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Teachers in hospitals are a unique phenomenon. Their students are sick, hospitalized children with a range of physical, emotional, and cognitive needs. Teachers are expected to be dynamic, flexible, creative, open-minded, and efficient to function in the most appropriate manner. However, a recent study showed that these teachers tend to procrastinate on some of the most common tasks that teachers perform on a daily basis in the regular school system. The present study was an initial investigation into the reasons for procrastination in teachers who work in two hospitals in Israel. Thirty-two teachers were interviewed. The findings indicated that the primary reason for procrastination among teachers in the hospital was professional role ambiguity, with emotional factors and situational determinants which were identified. Future research should further explore reasons for procrastination in the workplace, in general, and its association with professional role ambiguity specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construct: Induction into the Gold Humanism Honor Society (GHHS) during medical school is recognized as an indicator of humanistic orientation and behavior. Various attitudes and interpersonal orientations including empathy and patient-centeredness have been posited to translate into behaviors constituting humanistic care. Background: To our knowledge there has never been a longitudinal, multi-institutional empirical study of the attitudinal and interpersonal orientations correlated with GHHS membership status. Approach: We used the American Medical Association Learning Environment Study (LES) data set to explore attitudinal correlates associated with students whose behaviors are recognized by their peers as being exceptionally humanistic. Specifically, we examined whether empathy, patient-centeredness, tolerance of ambiguity, coping style, and perceptions of the learning environment are associated with GHHS membership status. We further considered to what extent GHHS members arrive in medical school with these attitudinal correlates and to what extent they change and evolve differentially among GHHS members compared to their non-GHHS peers. Between 2011 and 2015, 585 students from 13 North American medical schools with GHHS chapters participated in the LES, a longitudinal cohort study using a battery of validated psychometric measures including the Jefferson Scale of Empathy, Patient-Practitioner Orientation Scale and Tolerance of Ambiguity Questionnaire. In the final survey administration, students self-identified as GHHS inductees or not (non-GHHS). T tests, effect sizes, and longitudinal generalized mixed-effects models examined the differences between GHHS and non-GHHS students. Results: Students inducted into GHHS scored significantly higher on average over 4 years than non-GHHS inductees on clinical empathy, patient-centered beliefs, and tolerance of ambiguity. GHHS students reported higher levels of empathy and patient-centeredness at medical school matriculation. This difference persists in the 4th year of medical school and when controlling for time, race, gender, and school. Conclusions: GHHS inductees enter medical school with different attitudes and beliefs than their non-GHHS classmates. Although humanistic attitudes and beliefs vary over time during students' 4 years, the gap between the two groups remains constant. Medical schools may want to consider selecting for specific humanistic traits during admissions as well as fostering the development of humanism through curricular interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communicating scientific uncertainty about public health threats is ethically desirable but challenging due to its tendency to promote avoidance of choice options with unknown probabilities-a phenomenon known as "ambiguity aversion." This study examined this phenomenon's potential magnitude, its responses to different communication strategies, and its mechanisms. In a factorial experiment, 2701 adult laypersons in Spain read one of three versions of a hypothetical newspaper article describing a pandemic vaccine-preventable disease (VPD), but varying in scientific uncertainty about VPD risk and vaccine effectiveness: No-Uncertainty, Uncertainty, and Normalized-Uncertainty (emphasizing its expected nature). Vaccination intentions were lower for the Uncertainty and Normalized-Uncertainty groups compared to the No-Uncertainty group, consistent with ambiguity aversion; Uncertainty and Normalized-Uncertainty groups did not differ. Ambiguity-averse responses were moderated by health literacy and mediated by perceptions of vaccine effectiveness, VPD likelihood, and VPD severity. Communicating scientific uncertainty about public health threats warrants caution and further research to elucidate its outcomes, mechanisms, and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, cognitive