Project Trust: breaking down barriers between middle school children

This paper analyzes the success of a camp retreat weekend called Project Trust involving middle school students and teachers. The goal of the camp is to break down barriers between cliques identified as active in the school. The camp focuses on building team relationships across clique membership and incorporates elements of peace education and conflict resolution. A treatment group (campers) and comparison group (noncampers) were administered an adaptation of the Bogardus Social Distance Test and the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale before and after the camp. Attendance was found to lower social distance scores for nine of the ten groups/cliques. Campers also had higher self-concept scores after the retreat.     

Large-scale ensemble averaging of ambulatory impedance cardiograms

Impedance cardiography has been used increasingly to measure human physiological responses to emotional and mentally engaging stimuli. The validity of large-scale ensemble averaging of ambulatory impedance cardiograms was evaluated for preejection period (PEP), interbeat interval, and dZ/dt_(min) amplitude. We tested whether the average of “classical” 60-sec ensemble averages across periods with fixed activity, posture, physical load, social situation, and location could be accurately estimated from a single large-scale ensemble average spanning these entire periods. Impedance and electrocardiograms were recorded for about 24-h from 21 subjects. Recordings were scored by seven raters, using both methods for each subject. Good agreement (average intraclass correlation coefficient was .91) between both ensemble averaging methods was found for all three cardiac function measures. The results indicate that for unambiguous ambulatory impedance cardiograms, large-scale ensemble averaging is valid, which makes measuring prolonged changes in cardiac sympathetic activity by measuring ambulatory PEP feasible even in large epidemiological samples.     

Acquired ‘theory of mind'' impairments following stroke

The ability to attribute thoughts and feelings to self and others (‘theory of mind') has been hypothesised to have an innate neural basis and a dedicated cognitive mechanism. Evidence in favour of this proposal has come from autism; a brain-based developmental disorder which appears to be characterised by impaired theory of mind, despite sometimes good general reasoning skills/IQ. To date no case of specific acquired theory of mind impairment has been reported. The present study examined theory of mind in adults who had suffered right hemisphere stroke, a group known to show pragmatic and social difficulties. In one study using story materials and two using cartoons, patients' understanding of materials requiring attribution of mental states (e.g. ignorance, false belief) was significantly worse than their understanding of non-mental control materials. Data from healthy elderly subjects, and a small group of left hemisphere patients (who received the tasks in modified form), suggest that this impairment on mental state tasks is not a function of task difficulty. The findings support the notion of a dedicated cognitive system for theory of mind, and suggest a role for the healthy right hemisphere in the attribution of mental states.     

Maternal care and attachment security in ordinary and emergency contexts

One of the foundations of attachment theory is the notion that early care plays a key role in determining the quality of child-caregiver attachment relationships. Studies have consistently shown relations between maternal sensitivity and infant security. Further research is required to resolve issues arising from modest correlations, focus on research in stressful as opposed to ordinary contexts, and questions about the generality of results across cultures and social contexts and about the context specificity of caregiving behavior. This article addressed these issues in 2 studies of child care in home and hospital contexts. Q-sort scores derived from extended naturalistic observations were used. Results are discussed in terms of links between methodology and effect sizes, the generality of links between maternal care and child security, the need for further research on caregiving in ordinary and emergency situations, and the context sensitivity of maternal behavior.     

Hormones and Cognition: Current Concepts and Issues in Neuropsychology

This article provides an extensive and comprehensive review of the effects of hormones on cognition. Studies detailing specific neurocognitive functions affected by variation in hormone levels across the life span are presented. Dysregulation of hormone levels is considered from models of both normal and diseased functioning. Patterns of cognitive dysfunction are described for a range of syndromes involving the neuroendocrine system, and evidence of specific neurophysiological mechanisms that can account for these findings is outlined. This review includes discussion of treatment outcomes and the permanency of endocrine-related cognitive dysfunction. The authors present a set of guidelines for clinical neuropsychologists to use for assessment of patients with neuroendocrine system dysfunction. Clinical and methodological issues in research and treatment settings are discussed.     

Task Decomposition Through Competition in a Modular Connectionist Architecture: The What and Where Vision Tasks

A novel modular connectionist architecture is presented in which the networks composing the architecture compete to learn the training patterns. An outcome of the competition is that different networks learn different training patterns and, thus, learn to compute different functions. The architecture performs task decomposition in the sense that it learns to partition a task into two or more functionally independent tasks and allocates distinct networks to learn each task. In addition, the architecture tends to allocate to each task the network whose topology is most appropriate to that task. The architecture's performance on “what” and “where” vision tasks is presented and compared with the performance of two multilayer networks. Finally, it is noted that function decomposition is an underconstrained problem, and, thus, different modular architectures may decompose a function in different ways. A desirable decomposition can be achieved if the architecture is suitably restricted in the types of functions that it can compute. Finding appropriate restrictions is possible through the application of domain knowledge. A strength of the modular architecture is that its structure is well suited for incorporating domain knowledge.     

REVIEWS

Feminism and Addiction, Claudia Bepko (Ed.). New York.
Feminist Perspectives on Addictions, Nan Van Den Bergh (Ed.). New York.
Engendered Lives, Ellyn Kaschak. New York.
Seldom Seen, Rarely Heard: Women's Place in Psychology, Jams Bohan (Ed.).
Still Loved by the Sun: A Rape Survivor's Journal, Migael Scherer. New York.