Requiem for “schizophrenia”

In this article a brief overview of the treatment of chronic psychosis for the last two centuries is covered, with particular emphasis on many scientifically demonstrated causes of chronic organic psychosis and their medically successful treatment, including recent neurotransmitter manipulations. With respect for the important contributions of Bleuler, the term “schizophrenic” is considered as an unscientific and unprovable nosological construct, which has hampered the successful resolution of chronic psychosis and has outlived its usefulness in the lexicon of modern psychiatry.     

Children's strategies for controlling affective responses to aversive social experience

It was hypothesized that one mechanism of self-control that children develop is the strategic capacity to select the experiences they encounter. This hypothesis led to the prediction that children would deal with certain aversive social experiences by seeking out or taking advantage of opportunities for nurturant experiences. Young children were exposed to an aversive social experience in which they received less nurturance than a peer, a positive experience in which they received more nurturance, or a neutral experience in which nurturance was equal. Subsequently, an opportunity was provided for children to control the length of time they watched a highly nurturant television program. As predicted, boys experiencing an aversive social encounter increased the length of time they exposed themselves to the nurturant television show, and their level of reduced positive affect was related to how long they watched the nurturant content, further supporting the interpretation that they did so in response to their own affective state. Girls did not adopt the strategy of self-exposure to nurturant television but did appear to engage in self-distraction during the aversive social experience. Despite the apparent use of control strategies, there was no indication that these strategies were effective for the amelioration of reduced positive affect resulting from the aversive social experience. Discussion focuses on the sex differences observed in the adoption of strategic behavior and factors contributing to the ineffectiveness of the control strategies. A general model is proposed for personal and environmental factors requisite for the selection, employment, and effectiveness of strategies to control experiences and their affective consequences.     

Rater information acquisition processes: Tracing the effects of prior knowledge, performance level, search constraint, and memory demand

Research on performance ratings has tended to neglect factors affecting raters' acquisition of ratee performance information. The present research examined the dynamic effects of this rater information acquisition process. Study 1 examined the effects of prior ratee knowledge (familiarity) and ratee performance level on subsequent acquisition of ratee performance information under varying levels of constraint. After exposure to prior ratee information, raters acquired additional information concerning a set of ratees using a computer controlled information board procedure. The results indicated significant effects on the amount of search for prior knowledge, search constraint, and the interaction between prior knowledge and performance level. Study 2 extended the research by including a memory component (time delay) between the exposure to prior information and subsequent search. Results were congruent with Study 1. They indicated significant main effects on the amount of search for prior knowledge, ratee performance level, search constraint, and on the interaction between prior knowledge and performance level. In addition, the results indicated a significant interaction between memory demand and prior knowledge. Implications of these results, limitations, and extensions of this research approach are discussed.     

How do group meetings make a community Therapeutic?

Summary Following an abrupt shift from a therapeutic community with emphasis on group meetings to a hierarchical medical model on a mental hospital floor, disturbed patients required extensive individual nursing care. This increased work load for the nursing staff resulted in admissions having to be limited to the rare cases who needed little or no nursing care. As patients were discharged, the vacancy rate went up to approximately 20% for a week and remained high for another two weeks. Nursing staff-patient relations deteriorated.Subsequently, it was possible to resume the emphasis on the groups of a therapeutic community and to observe the contrast. The experience showed how groups can effect and support a therapeutic community. It clarified some of the mechanisms by which groups positively affected disturbed patients. Some mechanisms by which the staff, community, and group meetings favorably influenced the nursing staff-patient relationship and intrastaff communications became clear also.     

Perceptual differences between reading handwritten and typed words

Perceptual differences between reading handwritten and typed words were investigated in a series of three experiments. In the first two experiments, a Sternberg memory search paradigm was employed, with either typed or handwritten probes. The reaction time to classify handwritten probes was slower than for typed probes, but memory search took place at the same rate for both kinds of probe. In the third experiment, the latencies for naming the written and typed words differed by the same amount of time as the overall difference between the same stimuli in the memory search task. These findings indicate that only perceptual processes are differentially affected by the differences between typed and written words. Furthermore, in these tasks the independence of encoding and memory search makes it unlikely that processes of perceptual indentification use expectations or analysis-by-synthesis based on the information in immediate memory