Electromyography diagnosis of laryngeal paralysis

The differential diagnosis of laryngeal muscle paralysis can be improved by electromyographical and neurographical analysis. The findings of 30 patients with recurrent paralysis were put forward and compared with the results among 30 test people.     

Structural analysis of subjective categorical data

A general approach to the analysis of subjective categorical data is considered, in which agreement matrices of two or more raters are directly expressed in terms of error and agreement parameters. The method provides focused analyses of ratings from several raters for whom ratings have measurement error distributions that may induce bias in the evaluation of substantive questions of interest. Each rater's judgment process is modeled as a mixture of two components: an error variable that is unique for the rater in question as well as an agreement variable that operationalizes the true values of the units of observation. The statistical problems of identification, estimation, and testing of such measurement models are discussed.The general model is applied in several special cases. The most simple situation is that underlying Cohen's Kappa, where two raters place units into unordered categories. The model provides a generalization and systematization of the Kappa-idea to correct for agreement by chance. In applications with typical research designs, including a between-subjects design and a mixed within-subjects, between-subjects design, the model is shown to disentangle structural and measurement components of the observations, thereby controlling for possible confounding effects of systematic rater bias. Situations considered include the case of more than two raters as well as the case of ordered categories. The different analyses are illustrated by means of real data sets.The authors wish to thank Lawrence Hubert and Ivo Molenaar for helpful and detailed comments on a previous draft of this paper. Thanks are also due to Jens Möller und Bernd Strauß for the data from the 1992 Olympic Games. We thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier draft.     

Social categorization and fit detection under cognitive load: efficient or effortful?

Participants perceived a discussion between members of two social categories in a name‐matching paradigm. Discussions either exhibited inter‐category fit, defined as a covariation of category membership and the category members' attitude positions, or not. Orthogonally, there was cognitive load at encoding, load at retrieval, or no concurrent load. Memory for the statements and memory for the speaker of a statement were affected by load with little evidence for fit effects. Conversely, category memory, reconstructive category guessing and perceived fit were affected by inter‐category fit with little evidence for load effects. The results suggest that category activation is sensitive to inter‐category fit and that fit detection is robust against moderate amounts of cognitive load. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychotherapie bei Patienten mit koronarer Herzkrankheit

Psychosomatisch-somatopsychische Interaktionen sind bei Koronarpatienten häufig und verlaufsrelevant. Seit den 1960er-Jahren kommen daher psychosoziale Interventionen zur Verbesserung von Befinden und Krankheitsverlauf zum Einsatz. Neben psychoedukativen und unspezifisch-supportiven Angeboten oder Entspannungsverfahren finden sich auch explizit psychotherapeutische Interventionen. Diese beabsichtigen einerseits, durch Reduktion von Stressbelastungen und Förderung gesundheitsbewusster Verhaltensweisen den Krankheitsverlauf zu verlangsamen. Zuletzt wurde zudem auch die Psychotherapie psychischer Komorbiditäten untersucht. Hier spielt die prognostisch relevante Depression eine besondere Rolle. In der größten Psychotherapiestudie bei Koronarpatienten, der ENRICHD-Studie, wurde bei 2481 Infarktpatienten mit Depression oder mangelnder sozialer Unterstützung eine maximal halbjährige kognitive Verhaltenstherapie eingesetzt. Diese führte zur deutlichen Besserung der Depressivität; bei hoher Spontanremissionsrate in der Kontrollgruppe blieb der Nettoeffekt jedoch bescheiden. Eine Lebensverlängerung wurde in der Interventionsgruppe nicht erreicht. Die Befundlage verlangt differenzielle Indikationsstellungen und behandlungstechnische Weiterentwicklungen der therapeutischen Konzepte bzw. die Erprobung anderer Therapieverfahren, erlaubt jedoch noch keine evidenzbasierte allgemeine Behandlungsempfehlung. Therapieentscheidungen stützen sich heute auf die Würdigung des Einzelfalls, auf gut belegte subjektiven Therapieeffekte, theoretische Annahmen über Stressbewältigungs- und Entspannungsverfahren sowie die an anderen Patientenkollektiven gewonnenen Wirksamkeitsnachweise psychotherapeutischer Verfahren. Dabei sind generell eine Beachtung der kardialen Situation und der typischen Problembereiche der koronaren Herzkrankheit (KHK) sowie eine gute Abstimmung mit den somatischen Behandlern wichtig.     

