The role of callosal connections in speech prosody

A 39-year-old right-handed woman suffered an aneurysmal hemorrhage damaging the anterior four-fifths of the corpus callosum as shown on MRI. Computer-aided acoustical analyses of fundamental frequency (Fo) contours and durational patterns were performed on emotive and nonemotive utterances at 4 weeks, 4 months, and 1 year postsurgery. The patient read sentences in each of five tones (happy, sad, angry, neutral, questioning) or with emphasis on certain words. She showed little Fo distinction with intended mood at 4 weeks, but her performance improved over time. This improvement in speech production was accompanied by an improvement in perceptual judgments of her intended tone by six normal listeners. Fo patterns characteristic of emphatic stress and question forms were found at all test periods, but again improved with time. Durationally, the patient showed appropriate emotive and nonemotive distinctions on most sentences. These results provide acoustic evidence that interhemispheric connections via the corpus callosum are important to proper Fo programming, especially emotive distinctions. The results suggest that the right hemisphere contributes to Fo programming but, following callosal damage, such programming can later be performed by the left hemisphere.     

An unlearned foreign "accent" in a patient with aphasia

Rarely, aphasics may develop what appears to be a foreign accent, as noted by Monrad-Kr?hn whose Norwegian patient sounded German. We describe a right-handed native American who developed a foreign accent following damage to the left premotor region and white matter anterior to the head of the left caudate nucleus. Her aphasia was of the transcortical motor type. Both she and her parents were born in the USA, she never traveled outside the country and never learned a foreign language. Phonetic analysis of her voice taped prior to the stroke revealed normal speech with a midwestern accent. In contrast, analyses of her current spontaneous speech, repetition, and reading reveal shifts in vowels, e.g., /I/----/i/, /ae/----/a/; increased diphthonigization; and tense speech posture. These features, which were especially frequent in spontaneous speech, probably explain her "accent." Acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency contours of sentences read in different emotional tones revealed a restricted range and variability of the peaks and valleys.     

An evaluation of forced-choice and true-false item formats in personality assessment

The reliabilities and validities of true-false and forced-choice formats in personality assessment were compared. Subjects from college residential units were assigned randomly to groups receiving the Personality Research Form (PRF) in either forced-choice or standard true-false form. Reliabilities were substantially higher for the true-false form. Peer rating validities for each format were in a comparable range, but correlations with self-ratings were higher for the true-false form. Results do not support the contention that a forced-choice format is consistently more valid than a standard format. Subjects well acquainted with ratees manifested more highly differentiated judgments, showed consistently higher validity, but were more prone to show a bias to attribute more salient traits, like dominance and exhibition, to ratees.     

Development of the Family Therapy Enactment Rating Scale

This report describes the development of a new scale designed to establish how therapists intervene and clients respond during effective enactments in family therapy sessions. The Family Therapy Enactment Rating Scale (FTERS) was developed by clinically trained investigators who observed 27 videotaped family therapy sessions and listed therapist interventions and client responses during four phases of enactments: pre-enactment preparation, initiation, facilitation, and closing commentary. Interrater reliabilities for the FTERS were calculated by training 6 undergraduate volunteers to rate independently a sample of 12 enactments. When reliabilities were found to be relatively low, a second study was conducted in which the FTERS was revised and reliabilities were calculated with a different sample of 21 videotaped enactments and a new group of 6 undergraduate raters. Reliability for the FTERS was found to be sufficiently robust to make this measure of therapist interventions and client responses a useful instrument for evaluating what takes place during enactments. Findings on the FTERS were used to offer tentative guidelines for effective initiation and facilitation of enactments in family therapy sessions.     

Internal Consistency and Test-Retest Stability of the Geriatric Depression Scale-Short Form in African American Older Adults

The Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) is one of the most widely used self-rated mood questionnaires for older adults. It is highly correlated with clinical diagnoses of depression and has demonstrated validity across different patient populations. However, the reliability of the GDS among African American older adults remains to be firmly established. In a baseline sample of 401 African American adults age 51 and over, the GDS-15 item short form demonstrates good internal consistency (KR20 = .71). Stability over a 15-month interval in a retest sample of 51 adults is deemed adequate (r = .68). These findings support the use of the GDS-15 item short form as a reliable mood questionnaire among African American older adults.     

Virtual team leadership: The effects of leadership style and communication medium on team interaction styles and outcomes

This study investigated the effects of transformational and transactional leadership styles and communication media on team interaction styles and outcomes. Teams communicated through one of the following three ways: (a) face-to-face, (b) desktop videoconference, or (c) text-based chat. Results indicated that transformational and transactional leadership styles did not affect team interaction styles or outcomes; that the mean constructive interaction score was higher in FTF than videoconference and chat teams, but not significantly higher in videoconference than chat teams; and that teams working in richer communication media did not achieve higher task performance than those communicating through less rich media. Finally, mean team cohesion scores were higher in FTF and videoconference than chat teams, but not significantly higher in FTF than videoconference teams. These results provide further evidence that communication media do have important effects on team interaction styles and cohesion.     

Norms Affect Prospective Causal Judgments

People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—that is, judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some future outcome. We show that the abnormal-selection effects are not primarily explained by the perception of agency (Experiment 4). We discuss these results in relation to recent efforts to model causal judgment.     

The Effects of Team Context on Peer Ratings of Task and Citizenship Performance

Recent trends indicate that organizations will continue their strategic pursuit of teamwork for the foreseeable future, which will create a need for accurate assessments of individuals’ performance in teams. Although individual behaviors can be perceived and assessed by fellow team members (i.e., peers), the extent to which the team shapes perceivers’ judgments versus the target’s behavior is unclear. We conducted two studies to understand how and why team context influences peer ratings of individual performance. In study 1, we conducted cross-classified modeling on a sample of 7160 performance observations of 568 targets made by 567 perceivers, who were each members of four separate teams. Results indicated that team membership accounted for a substantially higher proportion of perceiver, relative to target, variance. In study 2, we conducted social relations modeling with a sample of 679 performance observations collected from 217 individuals nested in 46 teams to test the effects of psychological safety on perceiver, target, and team variance components. Perceptions of psychological safety accounted for proportionally larger perceiver, relative to target, variance in OCB, and task performance ratings. Altogether, team context appears to affect perceivers’ judgments of behavior more than the target’s behavior itself, implying that peer ratings sourced from different teams may not be comparable. We consider the implications for the collection and interpretation of peer performance ratings in teams and the potential implications for social cognitive theory, such that certain aspects of the team context, including psychological safety, may act as a cognitive heuristic by molding perceiver judgments of targets.