Neutrality, interpretation, and therapeutic intent.

Neutrality is a central concept within the theory of psychoanalytic technique. We spell out the major controversies in which the concept has become embroiled, and provide a definition that we believe coincides with actual psychoanalytic practice. We discuss its merits and weaknesses, noting also the negative consequences of relying on older definitions. We relate neutrality to the interpretive process, indicating ways interpretation protects neutrality and is made more effective by it. We discuss the complex and controversial relation between neutrality and the analyst's therapeutic intent.     

Smooth-pursuit eye movement dysfunction and liability for schizophrenia: implications for genetic modeling.

Forty-one nonpsychiatric subjects, 38 probands with schizophrenia, and 99 of their relatives were studied. Oculomotor functioning was bimodally distributed for probands and relatives. Oculomotor dysfunction was not present in all families with a schizophrenic proband. In those families in which it was present, there were significant phenotypic correlations between oculomotor functioning and schizophrenia-related characteristics. The patterns of familial resemblance in the families in whom oculomotor dysfunction was present were consistent with nonadditive genetic variance contributing both to oculomotor dysfunction and to the relationship between oculomotor dysfunction and clinical symptoms. These results suggest that schizophrenia may be etiologically heterogeneous and that oculomotor dysfunction may help to identify nonadditive genetic variance for this disorder.     

From front line to home front: a study of secondary traumatization.

While the long-term effects of combat trauma on veterans have been studied extensively, its impact on veterans' wives has yet to be investigated. This study examined the implications of combat-induced psychopathology--wartime combat stress reaction (CSR) and current posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)--in a sample of 205 wives of Israeli combat veterans of the 1982 Lebanon war. Results show that both CSR and PTSD were associated with increased psychiatric symptoms in the wives. In addition, current PTSD was particularly found to contribute to impaired social relations among veterans' wives in a broad range of contexts, from inner feelings of loneliness, through impaired marital and family relations, and extending to the wider social network. Implications of these findings for treatment and further research are discussed.     

Some consequences of stimulus variability on speech processing by 2-month-old infants.

The present study explores how stimulus variability in speech production influences the 2-month-old infant's perception and memory for speech sounds. Experiment 1 focuses on the consequences of talker variability for the infant's ability to detect differences between speech sounds. When tested with high-amplitude sucking (HAS) procedure, infants who listened to versions of a syllable, such as [symbol: see text], produced by 6 male and 6 female talkers, detected a change to another syllable, such as [symbol: see text], uttered by the same group of talkers. In fact, infants exposed to multiple talkers performed as well as other infants who heard utterances produced by only a single talker. Moreover, other results showed that infants discriminate the voices of the individual talkers, although discriminating one mixed group of talkers (3 males and 3 females) from another is too difficult for them. Experiment 2 explored the consequences of talker variability on infants' memory for speech sounds. The HAS procedure was modified by introducing a 2-min delay period between the familiarization and test phases of the experiment. Talker variability impeded infants' encoding of speech sounds. Infants who heard versions of the same syllable produced by 12 different talkers did not detect a change to a new syllable produced by the same talkers after the delay period. However, infants who heard the same syllable produced by a single talker were able to detect the phonetic change after the delay. Finally, although infants who heard productions from a single talker retained information about the phonetic structure of the syllable during the delay, they apparently did not retain information about the identity of the talker. Experiment 3 reduced the range of variability across talkers and investigated whether variability interferes with retention of all speech information. Although reducing the range of variability did not lead to retention of phonetic details, infants did recognize a change in the gender of the talkers' voices (from male to female or vice versa) after a 2-min delay. Two additional experiments explored the consequences of limiting the variability to a single talker. In Experiment 4, with an immediate testing procedure, infants exposed to 12 different tokens of one syllable produced by the same talker discriminated these from 12 tokens of another syllable.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Whole words and decoding for short-term learning: comparisons on a "talking-computer" system.

Low-and average-ability readers in first and second grade studied a list of 36 words using a "talking-computer" system. The system highlighted and simultaneously pronounced orthographic units in the words when the children touched the words with a light pen. During two training sessions, the computer presented four groups of 9 words each, one group as whole words, one in syllabic units, one in subsyllabic units, and one as single grapheme-phoneme units. All children learned the least words with single grapheme-phoneme units, having had the greatest difficulty blending the units into words during training. The other presentation units did not differ significantly from each other for most students on post-testing. However, the low first-grade readers learned fewer words segmented and presented by subsyllables than by syllable or word units, but only for multisyllabic words. Monosyllabic words were blended and learned as easily with onset-rime segmentation as with whole word units, for all children.     

