Reviews

Z oja , L uigi and H inshaw , P eter (eds) The Differing Uses of Symbolic and Clinical Approaches in Practice and Theory
D ieckmann , H ans . Twice-Told Tales: The Psychological Use of Fairy Tales
K ohon , G. (ed.) The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition
T ustin , F rances . Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients
W innicott , D. W. Home is Where We Start From
H all , J ames A. The Jungian Experience: Analysis and Individuation     

Age-related changes in working and reference memory performance and locomotor activity in the Wistar rat

Wistar rats of three age groups were tested in an automated tunnel-maze system of variable geometry to investigate whether changes in spontaneous locomotor activity and in learning and memory develop differentially or in a correlated fashion as a function of age. Senescent (30 months) as well as mature-adult (17 months) rats showed an age-correlated decline of locomotor activity as compared to the mature-young (5 months) group. Both working-memory (measured as within-trial arm discrimination performance) and reference-memory (measured as avoidance of "blind alley" visits) were severely affected in the senescent group, whereas the middle-aged animals suffered only from a working-memory deficit. The findings provide evidence that locomotor deficits do not necessarily interfere in the assessment of age-related changes in cognitive performance. Furthermore the results support the hypothesis that working and reference memory have different underlying physiological correlates and that these neuronal systems are differentially affected by the aging process.     

Listeriosis of the central nervous system in children beyond the neonatal period

Observations on three children with neurolisteriosis (one case of meningitis, two cases of meningoencephalitis, each Serovar 4 b), show that even after the neonatal period, listeriosis must not be ignored in the process of diagnosis and therapy. It is the bacteriological examination of the cerebrospinal fluid, together with the blood culture, and not clinical symptoms and serology that guarantee a timely diagnosis and therapy (ampicillin and gentamicin).     

Effects of facial attractiveness and gender on causal attributions of managerial performance

The present study examined the effect of facial attractiveness and gender on raters' evaluations of and explanations for managerial performance. Results showed attractiveness to be a potential liability for both males and females. Good performance of attractive females was more likely than that of others to be attributed to luck or bias, while that of attractive males was viewed as occurring with little effort. In addition, the poor performance of attractive individuals was blamed on lack of effort (females) or lack of ability (males). Implications of these findings are discussed.An earlier version of this paper was published in the 1986 Proceedings of the Southern Management Association.     

Mothers with hostile, Type A predisposing child-rearing practices.

The authors examined characteristics of Finnish mothers (N = 924) who use hostile child-rearing practices (i.e., they ignore the child, are punitive and irritable, and perceive the child as a burden), practices that have been shown (R?ikk?nen & Keltikangas-J?rvinen, 1992) to predispose children to Type A behavior. The results of this study indicate that two factors--Type A behavior in the mothers and the mothers' sociodemographic background (low occupational status, low educational level and young age)--increase the probability of the mothers' treating their children in a hostile manner. Also, the mothers of boys in this study reported more hostile child-rearing practices than the mothers of girls did.     

Psychological compensation: a theoretical framework.

The 2 main objectives of this article are to review a variety of literatures in which the concept of compensation is used and to integrate the results of this review into a general framework of compensation. The review focuses on 4 domains of psychological inquiry: compensation for sensory handicaps, cognitive deficits, interpersonal losses, and brain injury. In the proposed framework, underlying dimensions and 4 basic steps in the progression of compensatory behavior are distinguished. The latter include origins, mechanisms, forms, and consequences. Finally, we describe ways in which researchers in particular domains can benefit from the global, process-oriented framework we propose. For most of the areas of compensation research reviewed, investigators can profit from a consideration of a broader selection of dimensions, additional steps in the process, alternative outcomes, and both objective and subjective assessment procedures.     

From Monroe to Moreau: an analysis of face naming errors.

Functional models of face recognition and speech production have developed separately. However, naming a familiar face is, of course, an act of speech production. In this paper we propose a revision of Bruce and Young's (1986) model of face processing, which incorporates two features of Levelt's (1989) model of speech production. In particular, the proposed model includes two stages of lexical access for names and monitoring of face naming based on a "perceptual loop". Two predictions were derived from the perceptual loop hypothesis of speech monitoring: (1) naming errors in which a (correct) rare surname is erroneously replaced by a common surname should occur more frequently than the reverse substitution (the error asymmetry effect); (2) naming errors in which a common surname is articulated are more likely to be repaired than errors which result in articulation of a rare surname (the error-repairing effect). Both predictions were supported by an analysis of face naming errors in a laboratory face naming task. In a further experiment we considered the possibility that the effects of surname frequency observed in face naming errors could be explained by the frequency sensitivity of lexical access in speech production. However, no effect of the frequency of the surname of the faces used in the previous experiment was found on face naming latencies. Therefore, it is concluded that the perceptual loop hypothesis provides the more parsimonious account of the entire pattern of the results.     

Predictors of short-term treatment outcome in bulimia nervosa inpatients.

Recent studies, mostly performed on bulimic outpatients, did not find consistent predictors of treatment outcome in bulimia nervosa. This is the first study to investigate anamnestic and clinical factors predictive of the short-term outcome of hospital treatment in 31 female bulimia nervosa patients with a mean age of 22.9 yr. Treatment outcome was assessed by several self-rating instruments measuring different features of the specific and unspecific psychopathology of bulimia nervosa. The most relevant predictors of the outcome of the 8-week hospital treatment were duration of previous inpatient treatments for bulimia, the intensity of anorexic tendency and the pretreatment level of depression. The majority of predictors tested did not show a strong relationship to treatment outcome. The findings are discussed in relation to results of other studies as well as to possible implications for treatment and research.     

Quantitative scores of normal and abnormal subjects on Initial-letter Word-association Test.

The quotient of the mean quantitative score on Initial-letter Word-association Test for 193 normal subjects was significantly higher than the quotient of the mean quantitative score of 44 abnormal (psychotic) subjects. This is interpreted as meaning that, in general, the normal subjects have predominantly a positive attitude towards their surrounding world in contradistinction to the abnormal subjects whose attitude was predominantly negative, ambivalent, and repressive. On the other hand, the mean of the quotients of the quantitative scores of the 44 abnormal subjects was higher than the mean of the quotients of the quantitative scores of the normal subjects which suggests increased oral tendencies of the abnormal subjects expressed much as the unwarranted optimism of small children.