Obsessional slowness: a meticulous replication.

The treatment of an apparently authentic case of obsessional slowness is described. The relationship between behaviour change and emotional events is discussed. The findings replicate those of Rachman (1974).     

The fearless avoiders: Comparison of various strains of rats in an active avoidance task

The effect of exploratory activity and emotional reactivity on the acquisition of active avoidance learning was assessed in rats. Four strains of rats selectively bred for a high or low degree of either of the two traits (Maudsley emotionally reactive animals, Maudsley emotionally non-reactive animals, high rearers, and low rearers) and a control strain (randombred animals) took part in the experiment. Significant differences were found between strains in the number of animals showing active avoidance behaviour. Emotional reactivity was shown to facilitate active avoidance behaviour and so did, unexpectedly, a low degree of exploratory activity. An attempt was made to explain the latter result in terms of differences in channel capacity between high and low exploring animals and the ensuing differences in attention focus on the relevant stimulus for the test situation.     

Crossed dextral aphasia: A clinical radiological correlation

Three lifelong right-handed patients with clinically and radiologically well-defined right-hemispheric infarctions became aphasic. Their language functions in the rehabilitative, subacute phase of their illness were characterized by fluent, literal paraphasic output, dyslexia, and dysgraphia. Auditory comprehension was fair for contextual conversation, and the combination of language abilities enabled them to reach a “functional communication” stage. This study was unable to determine why these three patients had crossed dextral aphasias resulting from their otherwise typical clinical and radiological right-hemispheric infarcts. Of interest, the radiologically well-defined lesions, aside from being ipsilateral, fitted well the “posterior” fluency localization in two of the three patients, but was more extensive in the third.     

Return of fear: The role of inhibition

In a previous study investigating the relationship between subjective, physiological and behavioural changes during treatment of specific phobias, a marked between-session increase was found in subjective fear after high, but not after low intensity phobic stimulation although the groups showed similar fear ratings and heart rates immediately after treatment (Grey et al, 1979). It was hypothesized that the high intensity stimulation led to ‘treatment fatigue’; a state of deactivation, the recovery from which led to a return of fear.In this study high intensity in vivo stimulation was used for the treatment of phobic subjects under conditions of distributed and massed practice. No differences emerged between treatment conditions. A small group of Ss with a conspicuously high heart rate (mean level 120 bpm) when rating zero fear, showed a significant increase in fear after one week's interval, although they had shown similar improvement to the Ss during treatment. Subjects in both treatment conditions showed lower heart rate at all post-treatment assessments than pre-treatment. The high initial heart rate Ss continued to have higher heart rate than other Ss throughout the experiment, although they showed a decrease after treatment. It was only these Ss with desynchronously high heart rate, i.e. high heart rate with zero fear ratings, who suffered a return of fear, whereas high heart rate during high fear did not predict either response to treatment or return of fear. A further finding was a lack of correlation between the behavioural and physiological indices of fear, namely, between distance and heart rate at high levels of fear.     

The use of averaged electroencephalic response techniques in the study of auditory processing related to speech and language

This paper reviews a number of studies done by the authors and others, who have utilized various averaged electroencephalic response (AER) techniques to study speech and language processing. Pertinent studies are described in detail. A relatively new AER technique, auditory brainstem responses (ABR), is described and its usefulness in studying auditory processing activity related to speech and language is outlined. In addition, a series of ABR studies, that have demonstrated significant male—female differences in ABR auditory processing abilities, is presented and the relevance of these data to already established differences in male—female language, hearing, and cognitive abilities is discussed.     

Nature of spelling errors in transcortical sensory aphasia: A case study

The nature and extent of spelling errors in a patient with transcortical sensory aphasia were investigated. The two experimental conditions required the patient to spell monosyllabic and polysyllabic words both verbally and in written form. Analysis of the spelling errors revealed partially preserved knowledge of the visual image of a word as a whole, as well as preserved knowledge of temporal order. Our patient's error patterns in both conditions were more similar than dissimilar. These findings in conjunction with results reported in the literature indicate that patients exhibiting different aphasia syndromes use separate spelling strategies.     

The selective impairment of phonological processing: A case study

A case study is reported of an aphasic patient with fluent speech and markedly superior comprehension of written vs. spoken words. Results of extensive testing supported the hypothesis that the patient suffers from a phonological processing deficit that affects performance in all tasks that require the generation of a phonological code. This selective deficit is interpreted as the underlying cause of diverse symptoms such as asyntactic comprehension of written sentences, the commission of spelling errors in writing, and the production of literal paraphasias and neologisms in spontaneous speech. Alternative possibilities for the classification of this patient are discussed.     

Writing nonwords to dictation

Two experiments show that the spelling of a nonword that is heard (i.e., /prein/) is influenced by the spelling of a word that is heard earlier (i.e., “brain” > prain and “crane” > prane). This is a robust effect and inspection of the pattern of results suggests that, under these conditions, both words and nonwords are lexically analyzed. A patient with an aquired reading disorder characterized as surface dyslexia was unaffected by such lexical influences in his spelling of nonwords. Moreover, his spelling suggested a defective ability to generate phonemically acceptable spellings of nonwords. Taken together with other reports of neurologically caused spelling impairments these results suggest that skill at assigning letters to sounds never becomes independent of lexical skill in adult readers. An analogical, lexically based parsing system for the reading and spelling of new (nonwords, as suggested by Marcel (1980) appears to be the best fit to these data.     