biases and physiological arousal have each been proposed as mechanisms through which paediatric anxiety develops and is maintained over time. Preliminary studies have found associations between anxious interpretations of ambiguity, physiological arousal, and avoidance, supporting theories that link cognition, psychophysiology, and behaviour. However, little is known about the relationship between youths’ resolutions of ambiguity and physiological arousal during acute stress. Such information may have important clinical implications for use of verbal self-regulation strategies and cognitive restructuring during treatments for paediatric anxiety. In this brief report, we present findings suggesting that anxious, but not typically developing, youth select avoidant goals via non-threatening resolution of ambiguity during a stressor, and that this resolution of ambiguity is accompanied by physiological reactivity (heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia). We propose future empirical research on the interplay between interpretation bias, psychophysiology, and child anxiety, as well as clinical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In disciplines such as moral psychology and media theory, investigations of moral clarity versus ambiguity in narratives are increasingly important. Untested mechanisms have been proposed for how moral clarity and ambiguity might affect audiences. Based on literature regarding joint action and coordinated experiences, we reason that morally clear narratives elicit coordinated responses across audience members, which should increase within-group cooperation. By contrast, we reason that morally ambiguous narratives elicit divergent, uncoordinated responses across audience members, and this experience decreases cooperation. We conducted three independent studies (one using short text narratives, one using feature-length films, and one using morally and emotionally neutral stimuli). Results indicate that moral clarity is indeed associated with subsequently higher levels of group cooperation than moral ambiguity, and the effect cannot be attributed to changes in affect or moral priming. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous literature has explained older individuals’ disadvantageous decision-making under ambiguity in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) by reduced emotional warning signals preceding decisions. We argue that age-related reductions in IGT performance may also be explained by reductions in certain cognitive abilities (reasoning, executive functions). In 210 participants (18–86 years), we found that the age-related variance on IGT performance occurred only in the last 60 trials. The effect was mediated by cognitive abilities and their relation with decision-making performance under risk with explicit rules (Game of Dice Task). Thus, reductions in cognitive functions in older age may be associated with both a reduced ability to gain explicit insight into the rules of the ambiguous decision situation and with failure to choose the less risky options consequently after the rules have been understood explicitly. Previous literature may have underestimated the relevance of cognitive functions for age-related decline in decision-making performance under ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surprised expressions are interpreted as negative by some people, and as positive by others. When compared to fearful expressions, which are consistently rated as negative, surprise and fear share similar morphological structures (e.g. widened eyes), but these similarities are primarily in the upper part of the face (eyes). We hypothesised, then, that individuals would be more likely to interpret surprise positively when fixating faster to the lower part of the face (mouth). Participants rated surprised and fearful faces as either positive or negative while eye movements were recorded. Positive ratings of surprise were associated with longer fixation on the mouth than negative ratings. There were also individual differences in fixation patterns, with individuals who fixated the mouth earlier exhibiting increased positive ratings. These findings suggest that there are meaningful individual differences in how people process faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation of emotionally ambiguous words, sentences, or scenarios can be altered through training procedures that are collectively called cognitive bias modification for interpretation (CBM-I). In three experiments, we systematically manipulated the nature of the training in order to discriminate betweenemotional primingandambiguity resolutionaccounts of training effects. In Experiment 1 participants completed word fragments that were consistently related to either a negative or benign interpretation of an ambiguous sentence. In a subsequent semantic priming task they demonstrated an