Precise Worlds for Certain Minds: An Ecological Perspective on the Relational Self in Autism

Topoi - Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many...     

Antecedents of fathers’ perception of child behavior at child age 12 months

This study investigates whether fathers’ adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and attachment style reported during pregnancy predict fathers’ perception of child behavior assessed 12 months postpartum, expressed by the Parenting Stress Index (PSI), Child Domain. Prospective fathers (N = 835) were recruited to “The Little in Norway (LiN) study” (Moe & Smith) at nine well-baby clinics in Norway, with data collection composed of five time points during pregnancy and two time points postpartum (6 and 12 months). The main analyses included linear regression, path-analysis modeling, and intraclass correlation based on mixed effects modeling. First, linear regression analyses showed that neither fathers’ ACE nor attachment style significantly predicted perceived child behavior postpartum directly. Furthermore, path analyses showed that ACE and less secure attachment style (especially avoidant attachment) measured early in pregnancy strongly predicted negatively perceived child behavior, mediated by fathers’ mental health symptoms during pregnancy and partner disharmony postpartum. Second, intraclass correlation analyses showed that fathers’ perceived child behavior showed substantial stability between 6 and 12 months postpartum. Family interventions beginning in pregnancy may be most beneficial given that fathers’ early experiences and perceptions of attachment in pregnancy were associated with later partner disharmony and stress.     

Where and when to look: Sequential effects at the millisecond level

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Learning and imitating a complex motor action requires to visually follow complex movements, but conscious perception seems too slow for such tasks....     

Effects of fluprazine (DU 27716) upon aggressive and sexual behavior of testosterone-treated female rats

Female rats, chronically treated with Testosterone Propionate (TP), were injected with Fluprazine (DU 27716) or saline and tested for social aggression, masculine and feminine sexual behavior. Fluprazine-treated females were less aggressive than saline-treated females, as indicated by a shift from offensive to less offensive parameters of aggression. At the same time, mounting in Fluprazine-treated females was almost totally abolished, both in aggression tests and in tests for sexual behavior. Feminine sexual responses increased during aggressive encounters but were slightly inhibited when females were confronted with sexually active males. Females treated with Fluprazine and tested for mounting with a receptive female showed a substantial increase of offensive aggression directed at the receptive stimulus female. It is concluded that Fluprazine does not selectively inhibit offensive aggression in TP-treated female rats.     

Ego development and the ethics of care and justice: the relations among them revisited

This study examined the links among ego development and the ethics of care and justice in 144 Norwegian men and women, 15 to 48 years old, taking into consideration age, sex, education, and verbal intelligence. As expected, the relationship between Loevinger's model of ego development and care-based moral reasoning as measured with Skoe's Ethic of Care Interview (ECI) was significantly stronger than the one between ego development and justice as measured with Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT). Both ethics correlated significantly with verbal ability. Analyses showed that beyond its overlap with verbal intelligence, the variance shared between the ECI and ego development was substantial. By contrast, when verbal intelligence was controlled, the DIT was not significantly related to ego development or to the care ethic.     

Learning subjective health complaints

Symptom episodes often show a spatio-temporal structure, that is, they occur in a specific context for a certain duration. Repeated experiences may therefore be construed as associative learning trials, in which context elements are turned into predictive cues, triggering anticipatory processes conducive to subjective health complaints. A series of experiments, using inhalations of air enriched with CO2 and external (odors) or internal (mental images) stimuli as cues, is discussed to show that subjective health complaints may occur upon presenting the cue alone. Learned symptoms may be unrelated to bodily responses and easily generalize to new related cues. Better learning occurs to cues with a negative affective valence and in participants scoring high for negative affectivity. Our findings are relevant to the understanding of medically unexplained ("functional") syndromes and the poor relationship between objective and subjective health indicators in general.     

A Rorschach study of oral dependence in alcoholics and depressives

Despite the strong association between alcoholism and orality in psychoanalytic theory, use of the Rorschach Inkblot Test to provide empirical support for such a link has yielded decidedly mixed results. However, Masling's Rorschach Oral-Dependency (ROD) scale has shown twice that people with alcoholism give more oral-dependent responses on the Rorschach than matched comparison groups (Bertrand & Masling, 1969; Weiss & Masling, 1970), which is supportive of classical analytic theory. In this study, we investigated alcohol groups, depression groups, and "normal" undergraduates with the ROD scale and found that the 2 clinical groups produced higher ROD scores than the undergraduates. In addition, recent studies by Duberstein and Talbot (1993) and Fowler, Hilsenroth, and Handler (1996) provide evidence for an object relations model of dependency that suggests that a balance between anaclitic dependence and complete independence, in which dependency needs are acknowledged but are not overwhelming, is most adaptive. This model of dependency was evaluated; it was found that a simple difference in group means provided a better fit with the data, although some evidence of an object relations model also was found. Finally, Rorschach and MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) levels of general defensiveness and primary process manifestations in Rorschach content were investigated to assess whether participants were responding defensively to the testing and whether there were any differences in the nature of oral-dependent responses between the clinical groups.     

Personally familiar proper names are relatively successfully processed in the human right hemisphere; or, the missing link

Responding to our abstract in Brain and Language (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 1999), which proposed that famous proper nouns are successfully processed in both cerebral hemispheres, Schweinberger, Landgrebe, Mohr, and Kaufmann (2001) claimed that the "link" between personal names and the right hemisphere is "illusory." Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001) further described six experimental studies in which LVF/RH recognition of famous proper nouns was influenced by task conditions and stimulus familiarity. Here presenting two more experiments performed to explore the refutation presented by Schweinberger et al., this article confirms an ability of the right hemisphere to recognize famous proper nouns and explains why appropriate stimulus development and task conditions are essential in furthering our understanding of the role of the right hemisphere in processing personal relevance.     

Effect of speech task on intelligibility in dysarthria: a case study of Parkinson's disease

This study assessed intelligibility in a dysarthric patient with Parkinson's disease (PD) across five speech production tasks: spontaneous speech, repetition, reading, repeated singing, and spontaneous singing, using the same phrases for all but spontaneous singing. The results show that this speaker was significantly less intelligible when speaking spontaneously than in the other tasks. Acoustic analysis suggested that relative intensity and word duration were not independently linked to intelligibility, but dysfluencies (from perceptual analysis) and articulatory/resonance patterns (from acoustic records) were related to intelligibility in predictable ways. These data indicate that speech production task may be an important variable to consider during the evaluation of dysarthria. As speech production efficiency was found to vary with task in a patient with Parkinson's disease, these results can be related to recent models of basal ganglia function in motor performance.