Liberation Psychology as the Path Toward Healing Cultural Soul Wounds

Oppression resulting in soul wounding has afflicted indigenous communities and the counseling profession. Internalized oppression has become part of oppressive practices inflicted on communities served. The authors delineate a liberation psychology that leads toward the psychological and spiritual emancipation of individual clients, communities, and the counseling profession.     

Recall and recognition measures of paired associate learning in healthy aging

Associate-recognition has received little attention as a potential clinical tool for detecting early Alzheimer's disease (AD). As an important preliminary stage to investigating the paradigm's diagnostic utility, we designed and administered a verbal associate-recognition task to healthy elderly participants (n = 62) and compared their performance to that on traditional cued-recall PAL. In both test conditions, the stimulus list comprised of a mixture of highly imageable and less imageable word pairs. Overall, performance on the associate-recognition task was superior to that on the cued-recall analogue. This 'recognition advantage' was not attributable to the higher baseline or chance guessing rate in the associate-recognition condition, as the size of the recognition advantage varied across learning trials and stimulus imageability. In comparison to performance on the imageable stimuli, performance on the less imageable stimuli was poor in both associate-recognition and cued-recall conditions. Across the delay, performances were more likely to drop in the cued-recall condition than the associate-recognition condition. These results suggest that verbal associate-recognition may be clinically efficacious and better tolerated in elderly populations than traditional cued-recall paradigms. Although these results are encouraging, further research is required to examine the utility of associate-recognition in clinical populations, particularly early AD.     

Dissociations of writing and praxis: Two cases in point

For normal writing it is essential that both motoric and linguistic competence be present; disruption of one or the other of these faculties may result in qualitatively different types of agraphia. Two right-handed patients became agraphic after left hemisphere lesions; pure apraxic agraphia in the absence of limb apraxia developed in one patient and pure linguistic agraphia in association with severe ideomotor limb apraxia in the other. The performance of these patients not only serves to illustrate the dissociation between the motoric and linguistic faculties that underlie writing but also confirms that ideomotor limb apraxia and apraxic agraphia are distinct and dissociable entities.     

Category-Specific Naming Deficit for Medical Terms after Dominant Thalamic/Capsular Hemorrhage

Postmortem, retrograde degeneration, and electrical stimulation studies have implicated the anterior pulvinar in language processing. We examined a patient who, after a hemorrhage affecting the dominant pulvinar and internal capsule, exhibited a circumscribed anomia for medical items and conditions. No other language disturbance was noted. Five category-specific word lists, matched for word frequency, were administered in a naming-to-definition format. Results indicated that the patient exhibited a significant category-specific naming deficit for medical items and conditions compared to matched control subjects. Although medical item lists were found to differ from nonmedical item lists in imageability and abstractness, B.C.'s category-specific deficit did not seem to be caused by word frequency, concept familiarity, imageability, or abstractness. Nor could the patient's performance be explained on the basis of deficits in broader semantic classifications (i.e., animate vs inanimate or man-made vs natural). The patient was unable to retrieve medical items even when given phonemic cues for those he could not name. Findings indicate that subtotal damage in the dominant pulvinar may create category-specific deficits.     

Apraxia in a patient with atypical cerebral dominance

Liepmann postulated that the left hemisphere of right-handed persons contains the "movement formulas" that control purposeful skilled movements of the limbs on both sides of the body. Accordingly, in right-handers apraxia should follow damage to the left hemisphere, whereas right hemisphere damage should not lead to apraxia. Although this is generally true, we recently examined a right-handed man who after a right hemispheric stroke became aphasic and apraxic with his nonparalyzed right hand. Our observations suggest that the right hemisphere of this right-handed man made a critical contribution to the planning and execution of skilled movements. This case provides evidence that right-handers should not be considered a homogeneous group in terms of cerebral motor dominance and that contrary to Liepmann's postulate, hemispheric dominance for the control of skilled movements does not entirely determine handedness.