Compensating for Cognitive Deficits Following Brain Injury

Two of the most important goals of rehabilitation are to (a) reduce everyday consequences of impaired cognitive functioning (disabilities) and (b) reduce the level of handicap (the extent to which these problems prevent successful return to society). One of the ways by which we can achieve these goals is to enable people to compensate for their cognitive deficits. This paper (i) describes a theoretical framework for understanding compensatory behavior, (ii) discusses different forms of compensation, (iii) considers compensation for several cognitive disorders, and (iv) presents suggestions for predicting which patients will find it easy to compensate and which require more intensive and focused rehabilitation.     

Concordance Between Parent Reports of Children's Mental Health Services and Service Records: The Services Assessment for Children and Adolescents (SACA)

The concordance between parent reports of children's mental health services and medical and administrative service records were assessed in a field test of the Services Assessment for Children and Adolescents (SACA) interview instrument. Service use reports from primary caregivers, usually mothers, for their child's emotional or behavioral problems were compared against inpatient, outpatient, and school records in St. Louis, one of the pilot sites for the Multi-Site Study of Service Use, Need, Outcomes and Costs in Child and Adolescent Populations (UNOCCAP). A global any use service variable, comprised of inpatient, outpatient, and school reports, yielded an overall service use concordance kappa of .76 between parent reports and records. Parent reports of inpatient hospitalization services using the SACA yielded the highest agreement with medical records, with kappa statistics of 1.00 for use of any inpatient hospital care and for medication use. Parent reports of specific inpatient services concurred with medical records more moderately, yielding kappas from .50 to .66. Reports of any outpatient mental health services yielded variable rates of agreement, with kappas ranging from .67 for any use of outpatient care, to .66 for medication use, to negligible kappas for specific treatments. Parent reports of school services were weakly related to records for most services, except for moderate agreement (.48) on placement in special classrooms for emotional or behavioral problems. Family burden or impact discriminated more powerfully than other variables between respondents who concurred with records and those who did not.     

Comparative cognition in the 1930s

According to the received view of the history of psychology, behaviorism so dominated psychology prior to the 1960s that there was little research in animal cognition. A review of the research on animal cognition during the 1930s reveals a rich literature dealing with such topics as insight, reasoning, tool use, delay problems, oddity learning, abstraction, spatial cognition, and problem solving, among others. Material on “higher processes” or a related topic was prominent in the textbooks of the period. Tracing academic lineages reveals such teachers as Harvey Carr, Robert M. Yerkes, and Edward C. Tolman as sources of this interest. The alleged hegemony of strict behavioristic psychology, interpreted as excluding research on animal cognition, requires revision. Some possible reasons for this neglect are suggested.     

Freud and the Visual Arts

Freud was more interested in literature than painting and sculpture, as Louis Fraiberg and Richard Sterba note. The question is how this affected his analysis of Leonardo's paintings and Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses The author argues that because he regarded them as intellectual puzzles to be psychoanalytically deciphered, he reduced them to a species of literature, suggesting his reluctance to recognize their aesthetic significance, and perhaps his inability to do so. The visual work of art becomes something to be read rather than seen. Its sensuousness is given short shrift. For example, Freud makes no mention of chiaroscuro and sfumato in his study of Leonardo—just those elements for which his art is famous as art. As Freud said, his analytic turn of mind kept him from obtaining any pleasure from what he could not rationally explain. The author traces Freud's elevation of the literary over the visual, and with that of the analyzable over the unanalyzable, to his critique of Charcot, whom he described as a visuel,' a man who sees his patients (and photographed them) rather than listens to them. Finally, Freud's dislike of modern art is contrasted with Karl Abraham's appreciation of its sensuous uniqueness. The general point is made that Freud didn't understand that the key to art was the artist's engagement with the medium.     

Is there an age-related positivity effect in visual attention? A comparison of two methodologies

Research suggests a positivity effect in older adults' memory for emotional material, but the evidence from the attentional domain is mixed. The present study combined 2 methodologies for studying preferences in visual attention, eye tracking, and dot-probe, as younger and older adults viewed synthetic emotional faces. Eye tracking most consistently revealed a positivity effect in older adults' attention, so that older adults showed preferential looking toward happy faces and away from sad faces. Dot-probe results were less robust, but in the same direction. Methodological and theoretical implications for the study of socioemotional aging are discussed.     

Creating partially deleted objects for perception research

Line drawings are commonly used in perception research. A basic strategy used in such research is to remove portions of the line drawings in order to determine what features of an object are important for recognition. However, it is important to monitor the amount of contour and type of information that are deleted when one is making partially deleted or fragmented objects. With the Image Fragmenting Program, researchers can use random or manual contour deletion strategies to create fragmented objects while controlling for the amount of contour removed from the images.     

Analytic preparation: the creation of an analytic climate with patients not yet in analysis

The art and science of beginning an analysis has a life of its own and can be considered in many ways quite apart from its later stages. An incremental path forward is smoothed for patients who are not yet prepared to analyze, and builds eventually into something readily recognizable as an analysis. The term analytic preparation refers to this set of processes. Early on, the analyst is concerned less with facilitating an early replica of an idealized analysis than with facilitating the mutual adaptation of patient and analyst as they begin to negotiate a "thought community." Since analytic preparation is not an entity, it does not neatly overlap in real time with the opening phase as usually described, does not have a discrete beginning or end, and does not abruptly shift mid-stream into analysis proper. Some relations between analytic preparation, analytic interaction, and the interpretation of transference are examined.