Choice Shifts In Political Decisionmaking: Federal Judges and Civil Liberties Cases

The purpose of this article is to investigate whether group-induced attitudinal shifts in decisionmaking take place outside the experimental laboratory and whether choice shift theory can be applied to the understanding of political behavior of actors engaged in socially relevant decisionmaking. A random sample of civil liberties decisions in Federal District Courts for the years 1963–1968 were examined. The hypothesis that there are systematic differences between single-judge and collegial court decisions was confirmed. Parties claiming a violation of constitutional rights increase the probability of successfully convincing a district judge when they are able to have their litigation heard by a three-judge court. The finding that judges are more likely to shift to a libertarian position when moving from the individual to the collegial decisionmaking condition holds when the data are examined in aggregate form as well as when the behavior of individual judges is studied under both decisionmaking settings.     

Reading without phonology: Evidence from aphasia

This study of an aphasic dyslexic supports the view that there are separate visual and phonological pathways in reading. The patient retained a reading vocabulary of at least 16 500 words although she was unable to perform operations that critically depend on grapheme-to-phoneme conversion; these included reading nonsense words, recognizing rhymes and homophones, and accessing lexical entries from homophonic spellings such as “kote”. Typographical variation, such as mixed case presentation, did not interfere with her reading performance, which suggests that it is mediated by letter identification rather than by a wholistic method of word recognition. The total performance pattern strongly suggests that this patient identifies words by matching particular letter-strings with their corresponding meanings.     

The word order problem in agrammatism : I. Comprehension

The results of a picture-pointing comprehension test show that agrammatic aphasics have difficulty understanding sentences in which the underlying semantic roles are marked by the order of noun phrases around a verbal element. Agrammatic patients performed poorly on reversible constructions involving spatial prepositions (e.g., “The square is above the circle”) and verbs (e.g., “The dancer applauds the clown”). These results have significance for the interpretation of the underlying disturbance in agrammatism—whether the deficit is syntactic or purely phonological.     

Applying principles of development to help at-risk preschoolers develop numeracy

In a yoked control design, multicultural Head Start 4-year-olds played numerous games involving either numeracy or the oddity principle and insertions into series. Children showed better mastery of oddity and insertions after playing games directed at those two concepts. Numeracy scores on the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (D. McCarthy, 1972) were equivalent for children who played numeracy games and children who played oddity and insertion games. These results are consistent with other research indicating that the understanding of oddity relations and that of insertions are key transitional thinking abilities that support numeracy at the preschool-kindergarten interface.     

Contrasting effects of phonological priming in aphasic word production

Two fluent aphasics, IG and GL, performed a phonological priming task in which they repeated an auditory prime then named a target picture. The two patients both had selective deficits in word production: they were at or near ceiling on lexical comprehension tasks, but were significantly impaired in picture naming. IG's naming errors included both semantic and phonemic paraphasias, as well as failures to respond, whereas GL's errors were mainly phonemic and formal paraphasias. The two patients responded very differently to phonological priming: IG's naming was facilitated (both accuracy and speed) only by begin-related primes (e.g. ferry-feather), whereas GL benefited significantly only from end-related primes (e.g. brother-feather), showing no more than a facilitatory trend with begin-related primes. We interpret these results within a two-stage model of word production, in which begin-related and end-related primes are said to operate at different stages. We then discuss implications for models of normal and aphasic word production in general and particularly with respect to sequential aspects of the phonological encoding process.     

Mapping the developmental constraints on working memory span performance

This study investigated the constraints underlying developmental improvements in complex working memory span performance among 120 children of between 6 and 10 years of age. Independent measures of processing efficiency, storage capacity, rehearsal speed, and basic speed of processing were assessed to determine their contribution to age-related variance in complex span. Results showed that developmental improvements in complex span were driven by 2 age-related but separable factors: 1 associated with general speed of processing and 1 associated with storage ability. In addition, there was an age-related contribution shared between working memory, processing speed, and storage ability that was important for higher level cognition. These results pose a challenge for models of complex span performance that emphasize the importance of processing speed alone.     

A prospective study of factors that lead to body dissatisfaction during pregnancy

This study examined changes in body image and predictors of body dissatisfaction during pregnancy. It was expected that higher levels of depression, social comparison tendencies, teasing, societal pressure to be thin and public self-consciousness would predict body dissatisfaction prospectively. Healthy pregnant women (n = 128) completed questionnaires on three occasions during their pregnancies reporting on a total of four time points: 3 months prior to pregnancy (retrospectively reported), in the early to mid-second trimester, the late-second/early-third trimester, and the latter part of the third trimester. For the most part women reported adapting to the changes that occurred in their body; however, women were most likely to experience higher levels of body dissatisfaction in early to mid-second trimester. Findings related to predictors of body dissatisfaction revealed that both social and psychological factors contributed to body image changes in pregnancy. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Counselling children and adults about AIDS/HIV: The ripple effect on haemophilia care settings

Haemophilia and HIV/AIDS are life-long, life-threatening conditions for which there is treatment but no cure. Both affect not only the patient but all members of the family. This paper focusses on how the counselling of those with AIDS/HIV has been affected by dilemmas such as treatment, infectious aspects, blood donation, sex, the media and having children. The impact of haemophilia and AIDS on the family and the ripple effect on health care staff is addressed.