Chronic Stress as a Mediator of Acute Stress: The Case of Hurricane Hugo1

This study explored one mechanism through which acute disaster stress (injury, life threat, property damage, loss) may produce lasting psychological distress (depression, anxiety, somatization, hostility). More specifically, the study examined the mediating roles of seven domains of chronic stress (marital, parental, filial, financial, occupational, ecological, physical) within a sample of 930 disaster victims and controls. The results provided strong support for the hypothesis that chronic stress mediates the long-term effects of acute disaster stress on psychological distress. The main effects of loss, though limited in strength, were completely explained by victims’ higher financial, marital, filial, and physical stress. The effects of injury, though quite strong, were largely mediated by these same domains of chronic stress. Likewise, the effects of life threat were largely mediated by all these domains plus ecological stress. A mediational model was not appropriate for understanding the consequences of property damage because it did not exhibit a main effect on psychological distress.     

STIMULUS (INSTRUCTIONAL) FADING DURING EXTINCTION OF SELF-INJURIOUS ESCAPE BEHAVIOR

Three individuals with developmental disabilities were exposed to a series of assessment conditions to identify the source of reinforcement for their self-injurious behavior. In each case, self-injury occurred most often in instructional (demand) situations containing a brief time-out from the task contingent on self-injury, indicating that the behavior was an escape response (i.e., maintained by negative reinforcement). Treatment was implemented in a multiple baseline across subjects design and consisted of extinction (prevention of escape) plus instructional fading (initial elimination of instructions followed by their gradual reintroduction). Results showed that the combined treatment produced immediate and large reductions in self-injury that were maintained as the frequency of instructions was increased across sessions to match the original baseline rate of presentation. Results of a component analysis conducted with 1 subject suggested that stimulus fading accelerated the behavior-reducing effects of extinction.     

Ritual and vulnerability

Crises are viewed as direct challenges to one's communal patterns of living. The individual response to crisis(-es) is mediated by the grand rituals of the culture. Ritual behaviors are adaptive behaviors. For the religious community, ritual becomes liturgy. Rite-as-liturgy is a profound statement about the meeting of the human and the divine. Ritual behaviors are understood as liturgical and/or sacramental responses to those crises that bring one to the brink of chaos.     

Gibsonian representations and connectionist symbol processing: Prospects for unification

Summary Not long ago the standard view in cognitive science was that representations are symbols in an internal representational system or language of thought and that psychological processes are computations defined over such representations. This orthodoxy has been challenged by adherents of functional analysis and by connectionists. Functional analysis as practiced by Marr is consistent with an analysis of representation that grants primacy to a stands for conception of representation. Connectionism is also compatible with this notion of representation; when conjoined with functional analysis, it provides a means of analyzing psychological systems in term of rules and representations without becoming committed to symbolism. Direct theorists, who rejected the orthodox symbolist conception of representation because it violated their strictures against cognitive mediational mechanisms, should find it possible to accept rules-and-representations and information-processing analyses of the mechanisms of information pickup couched in terms of functional analysis.     

“This project is mad”: Descartes,Derrida, and the notion of philosophical crisis

In “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Derrida maintains that crisis is endemic to philosophy rather than being, as Husserl forcefully argued, a temporary condition that can and must be overcome through the resources of reason. A reflection on the place of madness in Descartes's Meditations serves as the point of departure for demonstrating that Derrida has done an injustice to philosophy; and a comparison of Derrida's views with the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche reveals that Derrida's position in “Cogito and the History of Madness” entails a sacrifice of the notion of responsibility that lies at the center of meaningful historical action.     

Object identification without foveal vision: Evidence from an artificial scotoma paradigm

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the degree to which foveal information is necessary for object identification. To explore this question, we used an artificial moving scotoma paradigm to eliminate a region of a currently viewed display in real time as a function of eye position. Subjects examined linear arrays of four line drawings of objects while their eye movements were recorded. Immediately following each array, a test probe was presented to test the degree to which the subject had identified those objects. Three conditions were compared, one in which a central foveal scotoma was created, one in which an extrafoveal scotoma was created, and a control condition in which the scotoma was absent. The main result was that identification accuracy was very good, but eye-movement behavior was disrupted when a foveal scotoma was present. These results suggest that foveal information is not necessary but is beneficial for perceptual encoding during object identification; the loss of foveal information can be overcome as long as compensatory extrafoveal processing is possible.     

Item-specific interference caused by cue-dependent forgetting

Memory for A-B word pairs (e.g.,child-apple) was tested by a cued recall test (e.g.,child-app__). Showing an A-C “relative” (e.g.,child-bicycle) reduced recall, especially if it was shown recently and was highly accessible (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 3, a relative facilitated recall if it was semantically similar to the target (A-B′:child-cookies) but interfered if it was semantically dissimilar (A-C:child-fever). The best explanation for these results is that the relative primed features that affected the functional retrieval cue, and that interference occurred if the cue did not match the trace for the target (Martin, 1972). In other words, the interference effects are an example of cue-dependent forgetting. Neither blocking nor a discrimination process can account for these findings, although some evidence for a discrimination process has been found with other materials     

Differential Diagnosis in Older Adults: Dementia,Depression, and Delirium

Research shows that misdiagnosis can have particularly damaging consequences in older adults. It is frequently difficult, however, to determine whether observed symptoms are due to aging or to a medical condition. The author examines three common disorders that can be particularly challenging to diagnose in older adults: dementia, depression, and delirium. Three general questions are discussed for each: What are the age-related differences in the disorder's presentation? What medical issues need to be ruled out? What assessment methods are particularly useful in the diagnostic process?