Physical and emotional abuse and motor development: a preliminary investigation

Mothers of 212 children aged 2 to 12 yr. responded to a problem checklist. Significantly more children reported as maltreated were said to have learning difficulties than comparison children; language delays and poor motor coordination were also noted. Such children would benefit from the formal assessment and remediation of problems in motor development.     

The classification of neuropsychological deficit

The study involves classification of neuropsychiatric patients on the basis of neuropsychological and intelligence test performance. One hundred twenty-five hospitalized male neuropsychiatric patients with various diagnoses were administered the Halstead-Reitan and Luria-Nebraska neuropsychological test batteries, as well as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. A cluster analysis was performed for each of those three procedures utilizing Ward's method. It was found in all cases that clusters were determined on the basis of level rather than pattern of performance. Relationships were found between cluster membership and age, education, and presence or absence of structural brain damage but were not found for diagnoses of schizophrenia or alcoholism. Schizophrenic and alcoholic patients were found in all clusters in the case of all three test procedures. Differences in clustering among the three test procedures were noted, with the WAIS being relatively more sensitive to educational differences while the Halstead-Reitan was more sensitive to age differences. The clinical utility of classifying patients on the basis of neuropsychological and cognitive test performance was discussed.Acknowledgement is made to the Veterans Administration for support of this research.     

Androgyny as synthetic narcissism: Sex role measures and Kohut's psychology of the self

In Kohut's analysis of narcissism, the self emerges as a bipolar structure characterized by grandiosity at one pole and dependency at the other. Through appropriate developmental processes, grandiosity grows into a mature ambitiousness, and early dependencies are converted into a stable system of ideals. The present investigation predicted that sex role constructs essentially measure these two aspects of the self. Expected relationships between masculinity and grandiosity, and between femininity and dependency, were in fact obtained. Based in large part on Westin's (Self and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) analysis of Kohut's theory, synthetic, internal, external, and archaic narcissistic self styles were hypothesized to exist and to parallel the androgynous, masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated sex roles, respectively. Rough comparabilities were in fact evident between these two typologies. Factor analyses also demonstrated that narcissism and sex role measures load on factors in ways revealing the intimate ties between pathological narcissism and the failure to achieve desirable sex role characteristics.     

Prospective assessment of late-luteal phase dysphoric disorder

This investigation evaluated a method for the prospective assessment of the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome (PMS). The American Psychiatric Association has proposed a diagnostic category for PMS in the DSM-III-R entitled late-luteal phase dysphoric disorder (LLDD). The criteria for this disorder include prospective documentation of at least two symptomatic cycles. Two groups of women were studied, one group that met the DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria for LLDD and a comparison group that did not. Subjects recorded symptoms related to PMS for two menstrual cycles. A clinically significant worsening of symptoms was defined as a symptom increase during the premenstruum of greater than one standard deviation above normal. These effect sizes were then used to determine if the subject met the DSM-III-R criteria for prospective confirmation. Data analysis showed that although the LLDD group showed evidence for PMS in several symptom groups, only a minority (31%) met the requirement of prospective confirmation of significant PMS symptoms for the two cycles recorded. These results were discussed in terms of the need for prospective behavioral assessment of LLDD and the implications of these findings for past and future research.Portions of this paper were derived from the master's thesis of the first author.     

PROVIDING A MORE APPROPRIATE EDUCATION FOR SEVERELY HANDICAPPED PERSONS: INCREASING AND VALIDATING FUNCTIONAL CLASSROOM TASKS

We evaluated a teacher training and supervision program for increasing the involvement of severely handicapped adolescents and adults in functional educational tasks. The program, consisting of a brief in-service followed by supervisory prompts and feedback, was accompanied by large increases in functional tasks in three classrooms. In addition, generalized increases occurred during nontargeted times in the classroom and the changes during both the targeted and nontargeted times were maintained over a 44–45 week period. In two subsequent experiments, surveys provided social validation for the criteria for functional versus nonfunctional tasks in that: (a) relevant individuals reliably categorized functional tasks as representing typical living, work, social, and leisure situations and (b) experienced clinicians consistently rated tasks previously categorized as functional as being more useful for severely handicapped persons than tasks categorized as nonfunctional. Results are discussed in terms of the relationship of functional classroom tasks in the overall provision of appropriate educational services for severely handicapped students.     

Suppression of visible persistence

Five experiments were conducted to examine duration of visible persistence in sequences of stimuli. The basic display consisted of a point that stepped around a circular path on the face of an oscilloscope. Observers estimated the number of points seen simultaneously. Results were compared with a control condition in which the points were plotted in random order rather than sequentially. It was found that visible persistence of a point is suppressed if other points are shown nearby and after an appropriate delay. The degree of suppression depended on the spatial proximity of successive points. It was also found that both duration of visible persistence and degree of suppression increase with eccentricity in the visual field. The results are discussed in terms of two independent processes, persistence and suppression, that operate in a hierarchically antithetical relation.     

On the existence of prelinguistic categories: A case study

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether infants spontaneously form categories during the prelinguistic period and whether these categories are based on the same principles as adult basic-level categories. A new methodology, using a functional use measure as the determinant of category composition, was employed in a case study of one infant's horn category. Results indicated that this category met Schlesinger's (1982) criteria for a prelinguistic category and that the category was based on similarity relationships, as adult categories are.     

Predictive probability and analogy by similarity in inductive logic

The-continuum of inductive methods was derived from an assumption, called-condition, which says that the probability of finding an individual having propertyx _j depends only on the number of observed individuals having propertyx _j and on the total number of observed individuals. So, according to that assumption, all individuals with properties which are different fromx _j have equal weight with respect to that probability and, in particular, it does not matter whether any individual was observed having some propertysimilar tox _j (the most complete proof of this result is presented in Carnap, 1980).The problem thus remained open to find some general condition, weaker than the-condition, which would allow for thederivation of probability functions which might be sensitive to similarity. Carnap himself suggested a weakening of the-condition which might allow for similarity sensitive probability functions (Carnap, 1980, p. 45) but he did not find the family of probability functions derivable from that principle. The aim of this paper is to present the family of probability functions derivable from Carnap's suggestion and to show how it is derived.In Section 1 the general problem of analogy by similarity in inductive logic is presented, Section 2 outlines the notation and the conceptual background involved in the proof, Section 3 gives the proof, Section 4 discusses Carnap's principle and the result, Section 5 is a brief review of the solutions which have previously been proposed.