CAN SPATIAL TRAINING ERASE THE GENDER DIFFERENCES ON THE WATER-LEVEL TASK?

Spatial training has been only modestly effective at improving the performance of adolescents and adults on the water-level task. Based on previous findings with the task, a self-discovery training procedure was developed that involved having participants proceed from easier to more difficult problems along a dimension of increasingly greater competing perceptual cues. The training was effective in (a) eliminating the gender differences on the drawing task, and (b) significantly improving females' knowledge of the physical (invariance) principle, although not to the level of males. Training effects did not transfer to a related spatial task.     

Applicability of two violence risk assessment tools in a psychiatric prison hospital population

The risk of violent behavior is known to be higher for patients who suffer from a severe mental disorder. However, specific prediction tools for clinical work in prison psychiatry are lacking. In this single-center study, two violence risk assessment tools (Forensic Psychiatry and Violence Tool, “FoVOx,” and Mental Illness and Violence Tool, “OxMIV”) were applied to a prison hospital population with a primary psychotic or bipolar disorder and subsequently compared. The required information on all items of both tools was obtained retrospectively for a total of 339 patients by evaluation of available patient files. We obtained the median and inter-quartile range for both FoVOx and OxMIV, and their rank correlation coefficient along with 95% confidence intervals (CIs)—for the full cohort, as well as for cohort subgroups. The two risk assessment tools were strongly positively correlated (Spearman correlation = 0.83; 95% CI = 0.80–0.86). Such a high correlation was independent of nationality, country of origin, type of detention, schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, previous violent crime and alcohol use disorder, where correlations were above 0.8. A lower correlation was seen with patients who were 30 years old or more, married, with affective disorder and with self-harm behavior, and also in patients without aggressive behavior and without drug use disorder. Both risk assessment tools are applicable as an adjunct to clinical decision making in prison psychiatry.     

Infants prefer higher-pitched singing

Female singers were recorded singing a song in a high and/or a low range. Infants preferred to listen to the higher-pitched versions, suggesting that infants' preference for infant-directed singing and speech is mediated in part by a preference for higher pitch.     

Perceptual evaluation of the speech before and after fluency shaping stuttering therapy

An often-cited criterion for assessing the effect of a stuttering therapy is the ability of the stutterers to produce normally fluent speech. Many modern stuttering therapies use special techniques that may produce stutter-free speech that does not sound completely normal. The present study investigates this problem in the framework of the Dutch adaptation of the Precision Fluency Shaping Program.

Pre-, post-, and -year follow-up therapy speech samples of 32 severe stutterers who were treated in a four-week intensive therapy are compared with comparable samples of 20 nonstutterers. For that aim the samples were rated on 14 bipolar scales by groups of about 20 listeners. The results show that the speech of the stutterers in all three conditions differs significantly from the speech of the nonstutterers. The pretherapy speech takes an extreme position on a Distorted Speech dimension, due to the large proportion of disfluencies. The posttherapy speech has extremely low scores on a Dynamics/Prosody dimension, a‘1 while the follow-up therapy speech differs from the normal speech on both dimensions, but now the distances are smaller. These results are discussed in relation to the severity of the stuttering problem in the group of treated stutterers. Finally, implications for future research on therapy evaluation are discussed.     

Prediction of environmental change: Wish-fulfillment revisited

Two experiments are reported which examine the relationship between a person's estimate of the likelihood of a future change in his environment and his assessment of its desirability. The first experiment showed a general tendency for probability and desirability ratings to be positively correlated. This correlation was higher when the desirability of a predicted change was seen, on average, as matching its probability of occurrence, e.g., if the change was seen as both desirable and probable rather than probable but undesirable. In the second experiment subjects wrote an essay arguing either that a predicted change was probable, improbable, desirable or undesirable. Arguing for desirability of the predicted change had as much effect on subjects' probability estimates as arguing for its probability; similarly, arguing for its probability had as much effect on desirability ratings as arguing for its desirability. These results are taken to imply that individuals may seek to achieve greater cognitive simplicity by treating probability and desirability as a single dimension.