The Contribution of Neuroimaging to the Study of Language and Aphasia

New structural and functional imaging methods continue to be developed at a rapid pace. In the last 25 years, advanced imaging techniques have provided insights into how language is represented and processed in the brain and how it can be disrupted by damage to, or dysfunction of, various parts of the brain. Imaging studies have also yielded new information regarding how individuals recover language after stroke. We briefly review the strengths and weaknesses of the various radiological methods currently used to study language and aphasia.     

The Effects of Training on Perceptions of Sexual Harassment Allegations

This study of 176 college juniors examined the effects of respondent gender and sexual harassment training on the perceptions of what constitutes sexual harassment in the workplace. Variation in these perceptions, due to severity of the sexually oriented behavior, was also examined. Regardless of the subject's gender, individuals who 6 weeks earlier had seen a training film about sexual harassment rated severe sexually oriented work behaviors as more harassing than did individuals who had not seen the film. Additionally, males who had not seen the film rated ambiguous sexually oriented behaviors as less harassing than did males and females who had seen the film, and as less harassing than females who had not seen the film. Implications for the importance of training in addressing sexual harassment are discussed.     

Dissociations of language function in dementia: A case study

In this report we describe and attempt to characterize the deterioration in semantic knowledge occurring in a victim of a progressive dementing disease. The subject was unable to match even highly familiar naming words with their actual or pictured referents; instead, she consistently overextended verbal labels to closely associated distractors. The alteration in scope of referential meanings suggested by this overextension effect was apparently related to a breakdown in the structure of underlying categories. On a nonverbal match-to-sample procedure, for example, dogs were treated as exemplars of the cat family. Evidence for the breakdown of semantic knowledge was not limited to picture labeling paradigms. Thus, we found that the subject was unable to utilize semantic context in the written disambiguation of spoken homophones but could, at the same time, use even minimal syntactic cues as the basis for proper lexical selection. This last result was consistent with other lines of evidence pointing to the relative preservation of syntactic operations, in marked contrast to the semantic loss. The importance of this dissociation of function in organic pathology is considered from a number of perspectives, including its relevance to models of language organization in the brain.     

Triadic transferences of pathological family images

Traditionally, self-object and psychosexual transferences have been thought of as dyadic processes. This paper emphasizes the importance of seeing the triadic transferences that are contained within the more visible dyadic transferences. Triadic transferences are the partial recreation of replicas of pathological family images that were constructed from experiences with father-motherchild triads during childhood. Detecting them lessens the likelihood of therapeutic impasses occurring which resemble family of origin dyadic alliances. Childhood development and developmental arrest are discussed from a triadic perspective. In a healthy psychological family a triadic heterosexual family image is constructed which contains a triadic self and a resolved Oedipus.Revision of a paper presented at the 12th International Congress of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions, Kyoto, Japan, July 20, 1990. A preliminary version, entitled Triadic Transferences, was presented at the 12th Annual Meeting of the American Family Therapy Association, Philadelphia, PA, June 21, 1990.The masculine gender form is used for convenience, but with the recognition that statements apply to both genders.