Listeriosis of the central nervous system in children beyond the neonatal period

Observations on three children with neurolisteriosis (one case of meningitis, two cases of meningoencephalitis, each Serovar 4 b), show that even after the neonatal period, listeriosis must not be ignored in the process of diagnosis and therapy. It is the bacteriological examination of the cerebrospinal fluid, together with the blood culture, and not clinical symptoms and serology that guarantee a timely diagnosis and therapy (ampicillin and gentamicin).     

Insight and the analytic dyad

Insight reflects the unitary nature of psychic activity in contrast to the fragmentation created in abstracting categories for the purpose of study and discussion. The unique analytic clinical dyad offers a structure in which intrapsychic fragments can be actualized and integrated. As a result, the analyst's contribution is more crucially one of exploration than of revelation. Whatever the area of examination, past or present, the link to analytic immediacy offers the opportunity to make meanings meaningful, to convert known facts to psychic truths. The analyst's clinical task requires his private self-analysis as part of the collaborative exploration of how the patient's mind works. Higher level ego functioning, including acutely active remembering, is at times transiently loosened in order for the analyst to share in the clinical work of discovery. The words the analyst uses to communicate his understanding convey only approximate manifest meanings, though they structurally reveal deeper messages of importance to the patient. These verbal approximations help stimulate self-reflection in the analysand as a step in the process of gaining insight.     

Objective measurement of pain in the wrist: analyses of basic factors for normative data and a case study

A plate-pushing task was used to measure endogenous pain in the wrist from different loci. Practical application in rehabilitation seems reasonable.     

VOLUNTARY AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT: LEGAL AND RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS

This paper provides a review of recent Supreme Court decisions stemming from the implementation of voluntary AAPs that include preferential treatment as a remedy; the evidence and proof required to establish and defend against reverse discrimination claims is identified. Overall, the courts sanctioned the use of preferential treatment if it occured as part of a well-conceived AAP. However, differences were found in the manner in which the courts adjudicated Title VII and constitutional claims of preferential treatment. The discussion examines research on the potential effects of voluntary AAPs on important organizational and societal outcome variables. We conclude that the impact of AAPs is likely to be far-reaching, exerting an effect possibly well beyond the limits considered in court decisions.     

Learned helplessness in the cockroach (Periplaneta americana)

For 3 consecutive days cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) were exposed to either escapable, inescapable, or no shock in an escape task. Twenty-four hours later they were tested in a shuttlebox escape task. There were reliable differences between escapable and inescapable animals and between inescapable and control animals in both escape latencies and the number of failures to escape.     

Problem structure and the use of base-rate information from experience

This article is concerned with the use of base-rate information that is derived from experience in classifying examples of a category. The basic task involved simulated medical decision making in which participants learned to diagnose hypothetical diseases on the basis of symptom information. Alternative diseases differed in their relative frequency or base rates of occurrence. In five experiments initial learning was followed by a series of transfer tests designed to index the use of base-rate information. On these tests, patterns of symptoms were presented that suggested more than one disease and were therefore ambiguous. The alternative or candidate diseases on such tests could differ in their relative frequency of occurrence during learning. For example, a symptom might be presented that had appeared with both a relatively common and a relatively rare disease. If participants are using base-rate information appropriately (according to Bayes' theorem), then they should be more likely to predict that the common disease is present than that the rare disease is present on such ambiguous tests. Current classification models differ in their predictions concerning the use of base-rate information. For example, most prototype models imply an insensitivity to base-rate information, whereas many exemplar-based classification models predict appropriate use of base-rate information. The results reveal a consistent but complex pattern. Depending on the category structure and the nature of the ambiguous tests, participants use base-rate information appropriately, ignore base-rate information, or use base-rate information inappropriately (predict that the rare disease is more likely to be present). To our knowledge, no current categorization model predicts this pattern of results. To account for these results, a new model is described incorporating the ideas of property or symptom competition and context-sensitive retrieval.     

The role of the right hemisphere in the production of linguistic stress

Recent research has proposed a general prosodic disturbance associated with right hemisphere damage (RHD), one encompassing both affective and linguistic functions. The present study attempted to explore whether the ability to produce linguistic prosody was impaired in this patient population. Productions of phonemic stress tokens (e.g., Re'dcoat vs. red coa't) as well as examples of contrastive stress, or sentential emphasis (e.g., Sam hated the movie), were elicited from eight male speakers with unilateral right hemisphere CVAs and seven male control subjects. Two types of analyses were conducted on these utterances. Acoustic analysis focused on the correlates associated with word stress, namely changes in amplitude, duration, and fundamental frequency. The perceptual saliency of emerging cues to stress was also examined by presentation of test tokens to phonetically trained listeners for identification of stress placement. The patients as a group produced fewer acoustic cues to stress compared to the normal subjects, but no statistical differences were found between groups for either stress at the phrase level or at the sentence level. In the perceptual analysis, stress produced by the patient group was judged to be less salient than that for the normal group, although a high degree of variability was evident in both populations. The data suggest a spared processing mechanism for linguistic prosody in RHD speakers, thus mitigating against the view of a general dysprosody tied to RHD.