Diary reports on emotional experiences in the onset of a psychosocial transition: becoming drug‐free

The process of becoming drug free is viewed as a psychosocial transition in the life of drug addicts. A specific form of treatment of heroin addiction within residential communities is based on the importance of interpersonal relationships for change. Well‐being of 65 drug addicts during the first 2 weeks in a residential community is explored using a time‐sampling diary which was completed four times a day. The influence of subjects' history, situational context, and motive activation on well‐being and emotions is investigated. Results show that well‐being and emotions differ mainly according to subjects' history, but not — at least at the beginning of treatment within the community — according to situations. This is interpreted as a ‘state of shock’ in the new environment and highlights the necessity for special individual care for subjects with a long drug career. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cognitive skills among Nepalese child labourers

The cognitive skills of 61 Nepalese 10–14‐year‐old working children with at least 2 years working experience (WE) were compared to two groups of children, beginners (N=29) with less than 1 year of WE and a school group (N = 104) matched for age and ethnic background. All the children (N=194) were tested by the Bender test, WISC‐R for Arithmetic, Digit Span, and the Word Fluency test. The main results showed that the school group was better in all the cognitive tests, except for Digit Span Backwards, where the working group had the highest average score. The second main finding shows no major differences in cognitive skills between the beginner and working groups. However, the work experience as such was related to decreasing visuoconstructive skills and improving Digit Span Forward scores. This suggests that work in the carpet factories seem to develop the verbal short‐term memory functions of the children, while their visuoconstructive skills decrease by work experience. The third main finding showed that the boys were better in arithmetic skills than the girls when they had long working experience.     

Organic Unities, Non-Trade-Off, and the Additivity of Intrinsic Value

Whether or not intrinsic valueis additively measurable is often thought todepend on the truth or falsity of G. E. Moore'sprinciple of organic unities. I argue that thetruth of this principle is, contrary to received opinion, compatible with additivemeasurement. However, there are other veryplausible evaluative claims that are moredifficult to combine with the additivity ofintrinsic value. A plausible theory of the goodshould allow that there are certain kinds ofstates of affairs whose intrinsic value cannotbe outweighed by any number of states ofcertain other, less valuable, kinds. Such``non-trade-off' cannot reasonably be explainedin terms of organic unities, and it can bereconciled with the additivity thesis only ifwe are prepared to give up some traditionalclaims about the nature of intrinsic value.     

Silent Speech Activates Prefrontal Cortical Regions Asymmetrically, as Well as Speech-Related Areas in the Dominant Hemisphere

Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was measured simultaneously over the right and left hemispheres by 2 × 32 detectors in 30 healthy volunteers with a two-dimensional iv xenon-133 technique, during (1) rest and during (2) audible and (3) silent counting (101, 102, . . .). Mean hemisphere CBF increased significantly in both hemispheres during the activations.Audible speechactivated rolandic and temporo-parietal regions mainly on the right side. This pattern covers auditory and para-auditory as well as motor (tongue/larynx) regions. Most likely those regions are involved in auditory feedback and voice control.Silent speech(internal speech) gave a clearly different activation pattern involving (1) left-sided regions related to speech perception and speech motor control (including the SMA) and (2) a right dorsolateral prefrontal area that may be related to attention mechanisms. The silent speech pattern appears to demonstrate aspects of internal (cognitive) feedback activity in which prefrontal cortical regions are activated significantly.Audibleandsilentcounting may represent two principally different types of cerebral feedback systems, one for overt sensory–motor activity and one for a pure internal cognitive feedback.     

A comparative study of association measures

This paper discusses the general problem of measuring the association between an independent nominal-scaled variableX and a dependent variableY whose scale of measurement may be interval, ordinal or nominal. The theoretical foundations of a wide range of asymmetric association measures are discussed. Some new measures are also suggested. Fifteen of these association measures, some previously suggested, some new, are singled out for a computer-assisted numerical study in which we compute the value actually taken by each measure under a wide variety of conditions. This comparative study provides important insights into the behavior of the measures.     

Properties of changing patterns evoking visually perceived oscillation

The aim of this study was to identify some properties of changing proximal stimulus patterns which favor perceived oscillation. By using artificially generated stimulus patterns, it was found that the amount of changes associated with a certain direction of rotation should be small and the rate of these changes low if perceived oscillation was to appear. Great or swift changes were utilized by the visual system to determine perceived direction of rotation, and oscillation was not then reported. It was further found that patterns lacking straight edges perpendicular to the axis of rotation, or with this axis displaced from the middle of the pattern, and patterns with a gradient of texture density were perceived to oscillate more than similar patterns without these properties. Perceived oscillation of ellipses was discussed, and it was concluded that perceived oscillation was a consequence of perceived orientation, which is determined by stimulus properties.     

Direct comparison of auditory implicit memory tests

In this experiment, we examined the degree to which four implicit tests and two explicit tests, all involving auditory presentation, were sensitive to the perceptual characteristics of the stimuli presented during study. Presenting stimuli visually decreased priming in all the implicit memory tests, relative to auditory presentation. However, changing voice between study and test decreased priming only in the implicit memory tests requiring identification of words degraded by noise or by low-pass filtering, but not in those tests requiring generation from word portions (stems and fragments). Modality effects without voice effects were observed in cued recall, but the opposite pattern of results (voice effects without modality effects) was obtained in recognition. The primary new finding is the demonstration that auditory memory tests, both explicit and implicit, differ in their sensitivity to the perceptual information encoded during study.     

Proving theorems of the second order Lambek calculus in polynomial time

In the Lambek calculus of order 2 we allow only sequents in which the depth of nesting of implications is limited to 2. We prove that the decision problem of provability in the calculus can be solved in time polynomial in the length of the sequent. A normal form for proofs of second order sequents is defined. It is shown that for every proof there is a normal form proof with the same axioms. With this normal form we can give an algorithm that decides provability of sequents in polynomial time.The author was sponsored by project NF 102/62–356 (Structural and Semantic Parallels in Natural Languages and Programming Languages), funded by the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Research (NWO).Presented byCecylia Rauszer