Effects of a forced institutional relocation on the mortality and morbidity of nursing home residents

Residents of a county nursing home underwent a forced, mass relocation. Gerontologists advised on preparation of staff and residents. No increase in residents' mortality or morbidity was found after the relocation. The highest death rate was in the anticipatory period, the year prior to the move.     

Differential effects of pet presence and pet-bonding on young children

Pets have been shown to influence human development, but whether the effect is due to the presence of a pet or to the person's relationship with a pet is uncertain. Mothers rated their young children's companion animal bond (relationship) and social competence on a parental questionnaire, and a researcher assessed the children's empathy, cooperation, and intelligence during home visits. Significant correlations were noted between the children's bonds with their companion animals and their scores on the social competency scales as well as their empathy scores. The lack of similar significant pet presence ("ownership") correlations supports the hypothesis that the children's relationships with their pets are more important than just the presence of one or more pets in their homes.     

Personality, stress and disease: description and validation of a new inventory

The construction of a new Personality-Stress Inventory is discussed, based on previous research and other types of inventory constructed on the same principles. Scores on the inventory divide people into six types, selectively prone to different types of disease. The instrument is administered twice, with six months intervening, and changes in the inventory scores are prognostic of the probability of contracting different diseases. Evidence is presented to show the validity of the questionnaire and the method used.     

A Piagetian perspective on mathematical construction

In this paper, we offer a Piagetian perspective on the construction of the logico-mathematical schemas which embody our knowledge of logic and mathematics. Logico-mathematical entities are tied to the subject's activities, yet are so constructed by reflective abstraction that they result from sensorimotor experience only via the construction of intermediate schemas of increasing abstraction. The ‘axiom set’ does not exhaust the cognitive structure (schema network) which the mathematician thus acquires. We thus view ‘truth’ not as something to be defined within the closed ‘world’ of a formal system but rather in terms of the schema network within which the formal system is embedded. We differ from Piaget in that we see mathematical knowledge as based on social processes of mutual verification which provide an external drive to any ‘necessary dynamic’ of reflective abstraction within the individual. From this perspective, we argue that axiom schemas tied to a preferred interpretation may provide a necessary intermediate stage of reflective abstraction en route to acquisition of the ability to use formal systems in abstracto.     

Converging operations on a basic level in event taxonomies

Research on object concepts has identified one level of abstraction as "basic" in cognition and communication. We investigated whether concepts for routine social events have a basic level by replicating the converging operations used to investigate object concepts. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with event names from a taxonomy and were asked to list the actions comprising the event. Many more actions were listed at the middle than at the highest taxonomic level, without a further increase at the most specific level, paralleling the pattern of superordinate-, basic-, and subordinate-level object concepts. From these action lists, brief stories were composed for each event. In Experiment 2, subjects made pairwise similarity judgments on the stories. The mean similarity of events increased with specificity, as expected. But differentiation of categories (within-category similarity compared to between-category similarity) was highest for super-ordinates, contrary to results with object categories. In Experiment 3, subjects were fastest in recognizing actions as belonging to events named at the basic level. In Experiment 4, subjects predominantly chose basic-level terms to name stories. We conclude that event taxonomies do show basic-level structure, albeit a less sharply defined and less stable structure than in object taxonomies. The benefits and hazards of extending models of object concepts to other entities, such as social events, are discussed.     

Conversational time patterns and mutual influence in parent-child interactions: A time series approach

Mutual influencing processes are assumed to be the basic building blocks in establishing parentchild bonding and in influencing cognitive and language behavior. A study by Jasnow and Feldstein (1986) revealed that, within the temporal domain of speech, preverbal (9-month-old) infants and their mothers exhibit a pattern of mutual influence (attunement) in their average durations of switching pauses. The general purpose of this research was to extend those findings to children with higher verbal functioning. In addition, parent and child genders, nature of the interaction, and specific aspects of parents' personalities, expressiveness, and instrumentality were considered. Each parent interacted with their 4-or 5-year-old son or daughter in each of two conversations—unstructured (social conversation) and structured (task activity). Conversations were processed by an automated computer system yielding objective measure of turns, vocalizations, pauses, and switching-pause durations. To examine interspeaker influence or attunement of temporal speech patterns, influence coefficients were computer for each speaker on a turn-by-turn basis using time series regression. Analysis of these coefficients revealed that: (1) Mutual influence is most evident with switching-pause duration. (2) Structure in the conversation (as defined by the task or parental instrumentality) seems to facilitate attunement for vocalization and switching pause duration. (3) Attunement with girls seems to occur equally well with both parents, while boys exhibit a style of temporal patterning influence which suggests greater identification with the father. (4) Expressiveness seems to facilitate attunement to the child's switching-pause duration.     

Finding relations between systems of entities: a multivariate approach

A procedure to find out the relationship between systems of entities is described. The crux of the approach depends on projecting the systems to be compared on the same arbitrary hyperspace so that any two systems of entities can be related. The procedure described applies to data presented in square or rectangular non-singular matrices and provides a procedure to determine multiple regression coefficients, multiple correlations, canonical correlations and the relationships between the inner product of the row vectors and of the column vectors of the matrices involved. The operations described apply to raw values, deviation or standard scores, and may help in interdisciplinary research, though the risks involved in the blind application of a mathematical abstract formulation should not be ignored.     

The role of compliance in hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia

We modified the standard procedure for administering finger pressure pain in order to assess the extent to which subjects biased their reports of pain reduction when exposed to compliance-inducing instructions. Experiment 1 used only highly hypnotizable subjects and found that compliance-induced reductions in reported pain were about half as large as the reported reductions produced by hypnotic analgesia suggestions. Experiment 2 used low as well as high hypnotizables and administered hypnotic or nonhypnotic analgesia instructions and compliance instructions to the same subjects on separate pain trials. Reported pain reductions produced by hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia suggestions and those produced by compliance instructions were substantially and significantly correlated. Furthermore, hypnotizability correlated with compliance-induced reported pain reductions as highly as it correlated with the reported reductions produced by hypnotic analgesia suggestions. Among high hypnotizables (but not low hypnotizables) compliant responding was predicted by social desirability. The findings of both studies indicate that compliance strongly influences the reports of hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia proffered by high hypnotizables. The role of compliance in the pain reductions reported by low hypnotizables is less clear-cut.     

Syntactic comprehension in Japanese aphasics: effects of category and thematic role order.

Syntactic comprehension disturbances in Japanese aphasics were investigated focusing on the role of category order and thematic role order. The data from Japanese aphasics show that the canonicity of thematic role order determines the ease of interpretation of different sentence types. This finding implies that language-specific factors, rather than language-universal factors, influence the sentence comprehension mechanisms that are retained by aphasic patients.