The development of conceptual and rote recall skills among school age children

One hundred eighty children from Grades K, 5, and 9 performed a recall task within one of four instructional conditions: serial recall; standard free recall; labeling free recall; labeling cued recall. The task required that Ss view and recall items from three successively presented sets of categorized pieture stimuli. Controls were imposed upon the associatice relatedness of items within sets so as to minimize the occurrence of associative responding during recall. The clustering data showed that kindergarten and fifth grade children are able to use conceptual skills to effectively mediate recall, but fail to effect these skills on a spontaneous basis in free recall. The results were discussed in line with the hypothesis that young children fail to engage in planful cognitive activity in recall tasks.     

The disputation — a special type of cooperative argumentative dialogue

This article consists of three parts, two introductory, in which the limits and the methods of analysis of dialogues are expounded, and the major part, in which the main features of a philosophical theory of disputation are outlined.

"Firesetting caused by homesickness"

This account of one of the now rare cases of fire-raising through homesickness brings into clear relief what is peculiar to the abnormal development of the fire-raiser's personality, the abnormal pattern of subjective experience and the abnormal motivation of the criminal act.     

The "semiconscious" form of pathologic alcoholic intoxication, its characteristics and differences from "classical" forms of pathologic intoxication

An account of eight forensic-psychiatric reports characterises the special features of the "semiconscious" form of pathological and pathologically biased inebriation, and contrasts them with "classical" pathological forms.     

Results of the use of lithium to prevent recurrence of affective psychosis

The efficacy of lithium treatment in preventing relapse in phasal psychoses was tested by the re-examination of 99 patients at a Dresden clinic whose treatment had on average exceeded ten years. Results and progress were compared with those of patients starting treatment since the introduction of the lithium treatment in the year 1979. Phase or subphase frequency and duration, conditions of treatment, suicide attempts, unfitness for work, and registration as a disabled person were among the aspects considered.     

Expert assessment of competence to make a will following the death of the testator

The paper expounds the legal basis in the DDR for preparing a retrospective assessment of a deceased person's capacity to make a will, and examines the special features and the conclusions of 26 expert psychiatric opinions. A commentary is supplied on the characteristics of the situation.     

Genetic marker findings in systematic and unsystematic schizophrenias

The systematic schizophrenias are marked genetically by a significant surplus of the Gc serum type 1-1 (p less than 0.0005), what can be demonstrated by the separated analysis of the hebephrenias (p less than 0.0005), paraphrenias (p less than 0.01) and catatonias (p less than 0.05) also. Furtheron there is some evidence that the Gc subtype 1F plays a predominant role within the Gc 1-1 excess (p less than 0.01). The unsystematic schizophrenias (periodic catatonias and affective paraphrenias) do not deviate in their Gc distribution from the corresponding control values, but they exhibit contrary to the systematic forms a surplus of the haptoglobin serum group 2-2 like phasic psychoses. The marker findings are discussed with respect to the relevant data of biological psychiatry and biochemical genetics.