interpretation bias, in that they were faster to identify relatedness of targets that were associated with the training-congruent meaning of an emotionally ambiguous homograph. We then manipulated the training sentences to show that interpretation bias was eliminated when participants simply completed valenced word fragments following unrelated sentences (Experiment 2), or completed fragments that were related to emotional but unambiguous sentences (Experiment 3). Only when participants were required to actively resolve emotionally ambiguous sentences during training did changes in interpretation emerge at test. Findings suggest that CBM-I achieves its effects by altering a production rule that aids the selection of meaning from emotionally ambiguous alternatives, in line with anambiguity resolutionaccount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this courageous and conceptually rich article, Joye Weisel-Barth shares her experience with her patient, Lara, in which a spontaneous, well-intended decision at a moment of heightened emotional connection led, unpredictably, to later events which caused the treatment to collapse. Weisel-Barth’s article invites reflection regarding both the complexity and risks involved in the analytic therapist’s greater participatory freedom—a core element in contemporary relational thinking, broadly defined. I consider what happened between Weisel-Barth and Lara from four points-of-view. The first has to do withthe mutuality-asymmetry dialecticfirst named by Lew Aron (1991), developed more fully by Wally Burke (1992), and later canoninzed by Irwin Hoffman (1998). The second concerns what Madeleine and Willy Baranger (1961–1962) first recognized as thenecessary ambiguityof the analytic situation. Related to that is thenecessary complexity of the analyst’s subjectivity-as-analyst.And the fourth set of considerations, informed by Rachel Peltz’s (2012) article, “Ways of Hearing: Getting Inside Psychoanalysis,” concerns what it means to “go in close” in an analytic relationship, with particular reference to contemporary relational and Bionian approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is proposed that a critical psychotherapy could be developed by combining ideas from psychoanalysis with concepts from poetics, as Lacan originally suggested. Taking a narrative and personal style, and using examples of two men silenced by trauma and a clinical vignette, the author combines Laplanche's psychoanalytic concept of fourvoiement with some examples of the poetics of ambiguity as an example of how such a critical psychotherapy could develop. Studying how words express more than their literal meaning is combined with the idea that we are continually going astray from the original decentring concept of the unconscious that Freud introduced to psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gay stepfamilies have their own unique stressors that impact the individual member's ability to form a family. Through in-depth interviews, gay biological fathers and their same-sex partners described their experiences in their stepfamilies. The conceptual framework of boundary ambiguity is used to frame the experiences of institutional and interpersonal stressors that influence these family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The roles of belief in a just world (BJW) and discrimination against ones' group in perceptions of personal discrimination were examined. Female participants (n = 63) were personally discriminated against in a laboratory setting. We manipulated whether the experimenter appeared to discriminate against other participants, which presumably made the presence of personal discrimination less ambiguous, or did not appear to discriminate against others, which presumably made personal discrimination more ambiguous. In the no group discrimination condition, but not in the group discrimination condition, participants' perceptions of being personally discriminated against depended on individual differences in BJW: Women with a strong BJW perceived less personal discrimination than those with a weak BJW. Also, strong BJW women in the group discrimination condition perceived less personal discrimination than strong BJW women in the no group discrimination condition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses ways of developing self-authorship in college students, a capacity for questioning assumptions and remaining confident in ambiguous situations. The author contends that complex workplace environments and job demands call for a new approach to pedagogy in order to prepare students for post-college life. She references her own "Learning Partnerships Model" (LPM), a set of criteria for collaborative learning. Institutions mentioned as testing the models include Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech); University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and Miami University.

