<p> Hlinak and Delic and Becirovic, among others, addressed the connection between the use of the Socratic method and critical thinking development. Hlinak noted while there is an abundance of research on the Socratic method and distance learning, there are relatively few publications that address the intersection. With the continued growth of online education, there is a lack of research primarily on the perspectives of online faculty members. The purpose of the study was to gain the perspectives of online faculty members for effectively using the Socratic method in an online higher education environment to improve critical thinking skills and their application to decision making. An additional goal was the possible development of a research model to explain the use of the Socratic method in the online environment. Garrison's online community of inquiry was a primary supportive theory. Additional theories supporting this study included the Socratic method, James's pragmatism, Dewey's critical thinking, and Paul's formalized critical thinking. Globalization and Christensen's disruptive innovation also supported this research. Online faculty perspectives are essential; faculty are responsible for establishing pedagogy (e.g., teaching strategies, course design, and instructional intervention) for classrooms. The research questions addressed: (a) what teaching strategies, course design, instructional interventions, and delivery options are needed to implement the use of the Socratic method in the online classroom; (b) what influence does the use of the Socratic method have on cognitive presence; and (c) what effect does the increase of cognitive presence have on critical thinking and decision-making skills in nonclassroom activities and the workplace. Using qualitative exploratory research methodology, data were collected from faculty in an online educator forum using an online questionnaire and personal telephone interviews were conducted with faculty from an online doctoral program. Based on participant experiences, the Socratic method supports critical thinking development and fosters cognitive presence with students. According to the participants, the connection between the Socratic method and critical thinking extends these skills to nonacademic settings and the workplace. The participants made a number of recommendations to improve the effectiveness of the Socratic method in the online environment including integrating the Socratic method in course designs.</p><p>

<p> The peripartum period is a potentially difficult time in a woman's life, a time when up to 70% of women experience transient mood symptoms and approximately 15% will suffer from a severe mood event which impacts not just her, but her family as well. The symptoms and clinical features of the mood symptoms are linked to Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Bipolar Disorder (BD). Appropriate diagnosis as early as possible has a critical impact on the immediate and long-term health of the peripartum woman, especially in those with a bipolar diathesis. While treatment for BD versus MDD may be markedly different, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two, especially during a depressed episode, with postpartum onset. To date, no study has evaluated the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) for its value as a screening measure for the differentiation of BD versus MDD in the postpartum period. </p><p> This study sought to: 1) to describe the demographic differences between women diagnosed with BD versus MDD seeking treatment for a major depressive episode, with postpartum onset; 2) to characterize the features of the major depressive episode; with postpartum onset in women diagnosed with BD versus MDD; and 3) to examine scale characteristics of the EPDS as a predictor of the diagnosis of BD versus MDD. </p><p> Results revealed that postpartum depressed women diagnosed with BD reported a) an earlier age of onset, b) a greater number of prior mood episodes, c) greater incidence of psychotic symptoms in the current depressive episode, and d) lower overall scores on the EPDS versus postpartum depressed women diagnosed with MDD. There were no reliable differences between the groups on family history of a) mood disorders; b) number of generations; c) weeks postpartum at symptom onset; d) scores on a 4-item subscale of the EPDS; e) suicidal/homicidal ideation; nor the incidence of symptoms of f) atypical depression, g) generalized anxiety disorder, or h) obsessive-compulsive disorder. The findings support the use of a thorough clinical and demographic history when evaluating postpartum depressed women and the use of a measure in place of or in addition to the EPDS to ensure the appropriate differentiation of BD versus MDD.</p>

The face inversion effect (FIE; Yin, 1969) raises the question of whether upright face identification is mediated by a special mechanism that is disrupted by inversion. The present study investigates the effect of face inversion on the perceptual encoding of spatial frequency (SF) information using a novel variant of the Bubbles technique (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001). In Experiment 1, the SF Bubbles technique was validated using a simple plaid detection task. In Experiment 2, SF tuning of upright and inverted face identification was measured. While the data showed a clear FIE (28% higher accuracy and 455 ms shorter reaction times for upright faces), SF tunings were remarkably similar in both conditions (r = .96; a single SF band of ~2 octaves peaking at ~9 cycles per face width). Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that SF Bubbles is sensitive to bottom-up and top-down induced changes in SF tuning, respectively. Overall, the results show that the same SFs are utilized in upright and inverted face identification, albeit not with equal efficiency.

In the masked priming paradigm, responses to a target are faster if the prime and target are identical (repetition priming). Forster (submitted) provides evidence that repetition priming consists of a semantic component, due to the shared meaning of the prime and target, and an orthographic component, due to the shared letters. When an unmasked unrelated word intervenes between the prime and target, repetition priming was reduced, but orthographic priming was unaffected. When this intervener was masked, repetition priming was reduced whereas orthographic priming was eliminated. The unmasked intervener may block a semantic component of priming, and a masked intervener blocks the orthographic component. Experiment 1 replicated Forster’s results and confirmed the results were not due to an SOA confound. Experiment 2 included semantically-related primes in an attempt to examine the intervener’s effect on semantic priming, however, our materials did not yield semantic priming even when no intervener was present.

