The effects of right hemisphere damage on the pragmatic interpretation of conversational remarks

The ability to interpret conversational utterances was assessed in a group of 12 male patients with unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) and 12 non-brain-damaged, age-matched male control subjects. Subjects listened to short vignettes which described both the affective tone of the relationship between a speaker and an actor, and the actor's performance on a task. Each vignette concluded with the speaker characterizing the actor's performance. In half of the items, the speaker's utterance was literally true; in the other half, the utterance was literally false and invited a nonliteral interpretation. Results showed no appreciable differences in the performance of control subjects and RHD patients when interpreting literally true utterances. In contrast, the two groups differed reliably when interpreting the pragmatic intent of nonliteral utterances: Control subjects used information about both the actor's performance and the speaker-actor relationship, while RHD patients demonstrated difficulty in using the information about the speaker-actor relationship. Results have implications for patients' understanding of essential elements of conversations, such as characters' internal states and their intentions in employing different forms of literal and nonliteral language.     

ANALYZING ALERTNESS AMONG PEOPLE WITH PROFOUND MULTIPLE DISABILITIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR PROVISION OF TRAINING

We investigated whether variations in alertness among individuals with profound multiple disabilities affected subsequent responsiveness to training programs. Three experiments were conducted involving 5 people. In Experiment 1, results indicated that alertness of 3 individuals increased with provision of skill-acquisition training programs. Results also indicated no predictive relationship between alertness levels prior to training and subsequent responsiveness to training. Experiment 2 replicated results of Experiment 1 with 2 participants from Experiment 1 and an additional participant. Results of Experiment 2 also indicated that the increased alertness levels accompanying provision of training were not a function of the participants simply being in an inactive environment prior to training. Results of Experiment 3 indicated that alertness of an additional participant increased through provision of another training intervention, involving a systematic preference assessment. Responses during the preference assessment appeared to be unrelated to previously existing alertness levels. These findings suggest the need for caution when considering the withholding of scheduled training because an individual appears to be nonalert.     

Responding maintained under fixed-interval and fixed-time schedules of electric shock presentation

Following initial histories under a schedule of electric shock postponement, lever pressing in squirrel monkeys was maintained under fixed-interval and fixed-time schedules of electric shock presentation. No difference in either rate or pattern of responding was obtained when these schedules were presented as components of a multiple schedule. When they were presented singly for long periods of time, the fixed-interval schedule consistently maintained a higher response rate than the fixed-time schedule. The pattern of responding under both schedules was similar, typically consisting of a pause at the beginning of each interval followed by either a steady or a positively accelerating rate of responding. The results suggest that the response-shock dependency is of critical importance in the maintenance of high rates of responding under schedules of electric shock presentation, and support the general view that such responding may be conceptualized as operant behavior under control of many of the same variables that control responding under comparable schedules of food or water reinforcement.     

Family Secrets:

Family secrets are examined in a two-part article. Part I explores the dynamics of secrets in the relational context. Terminology is proposed for different types of family secrets as well as for different roles within the relational context. Guidelines for identifying family secrets are presented, and typical patterns accompanying or underlying secrets are explored. Different stances toward secrets are discussed, with particular emphasis on ethical issues. Finally, individual and relational consequences of secrets are proposed. Part II extends this discussion to the management of family secrets in marital and family therapy. Ethical and strategic dilemmas facing the therapist are examined as are consequences of secrets in treatment. A particular therapeutic stance is recommended and illustrated with examples of both reparative and preventive applications.     