The analysis presented in this paper is part of a larger study, the aim of which is to describe the GPs’ everyday taken-for-granted working life. The study is based on multi-sited anthropological fieldwork in Danish general practices. This paper analyses consultations where children are vaccinated and the analysis shows the way these consultations differ from other consultations in relation to flow and communication. Neither parents nor doctors question the value of the vaccination, but the manner in which they talk about it and handle it in the flow of the consultation points to them experiencing it as being problematic. Taking inspiration from Mary Douglas’ theory on cultural classification the injection is interpreted as ‘matter out of place’. The analysis identifies the infliction of pain and the discomfort this brings to the doctor and the parent as problematic as well as a breach of the doctor–patient relationship. The aim of vaccination is to prevent potential diseases in the future, but its function in the consultation, besides being fulfilment of national guidelines, is not immediately apparent. It has no real function in the consultation and this makes it problematic in the present, causing the ambiguity that both doctors and parents express. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The word superiority effect (WSE) in visual information processing was described more than a century ago. However, the ambiguity remains regarding the interaction between WSE and attention. An attempt was made to investigate this issue using a number of experimental paradigms, including the attentional blink, motion-induced blindness, perceptual latency priming, and visual search. The data obtained agree with the previous findings and demonstrate that full attention is not required for the WSE to occur, but only when attention is directed toward or diverted from the word as a whole rather than toward or from word components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In three experiments we compared 5- and 6-year-old children's understanding of multiple interpretations arising from an ambiguous figure (e.g., the duck/rabbit) and other ambiguous partial input. Children found it equally easy to switch between alternative interpretations of ambiguous figures and partial views (Experiment 1, N = 19) and more difficult to accept two characters' conflicting interpretations of ambiguous figures, than partial views (Experiment 2, N = 29). Children found it more difficult to accept explicitly that one stimulus could simultaneously give rise to two interpretations, than to switch between them (Experiment 3, N = 40). Children's handling of multiple interpretations was not primarily affected by the type of input, but results suggest that there are two distinct stages in children's handling of multiple interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposing attitudes, emotions, or perceptions of self and other that set the stage for experiences of duality influence our interactions and self-other schemas. The experience of duality that has been conceptualised as 'conflict,' 'self state,' and 'paradox" in psychoanalytic theory has been extensively considered, particularly in terms of its manifestation in transference-countertransference relations and in the analytic material from patients' experiences. They have not, however, been compared and contrasted as entities that lead to similar kinds of experience. Scant attention has been paid, moreover, to paradox as a mental organisation that underlies certain experiences of duality. The concept of paradox has thus been emphasised and developed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how dental students experience their clinical semesters from a gender perspective. Twelve students (seven women and five men) and three teachers (two women and one man) at the Umeå dentistry programme participated in semi-structured interviews that were analysed with Grounded Theory methodology. The model we propose consists of the core category experiencing ambiguity and the three categories experiencing pressure and stress, assessing your own performance, and passing through the eye of the needle as well as four subcategories. At the core of our findings lies ambiguity, captured in the student dilemmas what's enough/when's enough. The answers to these dilemmas are further complicated by the gendered dimension and the dimension of unequal treatment, which provide students with different and contradicting sets of rules and roles. A comparison with recent findings from the United States shows that the students' experiences are not unique. Our experiencing ambiguity model constitutes a platform for future research on how students experience clinical education, as well as potential predictors and consequences in relation to performance and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of psychological measures often results in item response data that arguably are consistent with both unidimensional (a single common factor) and multidimensional latent structures (typically caused by parcels of items that tap similar content domains). As such, structural ambiguity leads to seemingly endless 'confirmatory' factor analytic studies in which the research question is whether scale scores can be interpreted as reflecting variation on a single trait. An alternative to the more commonly observed unidimensional, correlated traits, or second-order representations of a measure's latent structure is a bifactor model. Bifactor structures, however, are not well understood in the personality assessment community and thus rarely are applied. To address this, herein we (a) describe issues that arise in conceptualizing and modeling multidimensionality, (b) describe exploratory (including Schmid-Leiman [Schmid & Leiman, 1957] and target bifactor rotations) and confirmatory bifactor modeling, (c) differentiate between bifactor and second-order models, and (d) suggest contexts where bifactor analysis is particularly valuable (e.g., for evaluating the plausibility of subscales, determining the extent to which scores reflect a single variable even when the data are multidimensional, and evaluating the feasibility of applying a unidimensional item response theory (IRT) measurement model). We emphasize that the determination of dimensionality is a related but distinct question from either determining the extent to which scores reflect a single individual difference variable or determining the effect of multidimensionality on IRT item parameter estimates. Indeed, we suggest that