Evidence for serial coercion: a time course analysis using the visual-world paradigm

Metonymic verbs like start or enjoy often occur with artifact-denoting complements (e.g., The artist started the picture) although semantically they require event-denoting complements (e.g., The artist started painting the picture). In case of artifact-denoting objects, the complement is assumed to be type shifted (or coerced) into an event to conform to the verb's semantic restrictions. Psycholinguistic research has provided evidence for this kind of enriched composition: readers experience processing difficulty when faced with metonymic constructions compared to non-metonymic controls. However, slower reading times for metonymic constructions could also be due to competition between multiple interpretations that are being entertained in parallel whenever a metonymic verb is encountered. Using the visual-world paradigm, we devised an experiment which enabled us to determine the time course of metonymic interpretation in relation to non-metonymic controls. The experiment provided evidence in favor of a non-competitive, serial coercion process.     

Social presence effects on the stroop task: Boundary conditions and an alternative account

Two studies investigated boundary conditions of an effect of social presence on the Stroop task and its interpretation in terms of an attentional view (P. Huguet, M. P. Galvaing, J. M. Monteil, & F. Dumas, 1999). In this view, social presence leads to attentional focusing, enhancing participants’ ability to screen out the distracting features of Stroop stimuli. As predicted, Stroop interference was found to be reduced by social presence, but an alternative account in which social presence exerts an effect on task selection received more support.     

Effects of race on responses and response latencies in the weapon identification task: a test of six models

The authors consider six models of underlying process in the weapon identification task: The first two are response-time extensions of signal detection models; the last four, of the process dissociation model. Predictions for accuracy data, correct response latencies, and false response latencies are used to discriminate between models. In the present study, racial bias in responses and correct response latency was replicated. New findings were that the direction of bias was reversed in error latency and that errors were faster than correct responses. These findings rule out four models, in particular, the idea that race biases early perception and interpretation of targets. Implications for reducing errors in the weapon identification task and possibilities of discriminating between the remaining two models are discussed.     

Syntactic priming in comprehension: the role of argument order and animacy

Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension--specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison?") are due to anticipation of structural properties following the verb (send) in the target sentence or to anticipation of animacy properties of the first postverbal noun. Shortly following the target verb onset, listeners looked at the recipient more (relative to the theme) following DO than PO primes, indicating that the structure of the prime affected listeners' eye gazes on the target scene. Crucially, this priming effect was the same irrespective of whether the postverbal nouns in the prime sentences did ("The monarch will send the painting to the president") or did not ("The monarch will send the envoy to the president") differ in animacy, suggesting that PO/DO priming in comprehension occurs because structural properties, rather than animacy features, are being primed when people process the ditransitive target verb.     

Prime diagnosticity in short-term repetition priming: is primed evidence discounted, even when it reliably indicates the correct answer?

The authors conducted 4 repetition priming experiments that manipulated prime duration and prime diagnosticity in a visual forced-choice perceptual identification task. The strength and direction of prime diagnosticity produced marked effects on identification accuracy, but those effects were resistant to subsequent changes of diagnosticity. Participants learned to associate different diagnosticities with primes of different durations but not with primes presented in different colors. Regardless of prime diagnosticity, preference for a primed alternative covaried negatively with prime duration, suggesting that even for diagnostic primes, evidence discounting remains an important factor. A computational model, with the assumption that adaptation to the statistics of the experiment modulates the level of evidence discounting, accounted for these results.     

Decision noise may mask criterion shifts: Reply to Balakrishnan and MacDonald (2008)

J. D. Balakrishnan and J. A. MacDonald (2008) argue that RTbased measures of signal detection processes provide evidence against signal detection theory’s notion of a flexible decision criterion. They argue that this evidence is immune to the alternative explanation proposed by S. T. Mueller and C. T. Weidemann (2008), that decision noise may mask criterion shifts. We show that noise in response times can produce the same effects as are produced by noise in confidence ratings. Given these results, the evidence is not sufficient to categorically reject the notion of a flexible response policy implemented through shifts in a decision criterion. nt]mis|This research was supported in part by a postdoctoral fellowship to C.T.W. from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).