Synchronous and desynchronous changes during fear reduction.

The purpose of this experiment, carried out on 27 subjects with intense and circumscribed fears, was to test one main hypothesis and several subsidiary predictions. The prediction that a high-demand in vivo treatment condition produces desynchronous changes and a low-demand treatment condition synchronous changes, was supported by some inter-session findings but not by the intra-session findings. The clear linear relation between heart-rate and reported fear was confirmed, as was the rapid habituation of the heart-rate response to phobic stimulation.The fear-reactions and fear-reductions of psychiatric and non-psychiatric were indistinguishable. High heart-rate responders and low heart-rate responders showed similar patterns of improvement. The constrained laboratory ‘treatment’ procedure used in the experiment produced large and rapid reductions in fear.     

The behavioural treatment of obsessional-compulsive disorders, with and without clomipramine

The effects of behavioural treatment alone, and in combination with clomipramine, were assessed on 40 patients with chronic obsessional-compulsive disorders, using a 2 × 2 factorial design. These effects were assessed by behavioural measures and mood measures.The behavioural treatment was followed by significant improvements on most behavioural measures. Clomipramine administration was followed by significant improvements on mood scales and some behavioural measures. There were no significant interactions between these two experimental conditions.     

Neuropsychological analysis of a case of crossed dysphasia verified at postmortem

A case is reported of crossed dysphasia in a right-handed monolingual patient, where neuropathological verification of the unilateral site of the lesion was obtained within a year of detailed neuropsychological assessment. The patient's pattern of language impairment was characterized by agrammatic speech and relatively preserved naming ability. In addition, the patient had good repetition, poor comprehension, and marked impairment on visuospatial tasks. Neuropathological investigations showed a large area of infarction affecting cortex, white matter, and subcortical structures in the right hemisphere. The possibility is discussed of a distinction between two types of crossed dysphasia with either dissociated or simultaneous language and visuospatial deficits due to reversed representation of hemispheric specific functions or transfer of most cognitive functions to the right hemisphere.     

The human lateral lemniscus and its nuclei: The human auditory pathways: A quantitative study

Quantification of the human lateral lemniscus and its nuclei in 15 brains of patients without hearing impairment revealed these average values: Cross-sectional surface area of the bundle at the level of the nucleus of cranial nerve IV of 2.5 mm², fiber density of 77,000/mm²; 194,000 total fibers on each side; grouping of the nerve cells in three nuclei (olive remnant, ventral, and dorsal) the largest of which is the ventral; cell density in the olive remnant of 5009/mm³, in the ventral nucleus of 15,184/mm³, and 13,169 cells per mm³ in the dorsal nucleus; total cell populations in all nuclei of 20,063 on the left and 26,137 on the right; glial-neuronal index of 9.2; cell dimensions of 23.6 × 15.4 microns in the olive remnant and 21.2 × 12.2 in the other nuclei; combined nuclear volume of 1.91 mm³. Loss of neurons was not apparent in the aged brains but a significant reduction in counts of axons and in lemniscal bulk appeared in two of the older brains of the series (77 and 91 years).     

Primary obsessional slowness: a nursing treatment programme with a 13-year-old male adolescent

A 13-year-old male adolescent inpatient with a 5-year history of primary obsessional slowness was treated using a nursing intervention programme involving prompting, pacing and shaping, or participant modelling of four types of self-care behaviour. The treatments produced an immediate increase in response rate of three of the four behaviour targets. Treatment gains were not maintained during the gradual fading of the intervention programme. Possible reasons for failure to achieve treatment maintenance are discussed in light of the literature on primary obsessional slowness.     

Dissonance motivation: Its nature,persistence, and reinstatement

This paper examines whether arousal is a necessary component of the motivation to reduce dissonance. Alternative responses to attitude-behavior inconsistency include attitude change, explaining the behavior by a consonant cognition (i.e., low choice), and attributing the dissonance-induced state to an alternative source, such as the purported side effects of an ingested “drug.” For conditions in which there are few consonant cognitions (i.e., high choice), a comparison of different “drug” conditions in which attitude change does or does not occur was expected to clarify which components of the dissonance-induced state mediate attitude change. Attitude change occurred in high choice conditions where the “drug” was described as pleasant, but not in high choice conditions where the “drug” was described as unpleasant or in a low choice condition. In addition, when the “drug” was descibed as arousing there was, if anything, more attitude change than when the “drug” was described as nonarousing. These results suggest that unpleasantness and not arousal per se is the motivating factor in dissonance reduction. The effects of the passage of time and reinstating the counterattitudinal behavior on the alternative responses to attitude-behavior inconsistency were also examined. Subjects returned 2 weeks later, stated their attitudes, recalled their original counterattitudinal essay, and again stated their attitudes. Although there was a general decrease in attitude change during this period, the pattern of attitude change remained basically the same. Attitude change following reinstatement increased from its original level only in those conditions where it had been initially attenuated through misattribution or a consonant cognition.