Perceptual biases in psychosis-prone individuals.

College students screened for psychosis-proneness using the Chapman scales were compared on 4 free-vision tasks that typically yield left-spatial-field biases. The tasks included 2 chimeric face tests, consisting of happy/neutral faces and male/female faces, and 2 nonface tasks, consisting of pairs of dot-filled or gradient-filled rectangles. Participants endorsing perceptual aberration items, magical ideation items, or both (n = 98) and control participants (n = 112) were left-biased on all tasks but gradients and were most biased on emotion faces; in contrast, i.e., social anhedonia participants (n = 40) displayed very little or no left-field biases. For all groups, task intercorrelations were greatest between the 2 face tasks and between the 2 nonface tasks. These findings suggest patterns of atypical perceptual asymmetry in psychosis-prone individuals.     

Cerebral Asymmetries in Processing Strategies for Letter and Symbol Trigrams

Several studies have shown that laterally presented consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) strings produce both superior performance, and a more wholistic processing strategy in the right visual field/left hemisphere (RVF/LHEM), and a more sequential strategy in the inferior left visual field (LVF). To determine whether these strategies are applied to other types of trigrams subjects (n= 30) were asked to identify consonant and symbol trigrams briefly projected unilaterally to the LVF or RVF, or bilaterally (the same trigram in both fields—BVF). A second group of subjects (n= 30) first practiced pronouncing consonant trigrams and then viewed them tachistoscopically. Both tasks yield RVF advantages. Symbols are processed more wholistically in the LVF, more sequentially in the RVF and in an intermediate pattern when presented bilaterally. In contrast, subjects seem to chunk letters as bigrams, and do so equally well in all fields, and visual field differences in strategies emerge for consonants only when they are pronounced. Pronounceability of consonant trigrams, assessed with ratings and vocal reaction times, was predicted by orthographic regularity. Since the RHEM has limited phonetic skills, but it, like the LHEM, is privy to information on orthographic regularity, the error pattern on consonant strings indicates non-phonetic processing, whereas the RVF wholistic strategy for consonant–vowel–consonant strings appears to reflect phonetic processing.     

Agreement of Children and Parents Scores on Chinese Version of Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory Version 4.0: Further Psychometric Development

Applied Research in Quality of Life - Quality of life (QoL) is an important index that allows health practitioners to understand the overall health status of an individual. One commonly used...