Information Load: A Test of an Inverted-U Hypothesis with Hourly and Salaried Employees

We surveyed 714 hourly and 516 salaried employees of a midwestern telephone company to test the effects of information load on work-related outcomes. Using curvilinear regression analyses, we found support for our hypothesis that employees are less satisfied with outcomes as the load of information deviates positively or negatively from some level. We also predicted, and found, that this quadratic function was more prevalent in the hourly group than in the salaried group. Implications, future research directions, and limitations of the present study are discussed.     

Earthquake Preparedness: Predictors in a Community Survey1

We measured the relationship between earthquake concern and preparation in a community with high seismic risk. Five samples of approximately 800 people were interviewed by telephone about their earthquake concern, but this study focuses on the last two samples in which respondents reported their preparatory behaviors. The findings were consistent in showing greater likelihood of concern for those who had experienced an earthquake, were female, younger, and non-Anglo and a greater likelihood of preparation for those who had more concern, were married, and had lived longer at their present address. In a nonrecursive causal model, no evidence was found for a reciprocal effect of preparation on concern. These results were discussed in terms of health belief models including the self-efficacy and “stages of change” perspectives. Implications were drawn for interventions to increase preparation in ready-to-change groups and compensate for the resistance of those less willing or able to prepare.     

Ratings of Orally Presented Verbal Expressions of Probability by a Heterogeneous Sample

Verbal expressions of probability are used in daily conversations, physician-physician and physician-patient communications, and questionnaire and interview responses. To assess the degree of agreement among English-speaking Australian adults in allocating numerical probabilities to these verbal expressions of probability, 966 interviewees provided estimates for 60 isolated expressions of probability and a sequence of seven items placed in a sequence. Means and median scores appeared to be consistent with common sense and with findings from other countries. Mirror-imaged terms were neither symmetrical nor equidistant, with the means and medians for the positive terms being closer to the mid-points of the scale than the means and medians of the negative terms. Items in a sequence of probability terms showed greater symmetry and less variability than isolated expressions. For most items, there was an unacceptably high level of within-subject and between-subject variability. Although subjects with higher levels of education and/ or mathematics education showed less variability, these factors accounted for very little of the variance. The greater variability in Australian results relative to those reported elsewhere was partly attributed to the use of interviews rather than questionnaires. There were no particular stems that yielded greater consistency. It was concluded that the use of these expressions leads to very imprecise communication.     

An "Epidemic" Model of Adolescent Cigarette Smoking

The prevalence of regular smoking increases rapidly during adolescence. We applied modeling methods from the study of epidemic infectious disease to smoking behavior. Our "epidemic" models dealt with the process of transition among four states: nonsmoker (susceptible), trier (exposed), regular smoker (infected), and ex-smoker (recovered). The best fitting model was one in which the transition from nonsmoker to trier was a social contagion process where nonsmokers contacted either triers or regular smokers. All other transitions were treated as constant rate processes in which a constant proportion of eligible individuals made the transition in a given year. The recursive equation model embodying these assumptions was able to predict accurately the proportion of adolescents in each state in Grades 6–11. Our results support a "stage" model of smoking, suggesting that different psychological and physiological processes are involved in the initiation of smoking than in developing a habit of regular smoking. A possible sex difference was found in the non-contact transition between trier and smoker states, with the transition being more probable in females than in males.     

Integration of the big five and circumplex approaches to trait structure.

To integrate the 5-dimensional simple-structure and circumplex models of personality, the Abridged Big Five Dimensional Circumplex (AB5C) taxonomy of personality traits was developed, consisting of the 10 circumplexes that can be formed by pitting each of the Big Five factors against one another. The model maps facets of the Big Five dimensions as blends of 2 factors. An application to data consisting of 636 self-ratings and peer ratings on 540 personality trait adjectives yielded 34 well-defined facets out of a possible 45. The AB5C solution is compared with simple-structure and lower dimensional circumplex solutions, and its integrative and corrective potential are discussed, as well as its limitations.