Turkish cities and one US city (Boston). Urbanization co-varied most strongly not with
individualism, but with low values of vertical collectivism, which is the tendency to subordinate personal goals
to those of in-group authority figures, and with family-consciousness (communalism within the family group).
family-consciousness and vertical collectivism were less frequently endorsed in larger urban areas compared to
rural areas. These associations provide a foundation for asking more specific questions about what aspects of
urban living (e.g., income,
Öz Farklı toplumlarda ve bağlamlarda kadınlar erkeklere göre daha çok depresif semtompları beyan etmekte olup depresyon oranları daha yüksektir. Tipik açıklamalar her kültürde ortaya çıkan kadınların düşük sosyal statüsü, kadın olmanın hormonal yönleriyle ilgilidir. Ancak, cinsiyet farklılıklar batılı olmayan kültürlerde ve kırsal bağlamlarda yoktur veya azalmıştır. Bu makale hem cinsiyet farklılıkları hem de hızla gelişen bir toplum olan Türkiye'den elde edilmiş verilerle depresyonda kentsel-kırsal farklılıklarıyla literatüre katkıda bulunmayı amaçlamaktadır. Türkiye'de kırsal ve kentsel bölgelerde yaşayan üniversite öğrencilerine beck depresyon envanteriyle birlikte kişisel başarı, ebeveyn kontrolü ve bireycilik-toplulukçuluk ölçekleri uygulanmıştır. Hem kentsel hem de kırsal alanlardaki erkek ve kadınlar, kentsel örneklemde kırsala göre daha az semptom rapor etmekle birlikte birbirine benzer miktarda depresif belirtiler rapor etmişlerdir. Bu bulgular, kadınların erkeklere göre kaçınılmaz olarak daha fazla depresif oldukları fikrine şüpheyle karşılanmaktadır. Türk toplumu veya Türk üniversite öğrencilerinin yaşamlarında, kadın ve erkeklerde hangi faktörlerin strese neden olan durumları dengelediğini bulmak yararlı olacaktır.
https://bostonu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_efECkWc2bcCZt1X
Through this survey we hope to discover which methods of learning deaf students prefer in order to develop new approaches to deaf education.
If you are interested in participating, please click paste in this url or click on link above. https://bostonu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_41tceIC13jE5HW4
Charles De Gaulle airport. The airline employee had dismissed my attempts to use French and asked me the required standard questions in
what he knew to be my native language, English.
By appearance, my interrogator was a North African immigrant to
France, probably near my own young age. My French was a tourist’s brave
attempt; he had the precision of many years of immersion.
Me: “No.”
“In France, we say every woman carries a weapon.” [long pause]
“Her cunt.”
Bulls-eye. He had succeeded in turning the tables on my white
American power.
See: http://www.frontiersin.org/Language_Sciences/researchtopics/The_Janus-Face_of_language_Whe/2202
The SLA literature has been extended in the last decade by work on exceptional learners, meaning those who could pass as native speakers despite learning as young adults. In those cases, high levels of integrative motivation appear to be the most important factor in explaining unusual L2 attainment. We extend this research paradigm to older adults, investigating factors associated with better-than-expected acquisition of L2 for middle-aged adults.
We interviewed L1 Russian immigrants to the U.S. who achieved good English proficiency despite immigrating after age 40 with little prior English. We administered personality scales and a test of English ability. Similar to studies on exceptional learners, our middle-age learners had high need for cognition, openness to new experience, extraversion, high empathy, and successful acculturation. But what stood out in the interviews was the presence of a special personal situation that required proficient English. One of the participants needed to learn English to interact with U.S. doctors in charge of treating a complicated illness. Another participant, a successful doctor in the country of origin who immigrated due to religious beliefs, described the “need to maintain professional status.” Our inference is that motivation related to maintaining a desired quality of life is a key factor in attainment of fluent English abilities after young adulthood. Our findings are inconsistent with strict interpretations of the critical
may not precede their referents (‘‘She spoke after Susan . . .’’). However, a
pronoun in a subordinate clause may precede its referent (‘‘After she spoke,
Susan . . .’’). According to Government and Binding Theory, these intuitions
are subsumed by the principle of c-command, a phrase structure descriptor
whose success at describing diverse grammatical phenomena has been widely
interpreted as support for the autonomy of syntax hypothesis. We investigate
an alternative view, that syntax signals (inter alia) foregrounding/backgrounding
structure. Listeners may consult this foregrounding/backgrounding
information when inferring pronominal coreference. We backgrounded
the main clause using progressive or pluperfect aspect, as in ‘‘She had been
speaking for several hours when Susan . . .’’ A rating study showed
coreference was allowed more frequently for pronouns in main clauses
when those clauses contained progressive or pluperfect aspect. A follow-up
study showed that the constructional semantics of when subordinates
contributes to backgrounding interpretations, as does semantic plausibility.
Our experiments do not falsify c-command, but rather empirically develop
the long-standing view that generalisations about syntactic structures (i.e.
formal principles) can be motivated by correlations between form and
function.
Sevil Hocaoğlu, M.A., Istanbul University, sevil-svtln@hotmail.com
Ayşe Ayçiçeği Dinn, Ph.D., Istanbul University, aycicegi@istanbul.edu.tr
Abstract
College students in Istanbul are surrounded by considerable contradictions. The life-style of a cosmopolitan European city beckons, but family life frequently retains traditional values such as skepticism of western behaviors like dating. A key source of tension for young people is religion. Turkey has a history as a secular state, but religious political parties and culturally powerful groups like Gülen have grown in importance in recent decades.
