Free Associate Research Articles

EDom: Norming software and relative meaning frequencies for 544 English homonyms

Words that are homonyms-that is, for which a single written and spoken form is associated with multiple, unrelated interpretations, such as COMPOUND, which can denote an < enclosure > or a < composite > meaning-are an invaluable class of items for studying word and discourse comprehension. When using homonyms as stimuli, it is critical to control for the relative frequencies of each interpretation, because this variable can drastically alter the empirical effects of homonymy. Currently, the standard method for estimating these frequencies is based on the classification of free associates generated for a homonym, but this approach is both assumption-laden and resource-demanding. Here, we outline an alternative norming methodology based on explicit ratings of the relative meaning frequencies of dictionary definitions. To evaluate this method, we collected and analyzed data in a norming study involving 544 English homonyms, using the eDom norming software that we developed for this purpose. Dictionary definitions were generally sufficient to exhaustively cover word meanings, and the methods converged on stable norms with fewer data and less effort on the part of the experimenter. The predictive validity of the norms was demonstrated in analyses of lexical decision data from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., Behavior Research Methods, 39, 445-459, 2007), and from Armstrong and Plaut (Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2223-2228, 2011). On the basis of these results, our norming method obviates relying on the unsubstantiated assumptions involved in estimating relative meaning frequencies on the basis of classification of free associates. Additional details of the norming procedure, the meaning frequency norms, and the source code, standalone binaries, and user manual for the software are available at http://edom.cnbc.cmu.edu .

Cimarrones de Panamá: La forja de una identidad afroamericana en el siglo XVI

Jean-Pierre Tardieu builds on several generations of Panamanian scholarship, such as that of Armando Fortune, María del Carmen Borrego Plá, and Luis Diez Castillo, to offer readers the most thorough study to date of sixteenth-century maroon community formation anywhere in the Americas. He begins with the standard narrative of Spaniards caught between their desire for African laborers and the territory’s ability to conceal runaways. The Castilla de Oro’s unique economic geography, with the key ports of Nombre de Dios and Panamá situated on opposite sides of the isthmus’s unsettled and difficult-to-traverse interior, facilitated cimarrón disruption of valuable convoys of Peruvian silver, regional gold, and metropolitan goods. The fact that slaves were the majority population only exacerbated the situation. The novelty of Tardieu’s study is in analyzing the reality of negotiation in tandem with the common discussion of maroon resistance. He details the conditions that forced the contending parties to the bargaining table. The meaning of autonomy was as varied for runaways as were European positions on controlling them. The crown, the Consejo de Indias, the Real Hacienda, local cabildos, clerics, merchants, and individual slave owners brought different philosophies and strategies to bear in addressing the cimarrón challenge.Despite the persistent colonist requests for military intervention, metropolitan administrators initially were slow to act and proposed alternatives to the prohibitive costs, high European death rates, and frequent ineffectiveness of such intervention. In observing the colony from abroad, the early crown response contended that modification to owner behavior would be the most cost-effective strategy for ameliorating conditions for the enslaved and limiting their flight. However, peninsular officials from the Real Hacienda sought more aggressive approaches. And local cabildos organized and paid for their slave-catching expeditions. By contrast, more conciliatory clerical involvement was also key in the process of understanding cimarrón behaviors and in attempting to negotiate their eventual inclusion into the imperial system.Tardieu highlights several moments of either maroon capture or negotiated settlement. One such event was the 1555 destruction of the community led by the legendary hero Bayano. Tardieu explicitly addresses the surrounding mythology. It is noteworthy that the captors could not overtake the community by force but delayed for months to disingenuously build cimarrón trust before luring their victims into a trap. Here Tardieu also demonstrates the willingness with which this particular group of runaways sought to reposition themselves as free associates of Spanish forces. Tardieu then interprets their naivete and legitimate desire for integration into a grander military system to compare Bayano’s imprisoned fate with that of Saint Domingue’s Toussaint Louverture.Tardieu more provocatively considers the internal political and ideological structures of the maroon domain. He notes a complex governmental hierarchy that allowed for the diffused control of an extensive territory. Tardieu also describes the development of a “religion naciónal que adoptó por mimetismo los ritos y la liturgia cristiana” (p. 98). This view is inconsistent with generations of scholarship indicating the intentional selectiveness that usually accompanied the syncretism of African and Catholic practices. Tardieu’s heavy reliance on the late sixteenth-century regional history of Fray Pedro de Aguado for this interpretation requires some caution, as Aguado was not a direct observer of the community and wrote with the cultural limitations of his period.The famous Drake raids of 1572 and 1573 taught both peninsular and local authorities that cimarrón alliances with foreign privateers were not only financially costly but also threatened imperial integrity and required immediate redress. Tardieu outlines the changing course of Spanish imperial responses over this period, from local military confrontation, to royal offers of amnesty and community recognition, and to a massive regional military action. Tardieu attributes the final selection of peace to the astuteness of maroon leaders. These seasoned soldiers accepted the futility of endless wars and acquiesced to the Spanish resettlement plans. In providing demographic details about these settlements, Tardieu moves beyond flat images of cimarrones to provide a valuably nuanced picture of early free black community formation.

