Tinnitus als soziale Infektion?

Background

11 out of 35 male employees of a central alert team with rescue coordination function developed a tinnitus disorder. This clinical case-study highlights the psychodynamic background of this accumulation.

Methods

Employees were investigated by psychometric questionnaires and semistructured psychodynamic biografical interviews. Additionally aspects of group dynamics and organisational structure were assessed.

Results

All staff members reported adverse work conditions. Medical and psychometric examination of the tinnitus patients did not reveal severe pathological findings. The interviews identified psychodynamic conflicts dealing with autonomy and regulation of self-esteem. All tinnitus patients reported a very adverse or punitive father relation and difficulties in performing a stabile male role and self-image. Group dynamics was dominated by paranoid and regressive tendencies complicated by maladaptive coping, crude perception of external facts and a pronounced experience of aggressive impulses.

Conclusion

The remobilisation of infantile powerlessness, ineffectiveness and helplessness triggered by adverse work conditions and the introduction of a new culture of personal responsibility within the work organisation together with an impaired coping of separation conflicts enforced by traumatic aspects of the relation with the father may have promoted the tinnitus symptomatology. Additionally, due to the missing awareness of the importance of such group dynamical processes the employers contributed to an increasing psychosocial distress, which promoted the accumulated manifestation of tinnitus as a conflict expressive symptom.     

Effects of backward speech and speaker variability in language discrimination by rats

Human infants use prosodic cues present in speech to extract language regularities, and it has been suggested that this capacity is anchored in more general mechanisms that are shared across mammals. This study explores the extent to which rats can generalize prosodic cues that have been extracted from a training corpus to new sentences and how this discrimination process is affected by the normalization of the sentences when multiple speakers are introduced. Conditions 1 and 2 show rats' abilities to use prosodic cues present in speech, allowing them to discriminate between sentences not previously heard. But this discrimination is not possible when sentences are played backward. Conditions 3 and 4 show that language discrimination by rats is also taxed by the process of speaker normalization. These findings have remarkable parallels with data from human adults, human newborns, and cotton-top tamarins. Implications for speech perception by humans are discussed.     

Encoding multielement scenes: statistical learning of visual feature hierarchies

The authors investigated how human adults encode and remember parts of multielement scenes composed of recursively embedded visual shape combinations. The authors found that shape combinations that are parts of larger configurations are less well remembered than shape combinations of the same kind that are not embedded. Combined with basic mechanisms of statistical learning, this embeddedness constraint enables the development of complex new features for acquiring internal representations efficiently without being computationally intractable. The resulting representations also encode parts and wholes by chunking the visual input into components according to the statistical coherence of their constituents. These results suggest that a bootstrapping approach of constrained statistical learning offers a unified framework for investigating the formation of different internal representations in pattern and scene perception.     

Human listeners are able to classify dog (Canis familiaris) barks recorded in different situations

The authors investigated whether human listeners could categorize played-back dog (Canis familiaris) barks recorded in various situations and associate them with emotional ratings. Prerecorded barks of a Hungarian herding dog breed (Mudi) provided the sample. Human listeners were asked to rate emotionality of the vocalization and to categorize the situations on the basis of alternative situations provided on a questionnaire. The authors found almost no effect of previous experience with the given dog breed or of owning a dog. Listeners were able to categorize bark situations high above chance level. Emotionality ratings for particular bark samples correlated with peak and fundamental frequency and interbark intervals. The authors did not find a significant effect of tonality (harmonic-to-noise ratio) on either the emotionality rating or situation categorization of the human listeners. Humans' ability to recognize meaning suggests that barks could serve as an effective means of communication between dog and human.     

AIDS and social exclusion: personality features or adaptive behaviors?

The purpose of this survey is to detect common personality features in people infected with AIDS who have a case history of drug addiction and who live in a situation of social exclusion. The sample comprised 105 male participants from the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, divided into 4 groups: (a) 30 men with AIDS, having an intravenous drug addiction case history and who live in a condition of social exclusion; (b) 30 men with IVDA case history, also living in a situation of social exclusion; (c) 15 men in a social exclusion condition; and (d) 30 men in a condition of social adaptation. The evaluation instruments were an author-designed semi-structured interview and the Multiaxial Clinical Inventory (MCMI-II; Millon, 1987). Although some differences were found, the results indicate that there is no specific personality profile in the "social exclusion" population. People in a condition of social exclusion (AIDS, drug addicts, and poor people) may obtain similar scores in the variables studied, but there is no clear specific personality profile in the excluded population, although there may be certain situations in which the segregated groups present similar behaviors. Furthermore, these behaviors do not always correspond to personality features but are adaptive responses to a harsh and complex reality.     

Fitting Rasch model using appropriateness measure statistics

In this paper, the distributional properties and power rates of the Lz, Eci2z, and Eci4z statistics when they are used as item fit statistics were explored. The results were compared to t-transformation of Outfit and Infit mean square. Four sample sizes were selected: 100, 250, 500, and 1000 examinees. The abilities were uniform and normal with mean 0 and standard deviation 1, and uniform and normal with mean -1 and standard deviation 1. The pseudo-guessing parameter was fixed at .25. Two ranges of difficulty parameters were selected: +/- 1 logits and +/- 2 logits. Two test lengths were selected: 15 and 30 items. The results showed important differences between the T-infit, T-outfit, Lz, Eci2z, and Eci4z statistics. The T-oufit, T-infit, and Lz statistics showed poor standardization with estimated parameters because their distributional properties were not close to the expected values. However, the Eci2z and Eci4z statistics showed satisfactory standardization on all conditions. Further, the power rates of Eci2z and Eci4z were 5% to 10% higher than the power rates of Lz, T-outfit, and T-infit to detect items that do not fit Rasch model.     

Evaluation of a group cue-exposure treatment for opiate addicts

Twenty-four detoxified opiate addicts were randomized to an experimental group and a control group to evaluate efficacy of a group cue-exposure treatment to reduce or extinguish classically conditioned responses to drug-related stimuli. Assessment included psychophysiological responses (skin temperature, skin conductance level--SCL--, and heart rate) to a videotape and subjective measures (subjective craving, positive and negative affect) before and after the videotape. The experimental group received a group cue-exposure program to drug-related stimuli that comprised twelve treatment sessions administered three times weekly. The treatment program significantly reduced conditioned responses to drug-related stimuli, as measured by SCL and positive affect.     

The Five-factor Personality Inventory as a measure of the Five-factor Model: Belgian, American, and Hungarian comparisons with the NEO-PI-R

The lexically based Five-Factor Personality Inventory (FFPI) was correlated with the factors and facets of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) in Belgian (N = 265), American (N = 116), and Hungarian (N = 320) samples. Results were similar across the three cultures. Analysis of orthogonalized FFPI factors showed that three of them--emotional stability, extraversion, and agreeableness--showed a direct correspondence to their NEO-PI-R counterparts. Autonomy, however, was not clearly related to openness, and facet analysis suggested that it might be interpreted as a dominance factor Better matches to NEO-PI-R conscientiousness and openness could be obtained by using vectors rotated 30 degrees from the FFPI positions. Raw scale scores showed similar results. Researchers should not assume that all measures of the Five-Factor Model are qualitatively similar