Linking work: from violence to subjectivization

For certain adolescents, the eruption of puberty sometimes carries the risk of a break in their psychic life: a break in their impression of continuity in existence, in the investment of their inner world, and in their relation to external objects. When these adolescents are unable to tolerate the discontinuity that accompanies the experience of adolescence, this can lead to pathologies of compulsive breaking away, depression, violence, or psychosis. Linking work, on the contrary, enables adolescence to become a transforming process on the psychic level and contributes to the dynamic character of the therapeutic process.     

Disaster mental health services following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing: modifying approaches to address terrorism

How did the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing differ from prior disasters and what implications did it have for disaster mental health services and service delivery? The federal disaster mental health approach in this country developed largely out of experiences with natural disasters. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing differed in several important ways, including the large number of human casualties, higher rates of psychopathology, and an extended period of concern due to the criminal investigation and trials, which suggested the need to consider modifications in the program. Outreach was extensive, but psychiatric morbidity of direct victims was greater than that of victims of natural disasters, emphasizing the need for attention to the triage and referral process. Other concerns that warrant consideration include practices related to record keeping and program evaluation.     

Evidence for several components of word familiarity

Familiarity with a word can be divided into two main components: familiarity with the form of the word (due to both its lexicality and its specific form) and familiarity with its meaning. In this study, ratings of familiarity were compared for words whose meaning was unknown to participants (UM words), for words of known meaning (KM words), and for unknown words (U words). Linguistic and experiential frequencies were equivalent. Rated familiarity was lower for UM than KM words and even lower for U words. Next, we built pseudowords from these stimuli by changing one letter and submitted them to two familiarity rating tasks that differed in the nature of the additional stimuli: either only nonwords or nonwords plus words. It was assumed that familiarity ratings would be lower for pseudowords built from UM words than for pseudowords built from KM words. The data were consistent with this assumption, and ratings depended on the initial categories of stimuli. These results support the view that usual word familiarity has two components, familiarity with form and familiarity with meaning, and a double source, processing of word form and processing of word meaning. The full set of these materials and norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Index to Volume 29

Other Index

Index to Volume 29     

The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: The case of bilinguals

It has been known for some time that the recognition of a noun is affected by the gender marking, such as masculine or feminine, that is carried by a preceding word. In this study, we used auditory naming to examine how early and late English-French bilinguals react to gender marking when processing French. The early bilinguals showed clear facilitation and inhibition effects, but the late bilinguals were totally insensitive to gender marking, whether congruent or incongruent. The results are discussed in terms of current accounts of gender processing as well as age of acquisition and regular use of the gender-marking language.     

Realism in energy transition processes: an example from Bohmian quantum mechanics

In this paper we study in details a system of two weakly coupled harmonic oscillators from the point of view of Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. This system may be viewed as a simple model for the interaction between a photon and a photodetector. We obtain exact solutions for the general case. We then compute approximate solutions for the case where one oscillator is initially in its first excited state (a single photon) reaching the other oscillator in its ground state (the photodetector). The approximate solutions represent the state of both oscillators after the interaction, which is not an eigenstate of the individual hamiltonians for each oscillator, and therefore the energies for each oscillator do not exist in the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. We use the approximate solutions that we obtained to compute Bohmian trajectories and to study the energy transfer between the oscillators. We conclude that, even using the Bohmian view, the energy of each individual oscillator is not well defined, as the nonlocal quantum potential is not negligible even after the coupling is turned off.     

Modulation of stress consequences by hippocampal monoaminergic, glutamatergic and nitrergic neurotransmitter systems

Several findings relate the hippocampal formation to the behavioural consequences of stress. It contains a high concentration of corticoid receptors and undergoes plastic modifications, including decreased neurogenesis and cellular remodelling, following stress exposure. Various major neurotransmitter systems in the hippocampus are involved in these effects. Serotonin (5-HT) seems to exert a protective role in the hippocampus and attenuates the behavioural consequences of stress by activating 5-HT1A receptors in this structure. These effects may mediate the therapeutic actions of several antidepressants. The role of noradrenaline is less clear and possibly depends on the specific hippocampal region (dorsal vs. ventral). The deleterious modifications induced in the hippocampus by stress might involve a decrease in neurotrophic factors such as brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) following glutamate N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor activation. In addition to glutamate, nitric oxide (NO) could also be related to these effects. Systemic and intra-hippocampal administration of nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitors attenuates stress-induced behavioural consequences. The challenge for the future will be to integrate results related to these different neurotransmitter systems in a unifying theory about the role of the hippocampus in mood regulation, depressive disorder and antidepressant effects.     

Noradrenergic control of odor recognition in a nonassociative olfactory learning task in the mouse

The present study examined the influence of pharmacological modulations of the locus coeruleus noradrenergic system on odor recognition in the mouse. Mice exposed to a nonrewarded olfactory stimulation (training) were able to memorize this odor and to discriminate it from a new odor in a recall test performed 15 min later. At longer delays (30 or 60 min), the familiar odor was no longer retained, and both stimuli were perceived as new ones. Following a post-training injection of the alpha(2)-adrenoceptor antagonist dexefaroxan, the familiar odor was still remembered 30 min after training. In contrast, both the alpha(2)-adrenoceptor agonist UK 14304 and the noradrenergic neurotoxin DSP-4 prevented the recognition of the familiar odor 15 min after the first exposure. Noradrenaline release in the olfactory bulb, assessed by measurement of the extracellular noradrenaline metabolite normetanephrine, was increased by 62% following dexefaroxan injection, and was decreased by 38%-44% after treatment with UK 14304 and DSP-4. Performance of mice in the recall test was reduced by a post-training injection of the beta-adrenoceptor antagonist propranolol or the alpha(1)-antagonist prazosin, thus implicating a role for beta- and alpha(1)-adrenoceptors in the facilitating effects of noradrenaline on short-term olfactory recognition in this model.