The first three seconds

The human auditory system can rapidly process musical information such as, for example: the recognition and identification of sound sources, the deciphering of meter, tempo, mode, and texture, the processing of lyrics and dynamics, the identification of musical style and genre, the perception of performance nuance, and the apprehension of emotional character. Two empirical studies are reported that attempt to chronicle when such information is processed. In the first exploratory study, a diverse set of musical excerpts was selected and trimmed to various durations, ranging from 50 ms to 3000 ms. These samples, beginning with the shortest and ending with the longest, were presented to participants, who were then asked to free associate and talk about any observations that came to mind. Based on these results, a second main study was carried out using a betting paradigm to determine the amount of exposure needed for listeners to feel confident about acquired musical information. The results suggest a rapid unfolding of cognitive processes within a 3-second listening span.

Phonological Facilitation from Pictures in a Word Association Task: Evidence for Routine Cascaded Processing in Spoken Word Production

While most authors now agree that the language production system is in principle cascaded, the strength with which cascaded lemma-to-phoneme activation typically occurs is debated. Picture naming has been shown to be facilitated by phonologically related distractor pictures, but no such facilitation from pictures has been shown for word reading. Picture-picture paradigms have recently been suggested to represent an attentionally facilitated and unusually strong case of cascaded phonological facilitation, not typical of a more general weakly cascaded production system. We used a novel procedure based on picture-word interference paradigms, where participants made speeded verbal free association responses to presented words, with irrelevant picture distractors that were phonologically related to their predicted high-associate responses. Phonological facilitation effects from related picture names were observed on free associate verbal production latencies. These findings represent a far more general demonstration of routine cascaded language production and suggest that the strength and extent of cascaded activation is more substantial than that suggested by traditional picture-word paradigms.

Self-coded indirect memory associations and

Indirect memory associations for substance use predict both the concurrent and prospective levels of substance use. These methods assess spontaneous, possibly implicit, and easily accessible associations that predict substance use over direct (explicit) methods of assessment (e.g., outcome expectancies). The present study tested and expanded the application of a coding method for alcohol and marijuana associations on the basis of self-coding of indirect responses (Frigon & Krank, 2009). College students generated free associates to (1) ambiguous words (e.g., draft or weed), (2) situations (e.g., at a party, hanging out with friends), and (3) emotions (having fun, feeling dreamy). Later, participants were shown their responses and were asked to code their responses according to both nonrisk and risk activities, such as alcohol and marijuana use. Self-coded scores were higher than researcher-coded scores, captured the same variance, and improved the prediction of substance use. Self-coding of indirect memory associations provides accurate and efficient prediction of the level of alcohol and marijuana. Self-coding is efficient and may be useful for reducing ambiguities in coding of many different kinds of open-ended responses.

The associative structure of language: Contextual diversity in early word learning

Previous studies demonstrated that statistical properties of adult generated free associates predict the order of early noun learning. We investigate an explanation for this phenomenon that we call the associative structure of language: early word learning may be driven in part by contextual diversity in the learning environment, with contextual diversity in caregiver speech correlating with the cue–target structure in adult free association norms. To test this, we examined the co-occurrence of words in caregiver speech from the CHILDES database and found that a word’s contextual diversity—the number of unique word types a word co-occurs with in caregiver speech—predicted the order of early word learning and was highly correlated with the number of unique associative cues for a given target word in adult free association norms. The associative structure of language was further supported by an analysis of the longitudinal development of early semantic networks (from 16 to 30 months) using contextual co-occurrence. This analysis supported two growth processes: The lure of the associates, in which the earliest learned words have more connections with known words, and preferential acquisition, in which the earliest learned words are the most contextually diverse in the learning environment. We further discuss the impact of word class (nouns, verbs, etc.) on these results.