A Single Intervention: A Visit to the Family

The following letter is reported unchanged except for disguised names. Concern with repairing disrupted relationships of adult members of a family with their own parents has been a matter of growing interest to a number of family therapists; Bowen (1), Boszormenyi-Nagy (2), and Framo (3), among others have stressed the importance of sending family members back to their families of origin. This report makes no effort to formulate the process in any particular theoretical framework (i.e., as reestablishing connectedness after an “emotional cut-off” or rebalancing a ledger of fairness, or whatever) but is intended only to illustrate the kind of outcome one may hope for in prescribing such a maneuver. It is offered simply as a clinical note. The letter needs little prefatory explication. Mr. Jack Newburgher had been a patient in psychoanalytic treatment for four years, with a quite successful outcome. On two occasions in the course of his therapy a joint session had been held with Mr. Newburgher and his wife, Muriel, when changes in his behavior had precipitated crises in the marital relationship. His therapy had terminated about two years before the visit referred to in the letter. Mr. Newburgher had called and asked for a joint consultation with Muriel about an acute family problem they were experiencing. Some — not all — of the background material was described, not nearly as coherently as it is reported in Muriel's letter, but in sufficient detail to make it plain that she was in distress about having to withdraw completely from her parents and that their family was in disarray as a consequence of her distress. The acuteness of the emotional disturbance, against a background of a lifelong adversary relationship between Muriel and her father and a history of ten years of illness on her fathers' part, suggested that the distress was the product of Muriel's anxiety and guilt over a decision to cut herself off completely from her parents. As a consequence, Muriel was urged to visit her family of origin, with the caveat that she might indeed discover them to be malignantly self-centered people indifferent to their effect on her and her family, but that she would at least have the gratification of having tried. The reference to “speaking French” was to the therapist having suggested that, on the other hand, she might find that her parents expressed their feelings in a different modality from her definitions of how feelings should be expressed, much as though their native tongue were French and she were insisting that they must speak to her in English.     

A mutual inductance shocker

A simple dc shock-generating device is described. The principle of operation relies upon the mutual inductance effect between the primary and secondary coils of a transformer.     

The Parent's Nazi Past and the Dialogue Between the Generations

This paper considers the impact of the Nazi past on the succeeding generation in Germany and on the dialogue between the two generations, using the theoretical framework of the dynamics of delegation — missions entrusted to parents by their children. Those issues became manifest in the course of conjoint family interviews with adolescents and young adults whose parents had been identified with the Nazi past.     

Material, Myth, and Magic: A Cultural Approach to Family Therapy

This paper presents a model for a therapeutic approach to the cultural systems of families. Using anthropologically derived concepts of material and ideational planes of culture, magic, and ritualistic intervention, the inducement of culture change in frozen familial systems is framed in dialectical terms. Four brief case studies are presented describing the systems engaged, the material-ideational rituals employed, and the cultural transformations induced. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some of the theoretical and practical implications of this cultural approach to the family in therapy.     

The roles of self-esteem and self-consciousness in the Wortman-Brehm model of reactance and learned helplessness

The present experiments were designed to study the conditions under which failure would enhance or inhibit subsequent task performance. Based on the theory of Wortman and Brehm (1975), it was expected that small amounts of failure would produce reactance (manifested by improved performance at a subsequent task), whereas large amounts would lead to learned helplessness (i.e., impaired later performance). It was further expected that individual differences in self-esteem and private self-consciousness would serve as moderator variables for the above effects. In Experiment 1, subjects were exposed to either a small amount of failure or no failure before working on an anagrams task. As predicted, subjects high in self-consciousness, who have shown greater reactance arousal in attitude change studies, performed better on the anagrams task than subjects low in self-consciousness in the small-failure condition, but not in the no-failure condition. Further analyses revealed that this Self-Consciousness X Small Failure interaction was attributable to the performance data of the low, but not the high self-esteem subjects. Experiment 2 was designed to replicate and extend these results. Subjects were pretreated with either a small amount of failure, an extended amount of failure, or no failure before working on the anagrams task. A significant Self-Esteem X Helplessness Training interaction emerged. Relative to the no-failure condition, in which the two self-esteem groups did not differ, low self-esteem participants (low SEs) performed marginally better than did high self-esteem individuals (high SEs) in the small-failure condition but significantly worse than high SEs in the extended-failure condition. The effect of private self-consciousness was considerably weaker in this study, possibly because the sample included few low SEs (who are especially influenced by self-focused attention) who were also relatively low in self-consciousness. Questionnaire data from Experiment 2 were consistent with the notion that enhanced performance reflected reactance, whereas impaired performance signified helplessness.