Clinical syndromes are not God''s gift to cognitive neuropsychology: A reply to a rebuttal to an answer to a response to the case against syndrome-based research

In this paper we consider several issues about single-patient versus syndrome-based research in response to E. Zurif, D. Swinney, and J. A. Fodor's (1991, Brain and Cognition, 16, 198-210) criticism of A. Caramazza and W. Badecker (1989, Brain and Cognition, 10, 256-295). We argue that these authors have failed to provide convincing arguments in favor of syndrome-based research. In particular, we show that the specific example--a study by D. Swinney, E. Zurif, and J. Nicol (1989, Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences, 1, 25-37)--given by these authors as a demonstration of the usefulness of syndrome-based research to inform theories of normal language processing does not in fact serve this purpose.     

Formal and Informal Counselling Help: Students' Experiences

The experiences reported by students who sought help from formal counselling sources were compared with those reported by students who sought assistance from informal helpers. The two groups of students had similar types of problems, but the counselling clients reported (a) higher levels of problem seriousness, (b) lower levels of comfort with the interaction, and (c) higher levels of satisfaction with the help offered.     

Zur Geschichte und gegenwärtigen Lage der Philosophie in der ČSR

Official Czech philosophy has been dominated by a mix of Engelsian philosophy of science and positivism, a combination explained in part by the survival of positivism in Czechoslovakia and the failure of analytic philosophy to make inroads into Czech thinking. However, due to Jan Patoka's influence in espousing the works of Husserl and Heidegger, there was an anthropologically oriented Marxism (K. Kosik) although its successes were greater abroad than in Czechoslovakia. A more neopositivistic variant (L. Tondl) of Marxism also appeared, but it was a short-lived phenomenon without purchase on mainstream philosophy.A certain renewal of Czech philosophy was evident before 1968, once again largely due to Patoka's influence. Foreign guests who took part in informally organized, often secret, seminars and discussion groups were very instrumental in spreading new ideas. Despite these positive occurrences, Czech philosophy is experiencing a crisis at the level of the middle generation of non-academic, philosophically competent intellectuals among whom sceptical and nihilist attitudes prevail. A rebirth of spirit may be in the offing if the recovery of the specific sense of the Czech Reformation's idea of truth is pursued.     

Teaching minority high school students to recruit helpers to attain personal and educational goals

Recruiting help from mentors and other potential helpers is a promising strategy for helping disadvantaged and minority youths meet their personal and educational goals. Three African-American high school seniors participated in a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training procedures that would allow them to ask for help in attaining educational and other personal goals. A behavioral training procedure that included instructional materials, role-play practice, praise, and feedback was used. Targeted skills included goal setting and 30 responses involved in the process of meeting with a potential helper. Role-play situations were used to evaluate participants' help-recruiting skills before and after training. Participants increased their help-recruiting skills from an average of 38% during baseline, to an average of 75% after training. Self-reported measures of goal attainment suggested that the students benefited from the training. Implications for mentoring programs designed to increase minority students' opportunities to reach educational goals were discussed.     

Sensorimotor synchronization: Motor responses to regular auditory patterns

Subjects (N = 32) were asked to synchronize a motor response with tones in auditory patterns. These patterns were created from six tones and six intertone intervals of equal duration. The pitch of the first tone differed from the others. It was found that subjects used three types of timing in their motor response: (1) the first intertone interval was prolonged and the second interval was shortened, (2) the second intertone interval was prolonged and the first interval was shortened, and/or (3) the first interval and the second interval were of approximately the same length. The prolongation of the fifth interval was observed during all three types of timing. The results are explained using the concept of suprasegmental control of timing, which explains a prolongation of intervals at critical control point of the patterns. The occurrence of three different strategies of timing is discussed in connection with similar principles in musical performance.     

Toward understanding sex differences in pay allocation: Agency,communion, and reward distribution behavior

This research examined the extent to which the personality characteristics of agency and communion are sex linked, and the extent to which differences in these orientations can account for sex differences in reward distribution behavior. In two studies, the agency and communion level of large samples of male and female undergraduates were assessed. As expected, males were more agentic and females were more communal. Moreover, when subjects who scored high or low on agency and high or low on communion were asked to allocate rewards between themselves and a co-worker, these personality differences were related to their allocation decisions. These results were used as the basis for discussing the role that sex-linked personality differences might play in distributive justice judgments.This article is an adaptation of a colloquium presentation at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, August 1981. The research reported here was supported by NIMH grant MH29987-1, Goals, Motives, and Norms of Reward Distribution, and by NIMH Biomedical Research Support Grant from the College of Social Science, Michigan State University. The authors wish to thank Andrea Doughty for her valuable advice, and to gratefully acknowledge the help of Mark Teicher, Julie B. Klein, Sue Schnelbach, Pat Loepp, Barb Allen, Gavin Goodrich, Bob O'Hara, Kelly Bowen, Rod Hollenstein, Steve Schultz, and Mary Hurst.     

An analysis of performance by pre-school children on the KRISP and on a length discrimination task

The speed and accuracy of judgements made by pre-school children on the Kansas Reflection-Impulsivity Scale for Pre-schoolers (KRISP - Wright 1971, 1973) and on a two-choice length discrimination task were investigated. If subjects were relatively accurate on the KRISP then correct responses tended to be faster than errors while if subjects were relatively inaccurate errors were the faster. It is inferred that accurate subjects respond asymptotically in terms of a speed-accuracy tradeoff while inaccurate subjects set a less demanding criterion. Accurate subjects showed a tendency to increase inspection time as a function of item difficulty. This relation did not hold for inaccurate subjects.However, groups classified by means of the KRISP did not differ in either the speed of correct responses or accuracy of line length discriminations. For all groups judgement times were significantly related to stimulus differences and to stimulus ratios. There was no evidence that so-called impulsive children engage in less efficient and less detailed processing than other children.It is argued, contrary to the view of Kagan and his co-workers (e.g. Kakan 1966), that speed and accuracy of responding may not reflect a stable trait dimension. Rather children appear to be able to change their strategies according to the particular demands, implicit or explicit, of the task.     

Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phones arise spontaneously?

It was found that illiterate adults could neither delete nor add a phone at the beginning of a non-word; but these tasks were rather easily performed by people with similar environment and childhood experiences, who learned to read rudimentarily as adults. Awareness of speech as a sequence of phones is thus not attained spontaneously in the course of general cognitive growth, but demands some specific training, which, for most persons, is probably provided by learning to read in the alphabetic system.