in many contexts, multidimensional data can yield interpretable scale scores and be appropriately fitted to unidimensional IRT models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anticipation relates to the perception of change. Therefore, dynamics is the context for defining anticipation processes. Since preoccupation with change is as old as science itself, anticipation-related questions go back to the first attempts to explain why and how things change. However, as a specific concept, anticipation insinuates itself in the language of science in the writings of Whitehead, Burgers, Bennett, Feynman, Svoboda, Rosen, Nadin and Dubois, i.e. since 1929. While Robert Rosen's work is the main focus of this article, an attempt is made to advance a perspective for the broad field of studies that developed around the notion of anticipation. Of particular interest are the circumstances of epistemological and gnoseological significance, leading to the articulation of the early hypotheses regarding anticipatory processes. Of no less interest to the scientific community are questions pertinent to complexity, adaptivity, purposiveness, time and computability as they relate to our understanding of anticipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aversion to “ambiguity”—uncertainty about the reliability, credibility, or adequacy of risk-related information—is an important problem that may influence judgments and decisions about medical interventions. Ambiguity aversion (AA) varies among individuals, however, and has been understudied in the health domain. To explore this phenomenon further, we developed a new theory-based measure of aversion to ambiguity regarding medical tests and treatments, and examined the prevalence and association of AA with sociodemographic factors. The “AA-Med” scale was developed using a large survey sample of the U.S. public (n = 4,398), and scale psychometric properties and the population distribution of AA were evaluated. The scale demonstrated acceptable reliability (α = .73) and validity as ascertained by association with respondents' interest in a hypothetical ambiguous cancer screening test. Ambiguity aversion (AA) was associated with older age, non-White race, lower education and income, and female sex. The AA-Med scale is a promising new measure, and AA is associated with several sociodemographic factors. We discuss implications of these findings and potential applications of the scale for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing the outline of the endless literature on consciousness, the separation between science and philosophy rather than being overcome, seems to come back in different shapes. According to this point of view, the hard problem seems to be how to study consciousness while avoiding a slip back to the old dualism. This article outlines the advantages of the phenomenological method. This method, more than getting over the mind-body separation, anticipates it through an open gaze, able to bring back the human presence as something structurally “ambiguous.” Reintroducing Husserl's scientific project in a complete way, Francisco Varela opened up a research area yet to be explored, which promises to be fertile for neuroscience, provided that we accept that radicalism essential to phenomenology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of professional education programs is to prepare aspiring professionals for the challenges of practice within a particular profession. These programs typically seek to ensure the acquisition of necessary knowledge and skills, as well as providing opportunities for their application. While not denying the importance of knowledge and skills, this paper reconfigures professional education as a process of becoming. Learning to become a professional involves not only what we know and can do, but also who we are (becoming). It involves integration of knowing, acting, and being in the form of professional ways of being that unfold over time. When a professional education program focuses on the acquisition and application of knowledge and skills, it falls short of facilitating their integration into professional ways of being. In addition, through such a focus on epistemology (or theory of knowing), ontology (or theory of being) is overlooked. This paper explores what it means to develop professional ways of being where the focus is becoming, not simply knowing as an end in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the consequences of the importance that recent 3 papers assign to the countertransference. When the latter acquires a theoretical and technical value equal to that of the transference, the analytic situation is configured as a dynamic bi-personal field, and the phenomena occurring in it need to be formulated in bi-personal terms. First, the field of the analytic situation is described, in its spatial, temporal and functional structure, and its triangular character (the present–absent third party in the bi-personal field) is underlined. Then, the ambiguity of this field is emphasized, with special weight given to its bodily aspect (the bodily experiences of the analyst and the patient being particularly revealing of the unconscious situation in the field). The different dynamic structures or lines of orientation of the field are examined: the analytic contract, the configuration of the manifest material, the unconscious configuration – the unconscious bi-personal phantasy manifesting itself in an interpretable point of urgency – that produces the structure of the field and its modifications. The authors describe the characteristics of this unconscious couple phantasy: its mobility and lack of definition, the importance of the phenomena of projective and introjective identification in its structuring. The authors go on to study the functioning of this field, which oscillates between mobilisation and stagnation, integration and splitting. Special reference is made to the concept of the split off unconscious ‘bastion’ as an extremely important technical problem. The analyst’s work is described as allowing oneself to be partially involved in the transference–countertransference micro-neurosis or micro-psychosis, and interpretation as a means of simultaneous recovery of parts of the analyst and the patient involved in the field. Finally, the authors describe the bi-personal aspect of the act of insight that we experience in the analytic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the effects of concreteness and ambiguity on language processing. In Experiment 1, English-Spanish