Recognition and treatment of incestuous families

Incest is a major mental health problem, in terms of both prevalence and morbidity. Father-daughter incest constitutes the majority of reported cases. The possibility of incest should be considered in a family which includes a violent father, a disabled mother, a child in an adult maternal role, or an acting out adolescent girl. Intervention requires recognition of the criminal and addictive aspects of the father's behavior. Active cooperation between mental health professionals and mandated child protective and law enforcement agencies is necessary for effective treatment. Group therapy and affiliated self-help programs appear to be the treatment modality of choice. Rehabilitation of the family is based upon restoration of the mother-daughter bond as a guarantee of safety for the child.     

Changes in excitability in motor cortex (representation of foreleg) of the dog depending on signal signification of flexor reaction during elaboration of trans switching

Excitability in a cortical representation of a foreleg was determined during elaboration of transswitching in dogs in three variations depending upon the stimulus used as a Conditioned stimulus (CS). If the flexor reaction to direct stimulation of the motor cortex was used as a CS, excitability changes of opposite signs appeared in the cortical representation of the foreleg, the threshold of flexion decreased in the alimentary situation and increased in the defense situation. Such changes in excitability were observed during instrumental conditioned transswitching. If subthreshold stimulation of the motor cortex was used as the CS, the threshold of flexion increased in both situations in approximately equal degree.     

Transfer of training of a new linguistic contrast in voicing

The present study examined the plasticity of the human perceptual system by means of laboratory training procedures designed to modify the perception of the voicing dimension in synthetic speech stimuli. Although the results of earlier laboratory training studies have been ambiguous, recently Pisoni, Aslin, Perey, and Hennessy (1982) have succeeded in altering the perception of labial stop consonants from a two-way contrast in voicing to a three-way contrast. The present study extended these initial results by demonstrating that experience gained from discrimination training on one place of articulation (e.g., labial) can be transferred to another place of articulation (e.g., alveolar) without any additional training on the specific test stimuli. Quantitative analyses of the identification functions showed that the new perceptual categories were stable and displayed well-defined labeling boundaries between categories. Taken together with the earlier findings, these results imply a greater degree of plasticity in the adult speech processing system than has generally been acknowledged in past studies.     

Perceptual objects and the cost of filtering

The latency of reading a single word is increased by 20 to 40 msec if another object is present in the display. The delay is affected by the spatial organization of the display: a colored frame causes less delay when it surrounds the word than when it is shown on the opposite side of fixation. A small gap in the frame is also more efficiently detected as a secondary task when the frame is around the word than when the two are spatially separate. The advantage of integrated over separate presentation suggests that a “filtering cost” is incurred when two distinct perceptual objects compete for attention. Attention in filtering tasks operates on perceptually distinct objects rather than on nodes in a semantic network.     

Clinical, electroencephalographic and computer tomographic studies of children with West and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome

The results of clinical, electroencephalographic and repeated computed tomographic examination of 14 children suffering from epileptic seizures in connection with the West and Lennox-Gastaud syndrome are analyzed and compared. Computed tomography yields little information regarding the etiology of such forms of epilepsy. Distinct clinical and electroencephalographic findings were accompanied by normal computed tomographic results in a large proportion of the cases. To avoid misinterpretation of computed tomographic findings and consequent prognostic errors in these epileptic cases it is necessary to take possible side effects of ACTH and corticosteroid treatment into account. At the climax of hormone treatment computed tomography revealed imposing changes in the form of generalized atrophy in 10 of the 14 children examined. These receded completely upon termination of hormone treatment.     

A more powerful method for testing for agreement between a judge and a known standard

We assume that a judge's task is to categorize each ofN subjects into one ofr known classes. The design of primary interest is employed if the judge is presented withs groups, each containingr subjects, such that each group of sizer consists of exactly one subject of each of ther types. The probability distribution for the total number of correct choices is developed and used to test the null hypothesis that the judge is guessing in favor of the alternative that he or she is operating at a better than chance level. The power of the procedure is shown to be superior to two other procedures which appear in the literature.The authors are grateful for the suggestions of the referees and for computer funding provided by the Northeast Regional Data Center at the University of Florida.     

Task-specific strategies of mental “rotation” of facial representations

The effects of task demands on the visual comparison of facial patterns and of comparable nonfacial patterns were explored in two studies. The studies yielded two primary findings. First, faces, despite their holistic properties, are not rotated faster than comparable non-face-like patterns, although subjects’ judgments of them were uniformly more rapid than judgments for nonfaces. Second, the nature of the same-different judgment task required of subjects had a large effect on the pattern of results obtained: When stimuli were compared to their mirror images, results indicative of mental “rotation” were obtained. When stimuli were compared on the basis of similarity of individual features, the pattern of results was very different. This one manipulation produced effects that exceeded those of all of the other manipulations, including that of rotation.     

Modification of anger in children by affective imagery training

From a school population of normal children third through fifth grades), thirty children initially identified as “angry”were randomly assigned to either an affective imagery training group, an attention group, or a control group. The treatment group received three sessions of affective imagery in which they focused on physiological changes and on their thoughts associated with prior emotional experiences. Teachers recorded pre-, post- , and short term follow-up aggressive behaviors for all thirty children. Cognitive perceptions and attributions were recorded at the same three occasions on the Affect Questionnaire. Results suggested that, as a result of affective imagery training, angry children's perceptions and cognitions shifted from “angry” towards “sad,” and there was a concomitant decrease in observed aggressive classroom behavior.     

Contrasting cases of Italian agrammatic aphasia without comprehension disorder

This study examined the effects of different concurrent verbal memory loads on a recognition accuracy task using bilaterally presented nouns. Four different memory load conditions were examined. They varied along a size dimension of either three or six words and along a complexity dimension of either easy concrete nouns or difficult highly abstract nouns. In each of the above conditions and in one control group, order or word report was controlled and in a second control group subjects were free to report the lateralized words in any order they wished. There were 20 subjects in each of the six groups. As expected, a significant right visual field superiority for verbal processing was obtained. there were no main effects of size of memory load nor complexity of m emory load on the laterality patterns. More subtle fluctuations in the patterns were found in the form of significant interactions between memory load, order of word report, and visual field. These interaction effects suggest that words reported second in the bilateral task, are more susceptible to the interfering effects of either larger or more complex memory loads. This is particularly true for right visual field words. While these data generally support a structural model of hemispheric organization, the interaction effects suggest that modifications must be made to the basic model to account for such factors as hemispheric capacity limits and order of report in the bilateral task.     

Further study of the electrophysiological correlates of lexical decision

Discriminations were required between words, pseudohomophones, and visually matched nonwords. Two tasks were employed, one which could be accomplished on the basis of a visual code (the REAL task, involving discrimination between words and both types of nonword) and another necessitating the use of a phonological code (the REAL/PSEUD task, words and pseudohomophones vs. nonwords). ERPs were recorded from three midline sites and from left and right inferior parietal sites. Two principal results were observed, (i) the peak latency of a late positive component, P637, covaried with RT, with variations in latency of around one half the corresponding RT variations, and (ii) the peak-to-peak amplitude of N100-P187 interacted with stimulus and task, such that it was larger for nonwords in the REAL task and words in the REAL/PSEUD task. No taskor stimulus-dependent asymmetries were observed in any ERP component. The P637 latency data support a model of RT variation based on the interaction of changes in parallel response preparation and stimulus evaluation processes. The observations with respect to N100-P187 suggest that ERPs are sensitive to factors related to the early processing of words and word-like visual material.