The role of functional and perceptual attributes: evidence from picture naming in dementia

We examined the performance of a group of people with moderately severe Alzheimer's type dementia on a naming task. We found that functional information plays an important role in determining naming performance on both living and non-living things. Perceptual information may play some role in naming living things. We also found some evidence that the semantic category to which an item belongs may also have some effect on naming performance. We argue that both the sensory-functional and domain-specific knowledge hypotheses may be correct: the brain is to some organized on taxonomic grounds, while the semantic representations of living and non-living things depend differentially on perceptual and functional information. These representations can be differentially disrupted by damage to modality-specific stores. At a moderate level of severity, dementia causes global damage that has the effect of disrupting both the localized taxonomic and the modality-specific stores. We discuss the nature of functional information.     

Neuropsychology,genetic liability,and psychotic symptoms in those at high risk of schizophrenia

Neuropsychological assessments were compared among individuals at enhanced genetic risk of schizophrenia (n = 157) and controls (n = 34). The relationship between cognitive impairments and the presence of psychotic symptoms and measures of genetic risk was explored in the high-risk subjects. Neuropsychological differences were identified in many areas of function and were not accounted for by the presence of psychotic symptoms. Genetic liability was not associated with neuropsychological performance or with psychotic symptoms, but exploratory analysis showed some tests were associated with both liability measures. These results suggest that what is inherited is not the disorder itself but a state of vulnerability manifested by neuropsychological impairment, occurring in many more individuals than are predicted to develop the disorder.     

Clarifying achievement goals and their impact

The study of achievement goals has illuminated basic motivational processes, though controversy surrounds their nature and impact. In 5 studies, including a longitudinal study in a difficult premed course, the authors show that the impact of learning and performance goals depends on how they are operationalized. Active learning goals predicted active coping, sustained motivation, and higher achievement in the face of challenge. Among performance goals, ability-linked goals predicted withdrawal and poorer performance in the face of challenge (but provided a "boost" to performance when students met with success); normative goals did not predict decrements in motivation or performance; and outcome goals (wanting a good grade) were in fact equally related to learning goals and ability goals. Ways in which the findings address discrepancies in the literature are discussed.     

Development and validation of a modified version of the Peritraumatic Dissociative Experiences Questionnaire

This article reports results from 3 studies conducted to develop and validate a modified version of the self-administered form of the Peritraumatic Dissociative Experiences Questionnaire (PDEQ; C. R. Marmar, D. S. Weiss, & T. J. Metzler, 1997). The objective was to develop an instrument suitable for use with persons from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. In Study 1, the original PDEQ was administered to a small sample (N = 15) recruited from among men admitted to the hospital for physical injuries stemming from exposure to community violence. Results led to modifications aimed at improving the utility of the instrument. In Study 2, the modified PDEQ was subjected to structural equation modeling and item response theory analyses to assess its psychometric properties in a larger, primarily male, sample of community violence survivors (N = 284). In Study 3, the reliability and validity of the modified instrument were further assessed in a sample of female survivors of sexual assault (N = 90). Results attest to the psychometric properties as well as the reliability and validity of the modified 8-item PDEQ.     

The self in the couple relationship: part 1

This paper discusses the importance of the ‘good-enough’ development of the core self in the couple relationship. It argues that difficulties in the development of the self lie behind a significant number of troubled couple relationships. Part 1 focuses on individual psychotherapy and how changes to the core self are often attended by shifts in the marital relationship. It traces how this occurs through clinical material and analyses what kinds of changes to the self are needed for the couple relationship to function well. Psychodynamic theory is used to understand the core changes over time and how these are related to significant second-order change in the couple relationship. The construct of the ‘transitional space’ is used to theorize the couple relationship. Implications for the practice of individual psychotherapy are discussed. In Part 2, the significance of change in the experience of the self of one or both partners for a successful outcome of couples therapy is discussed, along with the place of work with individual partner(s) in the course of conjoint couples therapy.     

Assessing Dependency Using Self-Report and Indirect Measures: Examining the Significance of Discrepancies

The present study addressed convergence between self-report and indirect approaches to assessing dependency. We were moderately successful in validating an implicit measure, which was found to be reliable, orthogonal to 2 self-report instruments, and predictive of external criteria. This study also examined discrepancies between scores on self-report and implicit measures, and has implications for their significance. The possibility that discrepancies themselves are pathological was not supported, although discrepancies were associated with particular personality profiles. Finally, this study offered additional evidence for the relation between dependency and depressive symptomatology and identified implicit dependency as contributing unique variance in predicting past major depression.     

Must new worlds also be Good?

The activities analysed by Spinosa et al., viz entrepreneurship, citizen action, and cultural leadership, are all central to the American experience. They have a common phenomenological structure and a common purpose, which is to ‘disclose new worlds’, i.e. so to reconfigure the collective perceptions as to bring about ‘large‐scale cultural and historical changes’. Each, more or less unselfconsciously, is an exercise of skill, an expression of freedom, and a building of solidarity through the recovery or discovery of human meanings. I argue that unless we know the ends to which skill and freedom tend, and in which meaning is found, all three (which the authors treat rather as ends in themselves) are underdescribed, and impossible to see as possessing or conferring value simply per se. The same goes for the original three activities. Cultural leadership, citizen action, and entrepreneurship can work as easily towards bad ends as good. To see them as virtual ends in themselves, then, is premature, and a kind of formalism.     

Concepts,structures, and meanings

Concepts are basic elements of thought. Piaget has a conception of the nature of concepts as informational or computational operations performed in an inner milieu and enabling the child to understand the world in which it lives and acts. Concepts are, however, not merely logico‐mathematical but are also conceptually linked to the mastery of language which itself involves the appropriate use of words in social and interpersonal settings. In the light of Vygotsky's work on the social and interactive nature of children's thinking and the nature of language as an essentially public currency of rule‐governed signs, we are led to reconstrue conceptual mastery as the acquisition of an interactive and interpersonal repertoire of tools which introduces the child to the world of those who educate it. In this way we come to see the elements of mind as constitutively involving that activity in which the determinants of meaning constrain and direct the child's linguistic development.     

The Southern Pub Crawl and Brawl: An Examination of the Alcohol–Violence Nexus in a Southern City

This research examines the relationship between alcohol availability and crime, specifically the variation of effects between the presence of off- and on-site establishments on violent crime. We contribute to extant research by providing a more comprehensive disaggregation of alcohol establishments. Framed in routine activities theory, we argue that alcohol availability will exacerbate violent crime rates by increasing quantities of motivated offenders and suitable targets, while simultaneously decreasing the number of capable guardians. We find a nuanced relationship between the presence of alcohol establishments and violence that varies based on establishment type as well as the characteristics of its block group.