bilinguals translated words with a single translation. Contrary to past findings, we observed no concrete-word advantage in translation latency. In Experiment 2, English-Spanish bilinguals translated words with one and more than one translation. Words with multiple translations were translated more slowly and showed the typical concrete-word advantage. Words with one translation showed a reversal of the typical concrete-word advantage in latency. Further, concrete words were uninfluenced by ambiguity. In Experiment 3, we explored whether the interaction between concreteness and ambiguity was a general property of the language processing system. Supporting this idea, in a monolingual lexical decision task, we found an interaction between concreteness and number of meanings analogous to the interaction in translation. We discuss the common mechanism that may lead to this interaction in both within and cross-language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sequential effects are ubiquitous in experimental psychology. Within visual search, performance is often speeded when participants search for the same target twice in a row, as opposed to two different targets. Here, we investigate such intertrial priming. Two experiments show that factors influencing search processes affect the presence and size of intertrial priming: It is larger when there are fewer elements in the visual display, and larger when there is a salient distractor present than when the target is the only salient element in the display. A control experiment showed that these increased priming effects were not due to longer baseline RTs. These findings, it is argued, are inconsistent with theories that explain intertrial priming as resulting from either only faster visual selection, or from episodic retrieval of responses. Instead, we propose that ambiguity in the stimulus or task underlies the occurrence of intertrial priming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. Ambiguities in the conceptions and measurement of locus of control were investigated in this study. Specifically, some psychometric properties of several widely used measures of perceived behavior--outcome contingency, interpersonal power, and social self-efficacy were assessed. To different degrees, the results indicated that all three measures of perceived behavior--outcome contingency lacked convergent and discriminant validity. Implications for interpreting past research, directions for future investigations, and limitations of the present study are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of prosody to the interpretation of temporary syntactic ambiguity was examined for young and elderly listeners using a sentence - completion task . Temporary syntactic ambiguity refers to cases where it may be temporarily unclear whether a syntactic clause bound ary has or has not been reached based on what has been heard in the sentence to that point . Results suggest that both young and elderly adults use a computationally less demanding late - closure parsing strat egy whenever possible , but that sentence prosody can override this ten dency when an alternative closure position is clearly signaled . Although subtle differences appeared in regard to sentence completion strategies and latencies to completion , results suggest that efficient resolution of syntactic boundary uncertainty and effective use of sentence prosody are two features of language comprehension that remain well - preserved in normal aging . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The published literature on attitudes toward environment and space has neglected ambiguity and ambivalence, an aspect of human psychology which we all recognize, but one which is difficult to measure. Three conditions promote ambiguity and ambivalence: 1) complex environments (stimuli); 2) the discrepancy between the mind's search for symmetry and life's bias in favor of movement and of certain psychological values; and 3) the tendency for feelings and primitive concepts to polarize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positivity effect in judgments of personal experiences is a well-established finding. In this article, we posit that this effect may not manifest in the case of product experiences We base this on literature that suggests that social stimuli (such as personal experiences) are more ambiguous than nonsocial stimuli (such as experiences associated with products) Because of this ambiguity, construal processes are more likely to occur for social versus nonsocial stimuli, increasing the likelihood of the operation of self-serving theories in social judgments. Experiment 1 reveals that positive personal experiences are more likely to be retrieved than negative personal experiences, however, there is no difference in recall of positive and negative product experiences Experiments 2 and 3 extend this finding to judgments of past and future experiences, respectively, and replicate the better-than-average effect for personal, but not product, experiences Experiment 4 then examines the motivational underpinnings of construal processes and shows that construals can operate even for relatively unambiguous product experiences when participants believe such experiences implicate the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments were conducted with male and female university students in an attempt to establish whether syntactically ambiguous words are better represented by independent lexical entries for each syntactic context in which the items occur, or whether the different usages could be adequately represented by single entries. Both experiments were attempts to influence recall through control of the coding of ambiguous items. Experiment one (N = 128) involved a free recall procedure in which ambiguous items were embedded in lists of nonambiguous nouns or verbs, and Experiment two (N = 144) involved a release from proactive inhibition procedure which has been shown to make syntactic features highly salient. The results of both experiments supported the single entry view; that is, the ambiguous items apparently were not coded according to one usage independent of other usages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposes a framework to reconcile normative and descriptive views of ambiguity and subjective probability. Formal definition of ambiguity over a continuum ranging from ignorance to risk; Inductive logic account for the effects of ambiguity; Psychological models; Implications of the study to the modeling of subjective probability judgements.