Brothers &amp; Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (review)

Reviewed by: Brothers & Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales Jan Susina (bio) Brothers & Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales. Edited by Kate Bernheimer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Fairy tales are often, but not always, formulaic. They frequently begin "Once upon a time" and end with the satisfying, "And they lived happily ever after." Or so we believe. However, between the two stylistic bookends of this flexible genre that appeals as much to adults as children comes the all-important middle where the characters, the action, and the magic reside. Without a compelling story, no fairy tale or would-be literary fairy tale can survive, despite the use of a well-established opening or conclusion. No amount of allusions to the dark woods, menacing wolves, or princes, happy or unhappy, is going to save it. That's the problem with Kate Bernheimer's Brothers & Beasts. It is a decidedly uneven anthology of personal essays, stories, and poems by twenty-three male writers who were invited to submit a personal essay on fairy tales. Bernheimer tried to keep the essays open-ended rather than asking the writers to limit their discussion of fairy tales to issues of gender or childhood. The collection starts out well with a brief foreword by Maria Tatar and ends with a thoughtful afterword by Jack Zipes that reminds the reader that fairy tales "cannot thrive without innovation, just as we cannot thrive without innovation" (184), and that the genre encourages writers to play with endless variations of the key elements. But many of the contributors, like princes in fairy tales, get lost in the woods. For instance, the first essay by Steve Almond examines how he incorporated Betty MacDonald's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories into his life as a ten-year-old boy. The only problem is MacDonald's books aren't fairy tales. Several of the contributors seem to have trouble distinguishing the forest from the trees, or in this case, the teller from the tale. One of the best essays in the volume turns out to be Bernheimer's introduction, and it should have served as a model for the other contributors. Her insightful meditation explores the reasons for her childhood preference for Hansel over Gretel in Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" despite her knowledge of the scholarship that praises Gretel's agency in the tale. Growing up a timid child with an equally shy younger brother and a dominating older sister, Bernheimer seems to have thrown her lot with her male sibling who was more a Charlie Brown than a handsome prince. Bernheimer is both a talented writer of The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (2001) and the Complete Tales of Merry Gold (2006), as well as the editor of the literary journal The Fairy Tale Review. Her introduction reveals a deep knowledge and appreciation of fairy tales. If only her contributors shared her love of fairy tales. That is not to say that there aren't a number of excellent personal essays that explore the influence of fairy tales on the emotional, intellectual, and writing lives of the male contributors. Like the beautiful bird that rises from the brother's bones [End Page 216] in the Grimm's "The Juniper Tree," several of the selections soar over the rest, including Robert Coover's "Tale, Myth, Writer," Neil Gaiman's "Four Poems," Eric Kraft's charming "I Consider My Luck," and perhaps, most importantly, Gregory Maguire's "The World Turned Upside Down." After reading Maguire's essay, one is quick to realize that those years of working as a professor and associate director of the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College were not wasted and were pivotal in the composition of his novels Wicked (1995), Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999), and Mirror, Mirror (2003). These writers keep focused on fairy tales, but too many of the other contributors wander off topic. Many use fairy tales as a spring-board to discuss something else, often times themselves. Rather than the subtitle An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales, a more appropriate one might be "What We Write About When We Free Associate About...

ARNM: Future directions for Australian Rural Nurses and Midwives

[Extract] With the overall aim to promote quality health care through excellence in nursing practice, ARNM now has a significant national membership, representing all sectors of the rural nursing community - academic, clinical (community and hospital), managers and policy officers. ARNM has 1271 individual members from diverse rural backgrounds, in addition to 13 health facilities or area health services with varying numbers of rural nurses and midwives in their employment. The majority of ARNM members (59.9%) are clinicians working 'at the bedside', and nurse managers (22.7%). Academic rural nurses and midwives now only make up 2.3% of membership, reflecting a change in the historical profile of ARNM members. Encouragingly, membership applications and enquires reach the Secretariat on a daily basis as we continue to offer free associate membership.

Associative and Categorical Relations in the Associative Memory Illusion

What kinds of associations underlie the associative memory illusion? In Experiment 1, lists composed of horizontal, or coordinate, free associates elicited false recognition of critical lures much more often than did lists composed of vertical, or subordinate, category instances. Experiment 2 replicated this result, and showed that the difference between free associates and category instances was not an artifact of differential levels of forward or backward associative strength. Associative structure plays an important role in the associative memory illusion: The illusion is strongest when the critical lure lies at the same level of categorization as the studied items.

Exploring the alcohol expectancy memory network: The utility of free associates.

Alcohol expectancies are theorized to operate through associative memory networks. These networks are thought to differ on the basis of individual experience (direct and vicarious) with alcohol. Free-associate probabilities have been used in cognitive psychology as a metric of the associative strength of words to other words; this method has been used to establish the relationships within a semantic memory network. Participants from a large college sample were asked to free associate to the phrase "Alcohol makes me ______" They were also asked about their quantity of alcohol consumption. Results showed that specific responses were given with different probabilities by individuals who drank at different levels. The heaviest drinkers tended to have more positive and arousing responses than did lighter drinkers, who tended to have more negative and sedating responses. These results underscore the need to take into account relevant individual differences in behavior and experience when characterizing semantic networks.