There is research which demonstrates that traumatic head injury (TBI) is associated with increased incidence of dementia as well as with greater cognitive impairment than is expected in normal aging. However, this literature remains equivocal; studies exploring head injury as a risk factor for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease have yielded conflicting results. The present study examines morbidity, mortality, cognitive impairment and psychosocial issues in seniors with a history of head injury of sufficient severity to cause loss of consciousness. These results suggest that over time, a history of TBI is associated with some increased morbidity with age. Associations between TBI and changes in personality that may lead to impaired psychosocial functioning were also suggested by the findings of this study. Specifically, the results indicated traumatic brain injury may be associated with marital breakdown and social isolation. Additional results suggest that people who have sustained a TBI have an increased likelihood of living in a nursing home or chronic-care facility.

This set of studies used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the electrophysiology of face recognition as it may occur in real-life circumstances including eyewitness identification. Research using photographs has identified two ERP components as being associated with memory function, the N250 (an early indicator of perceptual recognition) and the P300 (associated with stimulus evaluation, task-relevance, and probability), however, there is no published research examining the relationship between these components and memory for live events, and recognizing a face seen briefly in real-life is somewhat different than recognizing a face only seen in a photograph. The present set of three studies employed a “target / non-target” paradigm that used a live interaction at each encoding stage. In Experiment 1, participants were introduced to and asked to identify their study experimenter as the target. In the second experiment, participants were introduced to the same experimenter and asked to imagine that they witnessed her committing a convenience-store robbery. Participants were asked to “cover” for the experimenter by choosing a different photo from the line-up to accuse as the culprit – they are asked to lie. In Experiment 3, participants witnessed a live simulated theft and were asked to identify the culprit from a line-up. In all three experiments the line-up paradigm was identical – participants were shown a repeated series of sequentially-presented photographs and were asked to correctly identify one target among nine foils (non-targets), while brainwaves were recorded. Results showed that across all three studies, both the N250 and P300 were attenuated for the person selected as the target, in comparison to correct rejections of foils. Additional results from Experiment 2 showed that, compared to rejections of foils, both the N250 and P300 were enhanced for rejections of the experimenter-photo when participants were “covering” for her. In Experiment 3, participants who were unable to correctly identify the culprit showed that the N250 to incorrect rejections of the culprit was larger than correct rejections of foils. Finally, a comparison of participants who correctly identified the culprit and those who incorrectly identified a foil showed that the amplitude of the N250 and P300 to the selected culprit were equivalent regardless of eyewitness accuracy. Collectively, results from Experiments 1, 2 and 3 provide support that the memory effects indicated by the N250 and P300 components reported in laboratory studies generalize to person memories acquired during live interactions.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1999. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-07, Section: B, page: 3567. Chair: Cynthia Radnitz. Available also in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 120 p.; also includes graphics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-120). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

The face inversion effect (FIE; Yin, 1969) raises the question of whether upright face identification is mediated by a special mechanism that is disrupted by inversion. The present study investigates the effect of face inversion on the perceptual encoding of spatial frequency (SF) information using a novel variant of the Bubbles technique (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001). In Experiment 1, the SF Bubbles technique was validated using a simple plaid detection task. In Experiment 2, SF tuning of upright and inverted face identification was measured. While the data showed a clear FIE (28% higher accuracy and 455 ms shorter reaction times for upright faces), SF tunings were remarkably similar in both conditions (r = .96; a single SF band of ~2 octaves peaking at ~9 cycles per face width). Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that SF Bubbles is sensitive to bottom-up and top-down induced changes in SF tuning, respectively. Overall, the results show that the same SFs are utilized in upright and inverted face identification, albeit not with equal efficiency.

In the masked priming paradigm, responses to a target are faster if the prime and target are identical (repetition priming). Forster (submitted) provides evidence that repetition priming consists of a semantic component, due to the shared meaning of the prime and target, and an orthographic component, due to the shared letters. When an unmasked unrelated word intervenes between the prime and target, repetition priming was reduced, but orthographic priming was unaffected. When this intervener was masked, repetition priming was reduced whereas orthographic priming was eliminated. The unmasked intervener may block a semantic component of priming, and a masked intervener blocks the orthographic component. Experiment 1 replicated Forster’s results and confirmed the results were not due to an SOA confound. Experiment 2 included semantically-related primes in an attempt to examine the intervener’s effect on semantic priming, however, our materials did not yield semantic priming even when no intervener was present.