Boundary disturbance in borderline and psychotic states

This study examines evidence for boundary disturbances in depressive, borderline, and schizophrenic hospitalized inpatients. Certain thought disorder signs on the Rorschach are reconceptualized as indices of boundary formation, which is defined as the capacity to create particular distinctions along wome bipolar coordinate of experience where previously no distinction was possible, and which defines each cluster of experience through a maintenance of differential functioning. The borderline group scored significantly high on the indices of laxness and moderately severe inner-outer boundary formation. The schizophrenic group scored significantly higher on indices of self-other and somewhat higher on severe inner-outer boundary disturbance. Schizophrenics may be organized at a level of self-other boundary formation which subsumes inner-outer boundary formation, while the borderline group is organized at a level of inner-outer boundary formation.     

Antidepressant treatment of children: clinical relapse is unrelated to tricyclic plasma concentrations

Plasma concentrations of imipramine and amitriptyline and their desmethylated metabolites were measured in 20 children being treated for major depressive illness 2 wk. and 5 to 10 wk. after achieving drug dosages of 2.25 mg/kg body weight. At 2 wk. all children had exhibited clinical improvement, but by 10 wk. 4 of the 10 children treated with imipramine and 5 of the 10 children treated with amitriptyline had experienced clinical relapse of depressive symptoms. Tricyclic antidepressant plasma concentrations and ratios were comparable in the subgroups of children who maintained their clinical improvement and those who relapsed. There was no evidence of a systematic decline in plasma tricyclic antidepressant concentrations in those children who relapsed.     

Stimulus categorization by brain-damaged patients

Patients with localized insult to the right hemisphere, or to either the anterior or the posterior portion of the left hemisphere, as well as neurologically intact controls, evaluated stimuli on a seven-point rating scale for their degree of category membership. The stimuli were taken from one of two continua, one composed of fruit and vegetable items, and the other of items differing in hue and shape. Different subsets of stimuli provided different contexts for the judgments of category membership. The two left-hemisphere groups showed anomalies in categorizing the fruit and vegetable items but not the perceptual items, while the reverse was true for the right-hemisphere patients. Moreover, both left-hemisphere groups demonstrated context effects in their judgments of the representativeness of the fruit and vegetable items, but differed in the way in which they responded to changing contexts. Left posterior patients demonstrated weak category boundaries and even reclassified items. In contrast, patients with left anterior damage showed highly categorical responses and less differentiation of items within a category. All groups showed striking context effects in judgments of perceptual items in terms of changes in representativeness ratings and the location of a category boundary. Alternative interpretations of the results are offered.     

Time went by so slowly: Overestimation of event duration by males and females

In three experiments, 469 subjects watched a short videotape of a bank robbery and later estimated the duration of the tape. Subjects invariably overestimated the durations. Accuracy of time estimation was unrelated to amount of free recall (Experiment 1) or accuracy of memory (Experiment 2). Females overestimated to a greater degree than males (Experiments 2 and 3). A more stressful version of the event produced greater overestimates than a less stressful version (Experiment 3). The relationship between induced arousal and time estimation appears to be different for men and women.     

The ABCs of categorical perception

Studies of speech perception first revealed a surprising discontinuity in the way in which stimulus values on a physical continuum are perceived. Data which demonstrate the effect in nonspeech modes have challenged the contention that categorical perception is a hallmark of the speech mode, but the psychophysical models that have been proposed have not resolved the issues raised by empirical findings. This study provides data from judgments of four sensory continua, two visual and two tactual-kinesthetic, which show that the adaptation level for a set of stimuli serves as a category boundary whether stimuli on the continuum differ by linear or logarithmic increments. For all sensory continua studied, discrimination of stimuli belonging to different perceptual categories was more accurate than discrimination of stimuli belonging to the same perceptual category. Moreover, shifts in the adaptation level produced shifts in the location of the category boundary. The concept of Adaptation-level Based Categorization (ABC) provides a unified account of judgmental processes in categorical perception without recourse to post hoc constructs such as implicit anchors or external referents.     

GENERALIZATION OF OBJECT NAMING AFTER TRAINING WITH PICTURE CARDS AND WITH OBJECTS

Generalization of four retarded children's object naming responses to stimuli in the natural environment was assessed after training with either objects or pictures of the objects. Generalization was typically greater after training with objects. In a second experiment, half of the stimuli that showed little generalization were retrained by alternating the original training object with an object that belonged to the same stimulus class as the training stimulus. The other half were simply retrained using the object. The alternating procedure resulted in substantial increases in generalization to untrained objects.