A General Version of Standard Basis and its Application to T-Ideals

A very general version of standard basis is introduced. It covers a wide range of applications using this notion. Particularly, the standard basis of T-ideal in a free associate algebra is presented and a new variant of Specht’s problem (concerning PI-algebras) is formulated. A strengthening of the Specht’s conjecture is proved for nonmatrix finitely generated algebras.

Ionic association in liquid (polyether–Al 2O 3–LiClO 4) composite electrolytes

The influence of surface-modified Al 2O 3 particles on the formation of different ionic aggregates in poly (ethylene glycol) methyl ether (PEGME)–LiClO 4 and poly (ethylene oxide) dimethyl ether (PEODME)–LiClO 4 electrolytes is discussed. Three independent methods have been used to estimate the fractions of free ions and ionic associates. The first two methods are based on the deconvolution of the FTIR 624 cm −1 and Raman 930 cm −1 perchlorate anion modes. The third method uses a Fuoss–Kraus semiempirical method involving the salt concentration dependence of ionic conductivity. Results are compared for two polyether systems to explain interactions in polymer electrolytes based on low molecular weight polyglycols. The temperature dependence of the fractions of ionic species is also analysed.

Free associations and dominance ratings of homophones for young and older adults

Homophones are words that share phonology but differ in meaning and spelling (e.g., beach, beech). This article presents the results of normative surveys that asked young and older adults to free associate to and rate the dominance of 197 homophones. Although norms exist for young adults on word familiarity and frequency for homophones, these results supplement the literature by (1) reporting the four most frequent responses to visually presented homophones for both young and older adults, and (2) reporting young and older adults' ratings of homophone dominance. Results indicated that young and older adults gave the same first response to 67% of the homophones and rated homophone dominance similarly on 60% of the homophone sets. These results identify a subset of homophones that are preferable for research with young and older adults because of age-related equivalence in free association and dominance ratings. These norms can be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Web archive, www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

The Analysis of Meaninglessness.

Patients who are severely inhibited in their capacity to free associate and reflect on their associations present a technical challenge. Such inhibitions threaten the treatment with a form of communication breakdown. There is often a sense of futility and a sense that someone must be to blame for the treatment impasse. Efforts to interpret such severe inhibitions often result in intensification of the impasse. Working through such enactments is facilitated not only through accurate psychodynamic understanding but also through a willingness to engage in some degree of spontaneous emotional engagement, self-disclosure, and mutual analysis. When the patient is in a state of psychic equivalence, a particular quality of relational experience is sometimes required for the patient to perceive how external and internal reality are not necessarily equivalent. Most clinicians are familiar with a certain type of treatment impasse, one in which it seems as though nothing meaningful is transpiring. The patient may be relatively uncommunicative and silent, saying that nothing is on her mind. Or the patient may engage in a narrative style that keeps the analyst at an emotional distance. The tone of voice may be monotone and the content may be fairly concrete, a litany of ruminative worries, an endless collection of petty grievances, or a laundry list of normalizing progress reports. If the well runs dry, the patient claims her mind is blank, as the patient sees no meaning in her narrative beyond the manifest content. The analyst’s countertransference tends toward boredom, distractibility, or drowsiness when silently listening and toward exasperation when efforts to engage in a collaborative reflective effort are frustrated. Such patients are severely inhibited in their capacity to freely associate and to reflect on their associations. These severe inhibitions can virtually shut down an analytic process. Analysis may then seem a meaningless exercise in futility as it seems as though the patient is incapable of generating material of sufficient analytic interest. Questions of the patient’s suitability for analysis may arise in the mind of the patient as well as the analyst. If this situation is protracted, there is likely to be a growing concern about who is to blame for the impasse. At the manifest level it seems as though nothing is happening. What we have here is neither meaningless nor a failure of emotional engagement,

Spatial Metaphors of the Mind

A case in which the author began to understand her patient as “collapsing the space between them,” rather than as continuing only to free associate, is the occasion for a contemplation of the way psychoanalytic theory effects a transition between what is inner, or lived, and outer, or experienced. Metaphor is seen as the agent of this transition. The author discusses metaphor in relation to the case described, while also examining spatial metaphors of mind in classical analysis and in Kleinian theory. It is suggested that both may be integrated in a third metaphorical-spatial construct, Green’s analytic space.

