Processing of locatives “in,” “on,” and “under” by aphasic patients: An analysis of the regression hypothesis

The present study investigated the comprehension of aphasic subjects as to locative prepositions “in,” “on,” and “under.” Patients had to locate a movable object with reference to a stationary referential object in order to achieve the spatial relations requested under oral instructions. The influence of two types of contextual relations between the objects in each stimulus pair on the subjects' performances was examined. Spatial relations were biased by the conventional knowledge of the most normal relationship between the two elements in everyday life in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2, perceptivomotor constraints constituted the contextual bias. Analyzing the patients' responses in the light of developmental strategies did not lend support to the regression hypothesis. Broca's aphasics were sensitive to the two contextual factors investigated; Wernickes' performances were affected only by the perceptivomotor contextual bias. The results are discussed with reference to earlier studies on the differential syntactical comprehension skills of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics in sentence-picture matching tasks and production tasks.     

Structural complexity of motor patterns: A study on reaction times and movement times of handwritten letters

This study investigates the effects of psychomotor complexity on latencies for beginning to write single letters and numerals, and on times taken to complete the first strokes of letters and numerals. An experiment measured simple and choice reaction times for writing homogeneous graphemes (i.e., letters or numerals made up of similar strokes) and for writing heterogeneous graphemes (i.e., characters made up of dissimilar strokes). It was assumed that the motor programme for writing a letter is retrieved from long-term memory and briefly held, until it is used, in a short-term buffer store. The experiment examined the hypothesis that it is more difficult to read out homogeneous than heterogeneous stroke-structures from this store. For three out of four allographic grapheme pairs, homogeneous graphemes required longer initiation times or longer movement times for completion of the first stroke than did heterogeneous graphemes. These results are discussed in relation to recent findings on motor programming based on the use of reaction-time paradigms.     

Openness versus intellect: Much ado about nothing?

McCrae (1990) has argued that Openness to Experience is a fundamental dimension of personality that is not well represented among English-language trait adjectives. Presumably, then, studies of personality adjectives will inevitably fail to capture at least one fundamental personality dimension. I argue that the language does contain many adjectives referring to Openness, and that recent studies of the language of personality reveal a large factor clearly related to both Openness and Intellect. These studies support both the Openness construct and the questionnaire version of the five basic factors. Lexical and questionnaire methods appear to converge on a single structural framework for basic personality traits.     

Intergroup competition and its effect on intragroup and intergroup relations

Seventy-two male subjects from lower technical schools were divided into groups of three and assigned to three conditions in which they expected to work together in competition with another group, to work together but independently of the other group, or did not anticipate to work together at all. Subjects who anticipated working together showed a more favorable attitude toward their group and its members than subjects who did not. Moreover, actual social interaction increased in-group attractiveness. Intergroup competition led to a more differentiated leadership structure and a greater consensus about the distribution of influence in the group. Contrary to our predictions, intergroup competition produced no greater in-group solidarity, nor any over-evaluation of the group's product. Low influence persons felt comparatively more positive about their group even before they actually had the opportunity to work together. An attempt was made to relate this finding to the ordinal position of the low status figure, his affiliative tendencies under stress, and his greater social dependence.     

Validation of the sensation scale,a measure of subjective physiological responses to alcohol

The Sensation Scale was originally constructed to measure the subjective experience of physiological changes following alcohol consumption. Reduction of the original scale of 31 variables on the basis of face validity resulted in six ‘factors’ comprising 26 variables and one ‘other’ factor. These sortings are shown to have good interrater reliability. Furthermore, evidence is presented from two experiments that five of the six factors discriminated between nonalcoholic male subjects who drank either a beverage containing a moderate dose of alcohol or a nonalcoholic beverage.     

Alcohol and volitional control on affect/sensation,cognitive and perceptual-motor measures

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the hypothesis that one factor underlying the effects of non-pharrnacological variables on a given response to alcohol is the ability to exert control over that behaviour while intoxicated. Subjects were 54 male non-alcoholic drinkers who were randomly assigned to one of six independent groups created by the factorial combination of the independent variables dose (placebo, low, or moderate) and instructions (no instructions or ‘act sober’). The main dependent measures were cognitive and motor task performance and self-reported affect and physiological sensations. Results showed that alcohol strongly influenced motor performance and self-reported physiological sensations but had only minor effects on affect and cognitive performance. Subjects who consumed the low dose of alcohol were able to counteract only alcohol's effects on reaction time and feelings of egotism. Despite the overall strong effects of alcohol on their behaviour, subjects in the act sober condi tions perceived that they were able to counteract the drug's effects, and this resul t was most pronounced among subjects who drank the low dose of alcohol. The implications of these findings for the effects of non-pharmacological factors on responses to alcohol and for the prevention and treatment of alcohol problems are discussed.