INTERMITTENT REGRESSIONS IN A SERIAL AFTERIMAGE EXPERIMENT AS SIGNS OF SCHIZOPHRENIA

S mith G. J. W., R uuth E., F ranzén G. & S jöholm L. Intermittent regressions in a serial afterimage experiment as signs of schizophrenia. Scand. J. Psychol ., 1972 , 13 , 27 33.—A group of 35 young patients suspected of schizophrenia were tested in a serial afterimage (AI) experiment and were also rated on the Rockland-Pollin scale. Subjects with high psychotic scores showed one or more regressions to immature (size-constant, positive, physiognomic) images in their Al serials, images typical of children who cannot clearly distinguish their Ails as subjective phenomena distinct from the outside world. The Al test thus indicates schizophrenics to be characterized by intermittent withdrawal into a world of experiencing the self and non-self as not clearly distinguished. Regressions were rare in two control groups.     

Projected afterimages after manipulation of cognitive schemes in children.

Telling one group of subjects that afterimages are a physical reality largely independent of the observer and another group that afterimages are projected by the subject himself, it was predicted that the afterimages in these groups would differ. In all 10 pairs of nine-year-old children, matched with respect to cognitive maturity, the subject getting the former instruction reported more size-constant and/or positive afterimages than the subject getting the latter instruction.     

Psychofamilial correlates of school disorders

A model for understanding relationships between family functioning and children's school disorders is presented. The model is based upon the work of Minuchin, Rosman, and Baker (1979) with psychosomatic children and on the author's experience as clinical coordinator of a center for children and adolescents with academic and behavioral disorders. Five transactional patterns are identified as supporting the presence of a school disturbance: enmeshment, overprotectiveness, rigidity, lack of conflict resolution, and child intrusion in marital conflict. Each of these patterns is illustrated with case examples in order to highlight how the child's school symptoms often have an important impact on the family's organization. Some treatment suggestions are provided, with special emphasis made for those practitioners working with Hispanic families.     

Memory determinants of response latency to produce speech

In three experiments, subjects were asked to memorize related phrase pairs and then to produce one of these phrases from a cue. In Experiment 1, it was found that both memorization times and response latencies increased with the number of words that differed between the phrases. In Experiment 2 and 3, it was shown that the presence of a strong modifying or semantic relationship between words in one phrase influenced both memorization time and response latency when those same words were contrasted between the two phrases. The implications of the results for models of storage, retrieval, and planning of speech are considered.     

Veridical and false memory for scenic material in posttraumatic stress disorder

The question whether memory aberrations in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) also manifest as an increased production of false memories is important for both theoretical and practical reasons, but is yet unsolved. Therefore, for the present study we investigated veridical and false recognition in PTSD with a new scenic variant of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, which was administered to traumatized individuals with PTSD (n=32), traumatized individuals without PTSD (n=30), and non-traumatized controls (n=30). The PTSD group neither produced higher rates of false memories nor expressed more confidence in errors, but did show inferior memory sensitivity. Whereas depressive symptoms did not correlate with veridical nor false recognition, state dissociation was positively associated with false memories.     

Preface

The contributions in this part of the present issue mainly originate from the Carnap Lectures 2011 in Bochum where Prof. Tim Crane (Cambridge, UK) and Prof. Katalin Farkas (Budapest) presented keynote lectures under the heading ??The Boundaries of the Mental??. The full workshop program is available on our website: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophy/carnap2011/index.html