Roadblocks in the way of passion

Free association is the fundamental rule of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It is through the patient's associations that a glimpse can be had of what has been repressed. But, at least with some patients, this is easier said than done. There appears to be a conundrum in force: the inhibitions which caused the patient's desire to become repressed are precisely those which inhibit "the irruption of copious ideas". Freud said: "In my opinion the physician has taken upon himself duties not only towards the individual patient but towards science as well" (1905(1901): 8). In its own way this article is both a clinical and a theoretical matter. It considers free association as a therapeutic problem, giving a case to illustrate grappling with the patient's inability to free associate. The article also speculates on free association as an intellectual puzzle, and proposes a model which encompasses both empty and full speech.

Boys' and girls' responses to stress: affect and heart rate during a speech task.

To examine gender differences in heart rate and reports of negative and positive affect among adolescents during a speech task. Subjects were 133 adolescents, 73 girls and 60 boys, ages 14-18 years. Subjects were randomly assigned to speak for 10 minutes and asked either to free associate or to describe the most stressful event in their lives. Their heart rate was assessed at baseline and at 5 and 10 minutes after the task began. Self-ratings of negative and positive affect were assessed at baseline and at 10 minutes after the beginning of the task. Data were analyzed by Student's t-tests for independent samples, analyses of covariance, and Spearman rank-order correlation coefficients. Girls rated their negative affect significantly higher at baseline in comparison to boys. In addition, girls had a higher baseline heart rate. However, boys' increase in heart rate 5 minutes into the speech task was significantly greater than that of girls. Also, the free association task elicited significantly greater increases in heart rate compared to a task in which the adolescent described his or her most stressful life event. However, the stressful event task elicited greater negative and less positive affect. Significant relationships between change in heart rate and ratings of post-task affect were found among girls but not among boys, suggesting that the girls' ratings of their affect are more congruent with their physiological reactions to a stressful speech task. These results suggest that gender and task differences must be considered in assessing adolescents' stress.

The importance of semantic similarity to the irrelevant speech effect.

Irrelevant speech disrupts immediate recall of a short sequence of items. Salamé and Baddeley (1982) found a very small and nonsignificant increase in the irrelevant speech effect when the speech comprised items semantically identical to the to-be-remembered items, leading subsequent researchers to conclude that semantic similarity plays no role in the irrelevant speech effect. Experiment 1 showed that strong free associates of the to-be-remembered items disrupted serial recall to a greater extent than words that were dissimilar to the to-be-remembered items. Experiment 2 showed that this same pattern of disruption in a free recall task. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Automatic and effortful memory processes in depressed persons.

Clinical lore has held that depression results in memory dysfunction, particularly in older adults. Some believe that memory loss due to depression is indistinguishable from an organic dementia and label such dysfunction pseudodementia. Previous literature has inconclusively supported the relation between depression and memory deficits. This research assessed three groups of subjects: (a) 30 depressed patients, (b) 20 psychiatric controls, and (c) 30 normal controls. Dependent memory tasks were designed to vary along the automatic and effortful memory encoding continuum defined by Hasher and Zacks (1979). Two tasks were designed to be effortful (free recall and paired associates) and two tasks were designed to be automatic (memory for frequency and location). Contrary to predictions, depression was not related to memory deficits. However, post-hoc analyses indicated that psychiatric hospitalization and psychotropic medication had a greater negative impact on memory than did depression. As predicted, age resulted in effortful encoding deficits whereas age resulted in minimal deficits on the automatic tasks. There was no evidence of an interaction between depression and age that would be consistent with the descriptive label of pseudodementia.

Cognitive‐versus‐affective positivity asymmetries in thought systems

AbstractPositive‐negative asymmetry in thought can involve both cognitive asymmetry, (thinking about characteristics that a stimulus has versus does not have), which we predict will be large and preponderantly a positivity bias, and affective asymmetry (thinking about desirable versus undesirable characteristics that the stimulus has or has not), predicted to be small and to fluctuate predictably in direction. The first four of the 10 studies reported here investigate asymmetries in thinking ability, measured by giving people directed‐thinking tasks specifically asking them to generate positive versus negative thoughts. We predicted and found no affective asymmetry and a moderate‐sized cognitive positivity bias that declines with practice. The second four of the 10 studies investigate asymmetries in proclivity (or preference beyond ability) that appear when people free associate on a variety of stimuli. As regards proclivity, we predicted and found a large, uniformly positive cognitive bias (that declines somewhat as children mature), but only a slight affective bias that is positive when autistic needs are dominant and negative when realistic needs dominate. A final pair of studies show that the cognitive and affective variables interact as regards how directed positive versus negative thinking about a stimulus affects evaluation of that stimulus.