To learn more about religious attitudes among young adults in this rapidly changing region, we surveyed 200 students at Istanbul University. Students completed an Islamic version of the Religious Orientation Scale (ROS), along with personality measures. Using the ROS categories, 37% of students were high on both intrinsic and extrinsic subscales, 13% were extrinsic, 14% intrinsic, while 36% were low/nonreligious. This group responded 'disagree' on average to most questions, thus rejecting statements such as Unless conditions are blocked, I fast in the month of Ramadan.
In several recent western studies, possessing an analytical reasoning style was associated with atheism. We examined this using the Cognitive Reflections Test (CRT) and the Rational Experiential Inventory (REI). To obtain correct answers on the math problems of the CRT, respondents must inhibit responding with an intuitive but false answer. Correct answers on the CRT negatively correlated with ROS extrinsic orientation, r= -0.45. The REI sub-scores measuring Rational Engagement correlated with ROS extrinsic at r= -0.35, a new finding in the literature (our team previously found a trend in this direction with American college students). No relationships were found between religiousness and the broader autism phenotype (using the Autism Quotient) in contrast to several western studies.
Interview data with a small number of students revealed multiple reasons for atheism and low religiousness, but a salient issue was perceived incompatibility between scientific theories (especially evolution) and religious teachings.
Biographical notes
Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Associate Professor of Psychology at Boston University, received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Psychology from University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include cross-cultural psychology and individual differences in cognition and personality, including the life history factors that contribute to identifying as atheists, humanists and nonbelievers.
Sevil Hocaoğlu is a doctoral student at Istanbul University
Ayşe Ayçiçeği Dinn, Professor and Chairwoman of the Psychology Department at Istanbul University, received her Ph.D. from Marmara University. Dr. Ayçiçegi-Dinn has conducted cross-cultural research in the U.S. and Turkey, and has studied neuropsychological functioning in diverse populations including persons with obsessive compulsive disorder. She is the founder and director of the Istanbul University career center, where she works to help Istanbul University students succeed in the global economy.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/11/fordham-prof-fired-for-confusing-two-black-students-in-class/
From one of the news reports: The other student said that Trogan has repeatedly called her by the wrong name despite her correcting him.
'I felt really disrespected,' they told the student paper. 'I did not feel heard because every time he (misnamed me) I would tell him, and it just seemed like he would brush it off or that he did not care.'
This has happened to me. When a student name-corrects me in class after I made a name error, my breezy, "oh, sorry" isn't dismissive of their identity, it's that I am so profoundly embarrassed and mad at myself for the mistake that I rush to get over it and handle my inner self-anger. And of course there are on-going class issues to handle so I don't even get a moment then to try to find a feature in the student's face that will let me differentiate the student from similar-appearing students.
My biggest challenge is white girls with long brown hair. I like my students who are white girls with long brown hair. I am not prejudiced against them. But I have a hard time distinguishing these girls via appearance. I have poor face recognition and need to use large visual features to distinguish students from each other - height, body size, hair style, typical clothing. The challenge of white girls with long brown hair is that they are of similar height and body shape, style their hair similarly and often wear similar clothing.
This semester, I had 2 men and 10 women in a small class where it would be important to call on students by name. I saw right away I would have trouble naming the 2 men correctly because they were both white so I couldn't use skin tone or ethnicity, so I rapidly made a nemonic. One student had a Greek first name, and I mentally associated his swept up hair style (long on top) with "Greek God." I remembered to use it and the mnemonic worked like a charm.
The larger picture about human psychology and society is that humans evolved to co-exist in group sizes of 25 to 150. We need to grapple with what that means for anyone)tasked with recognizing and distinguishing large numbers of people. At the low-end of the face recognition ability distribution, errors will be made. Even people in the middle of the ability distribution will make errors, given the enormity of the evolutionarily unanticipated problem of tracking larger numbers of human faces.
Current accounts of lexical representation emphasize descriptive succinctness. It is argued here that speakers’ lexicons list a larger number of distinct senses, and contain more information about words’ typical linguistic context, than has previous been supposed. The need for a detailed listing of many senses and their contexts is illustrated via an intensive analysis of a single word, the English verb cut. Dictionary entries for cut and all cut senses in the LOB and Brown corpora were analyzed. An analysis of speakers judging cut expressions under controlled conditions found that frequently ocurring verb arguments of cut (for example, cut out, cut costs) were the easiest to judge, suggesting that frequently occuring arguments are listed in the lexical entry of verbs.
Repeated and orthographically similar words are vulnerable in RSVP, as observed using the repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. Prior researchers have claimed that RB is increased for emotion words. Employing orthographic repetition blindness, our data showed that emotion and emotion-laden words had a report advantage when they were the second of two similar words (e.g., less RB occurred with HORSE curse than with HORSE purse). This renders emotion RB similar to the use of emotion words in the attentional blink phenomenon. An extreme form of emotional arousal was studied in the same experiment using the taboo-illusory words paradigm. The sequence BRAT decide what ore frequently resulted in report of BRAT decide whore. Elderly and young observers showed similar amount of RB, report of emotion words, report of illusory words, and tendency of taboo words to reduce report of other words in the RSVP stream. This suggests that emotion word detection, and the binding mechanisms responsible for repetition blindness and illusory word report, are operating in elderly individuals in a similar manner to that of young adults.
repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. Prior researchers have claimed that RB is increased for
emotion words, but the mechanism for this was unclear. We argued that RB should be reduced
for words with properties that capture attention, such as emotion words. Employing
orthographic repetition blindness, our data showed that words with negative emotional valence
had a report advantage when they were the second of two similar words (e.g., less RB occurred
with HORSE curse than with HORSE purse). This renders emotion RB similar to the use of emotion
words in the attentional blink phenomenon. The findings demonstrate the neglected role of
competition in conscious recognition of multiple words under conditions of brief display and
masking.