Psychological reactions in Icelandic earthquake survivors

The aim of this study was to explore the psychological consequences of two earthquakes in Iceland in two probability samples of subjects--residents in the exposed area and a control group from an unexposed area. The sample was composed of 52 adults exposed to the earthquakes and 29 adults in a control group. Three months after the earthquakes, both groups were approached with questions from a survey consisting of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ), the Trauma Symptom Checklist (TSC), the Coping Styles Questionnaire (CSQ), the World Assumption Scale (WAS), and the Crisis Support Scale (CSS). The results revealed that 24% in the exposed group had Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and none in the control group had PTSD. Earthquake-related anxiety, inability to express one's thoughts and feelings, and emotional coping predicted 81% of the HTQ variance for both groups. Previous life events, low self-worth, and luck attributions, together with numbing and the feeling of being let down, predicted 56% of the symptom variance for both groups. When degree of traumatization and emotional coping were added to the model, another 30% of the variance could be explained.     

Effect of relation availability on the interpretation and access of familiar noun-noun compounds

Two experiments investigate whether relations that link the constituents of compounds during compound formation (e.g., teapot is formed by combining tea and pot using the relation head noun FOR modifier) also influence the processing of familiar compounds. Although there is evidence for the use of such relations in forming compounds, whether such relations affect the processing of familiar compounds is unknown. The data show clear effects of repetition and relational priming for written words on both a sense-nonsense task and a lexical decision task. These results indicate that the relation linking the constituents of familiar compounds is important to their access and use.     

The impact of semantic transparency of morphologically complex words on picture naming

We examined the contribution of semantic similarity to morphological priming effects, using the immediate (Exp. 1 and 3) and the delayed variant (Exp. 2) of picture-word interference. Distractor words were either compounds morphologically related to the picture name, but differing with respect to their semantic transparency (hummingbird, jailbird (Exp. 1); butterfly, butter dish (Exp. 3)), or form-related non-compound words (e.g., trombone). All three experiments revealed strong facilitation of picture naming due to morphologically related distractors. Form-related distractors facilitated picture naming in the immediate variant only, and to a lesser degree than compounds. Interestingly, the size of the morphemic effect was almost identical for semantically transparent and opaque complex words, which suggests that they share morphemic representations. These results suggest that morphological complexity in speech production is coded at the level of form representations, independent of semantic transparency.     

Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: the case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.     

Psychological responses to body shape exposure in patients with bulimia nervosa

One of the unresolved issues regarding research on bulimia nervosa concerns the question as to how patients diagnosed with bulimia nervosa respond to body image exposure. In addition, it remains unclear whether there are differential responses associated with different exposure techniques (e.g. in vivo exposure vs. exposure by visualization). The aim of the present study was to investigate psychological responses to body image exposure. Twenty participants diagnosed with bulimia nervosa (DSM IV) and twenty non-eating disordered individuals were exposed to their body image using a video recording (video confrontation). In addition, they were asked to imagine and describe the appearance of their body (imagery task). Results indicate that self-reported negative emotions increased in response to both, video confrontation and imagery task, in the clinical as well as in the control group. Furthermore, video confrontation led to more pronounced group differences than exposure by visualization (imagery task). Participants diagnosed with bulimia nervosa took less time to describe their waist, hips and bottom compared to non-eating disturbed controls. This last result could be interpreted in terms of avoidance behavior and other mechanisms during body image exposure.     

Collateral effects of response blocking during the treatment of stereotypic behavior

The collateral effects of response blocking were evaluated while treating stereotypic behavior in a woman diagnosed with autism. Blocking stereotypic behavior (head and tooth capping) was associated with decreases in leisure-item interaction and increases in another stereotypic response (hand wringing). Results suggested that the reduction in item interaction was due to adventitious punishment. Prompts to access an alternative source of reinforcement attenuated the side effects somewhat, but results suggested that the undesirable effects of response blocking may be fairly durable.     

Developmental dyslexia in different languages: language-specific or universal?

Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics.     

Microstructure of eating behavior associated with Rorschach characteristics in obesity

The relationship between the microstructure of eating behavior and personality aspects according to the Rorschach Comprehensive System (Exner, 1991, 1993) was investigated among obese participants (N = 32). Eating behavior was measured using a computerized eating monitor, VIKTOR (Cabmek, Stockholm, Sweden), calculating initial eating rate and the eating curve. A higher initial eating rate reflecting eating drive was associated with Rorschach signs of stress overload according to the D Score and higher affective responsiveness to external stimuli seen in the Affective ratio. The stress overload may prompt eating, and affective responsiveness may be linked to appetite through a higher sensitivity to food stimuli, thus increasing eating drive. An accelerating rate of consumption during the meal was associated with intense emotionality and oral dependency, suggested by Pure C and Food responses.     

The role of locomotion in the acquisition and transfer of spatial knowledge in children

The role of locomotion in the acquisition and transfer of spatial knowledge was investigated in 144 five-, seven- and eleven-year-old children. Two experiments were conducted in the Kiel locomotor maze. In the first experiment, one group of children explored the spatial layout by walking through the maze, while another learned the maze by surveying the layout. In the second experiment, children were exposed to one of two orientation tests in the maze, one of which could be solved using "landmark orientation", the other only using a "relational place orientation". Children sitting by the side of the experimental chamber surveying the maze needed fewer trials to learn the spatial layout than children exploring the environment in the locomotion condition, but in the orientation test demanding the "relational place orientation" children who had explored the maze in the locomotion condition outperformed the children in the non-locomotion condition. Results are discussed in the context of cognitive mapping models.