SUMMARY Six high- and six low-bias lexically ambiguous sentences and their unambiguous control pairs, divided into three lists, were presented to 30 male undergraduates, whose heart rate (HR) was recorded. Since HR is sensitive to complexity of cognitive activity, it was suggested that, compared to an unambiguous control condition, the degree of HR change would be greater for ambiguous sentences only if both their meanings were processed. Following presentation of sentences, Ss' HR increased and then decreased. Percentages of increase and decrease were analyzed in Group x Ambiguity x Bias x Sentence-clusters repeated measures Latin square ANOVAs. For increase scores, Ambiguity x Bias and Ambiguity effects were significant. For decrease scores, the Ambiguity main effect was significant. The results were further analyzed by Scheffe tests and interpreted as showing that both meanings of low-bias ambiguous sentences and only one meaning of high-bias ambiguous sentences were perceived although there may have been some degree of cognitive uncertainty in the latter condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the measurement of ambiguity tolerance. Terms used to introduced to construct of intolerance of ambiguity; High internal reliability and test-retest reliability of ambiguity tolerance; Observation of a strong evidence for criteria-related validity.

The article presents a discussion of the case presentation by Ron Bodansky, focusing on how a patient who grew up in an abusive dysfunctional family and has had a severe deficit of positive secure attachment experiences was able to improve her live and how the analysis helped her cure. The author mentions the struggle of the patient, Mrs. E., to cope with the confusion and the ambiguity that the scene from her childhood that triggered in her.

The central theme of this study is that a relationship exists between an individual's role changes and self changes. This is not a new idea. Lindesmith and Strauss discuss the effects of status changes on personality. Kuhn, building on the work of Mead, Cooley, and others, theoretically implies this. Sarbin cites a considerable body of empirical evidence in support of the statement that role enactments are related to four types of psychological changes, somatic changes, changes in performance, changes in preferences for attention deployment, and changes in cognitive dispositions, attitudes, values, opinions, and beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way individuals interpret their worlds is influenced by emotion and its regulation. Indeed, negative affect typically increases negative interpretations of ambiguous stimuli and may have a role in dysfunctional psychosocial function. Yet, it is not currently known whether explicit and implicit emotion regulation can counteract this effect. To address this question, undergraduates (N = 103) used cognitive reappraisal under angry and control mood states to disambiguate sentences by selecting either a neutral, positive, or negative word. While explicit cognitive reappraisal decreased negative affect, it had no effect on interpretation of ambiguity. Still, reported use of reappraisal predicted decreased negative and increased positive interpretations. Further, dispositional characteristics such as anger and optimism were key factors in how participants interpreted ambiguity. These findings suggest that regulating emotion may not be sufficient for influencing cognitive interpretations. Yet, individuals who are optimistic and are able to successfully regulate their emotions are less prone to negative interpretations even under angry mood states. This has implications for skill development in individuals with emotional disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the concept of "sacred waste," or items that hold no practical value but cannot be discarded due to their accumulation of religious, moral, or emotional meaning. Topics include the accidental production of sacred waste, its ambiguous potential and volatile, negative energy, and its uselessness as part of a sacred political economy.