Multidisciplinary assessment and diagnosis of conversion disorder in a patient with foreign accent syndrome

Multiple reports have described patients with disordered articulation and prosody, often following acute aphasia, dysarthria, or apraxia of speech, which results in the perception by listeners of a foreign-like accent. These features led to the term foreign accent syndrome (FAS), a speech disorder with perceptual features that suggest an indistinct, non-native speaking accent. Also correctly known as psuedoforeign accent, the speech does not typically match a specific foreign accent, but is rather a constellation of speech features that result in the perception of a foreign accent by listeners. The primary etiologies of FAS are cerebrovascular accidents or traumatic brain injuries which affect cortical and subcortical regions critical to expressive speech and language production. Far fewer cases of FAS associated with psychiatric conditions have been reported. We will present the clinical history, neurological examination, neuropsychological assessment, cognitive-behavioral and biofeedback assessments, and motor speech examination of a patient with FAS without a known vascular, traumatic, or infectious precipitant. Repeated multidisciplinary examinations of this patient provided convergent evidence in support of FAS secondary to conversion disorder. We discuss these findings and their implications for evaluation and treatment of rare neurological and psychiatric conditions.     

Assessing the remedy: the case for contracts in clinical trials

Current orthodoxy in research ethics assumes that subjects of clinical trials reserve rights to withdraw at any time and without giving any reason. This view sees the right to withdraw as a simple extension of the right to refuse to participate all together. In this paper, however, I suggest that subjects should assume some responsibilities for the internal validity of the trial at consent and that these responsibilities should be captured by contract. This would allow the researcher to impose a penalty on the subject if he were to withdraw without good reason and on a whim. This proposal still leaves open the possibility of withdrawing without penalty when it is in the subject's best interests to do so. Giving researchers recourse to legal remedy may now be necessary to protect the science, as existing methods used to increase retention are inadequate for one reason or another.     

Supervised versus unsupervised categorization: two sides of the same coin?

Supervised and unsupervised categorization have been studied in separate research traditions. A handful of studies have attempted to explore a possible convergence between the two. The present research builds on these studies, by comparing the unsupervised categorization results of Pothos et al. ( 2011 ; Pothos et al., 2008 ) with the results from two procedures of supervised categorization. In two experiments, we tested 375 participants with nine different stimulus sets and examined the relation between ease of learning of a classification, memory for a classification, and spontaneous preference for a classification. After taking into account the role of the number of category labels (clusters) in supervised learning, we found the three variables to be closely associated with each other. Our results provide encouragement for researchers seeking unified theoretical explanations for supervised and unsupervised categorization, but raise a range of challenging theoretical questions.     

Vestibular stimulation affects optic-flow sensitivity

Typically, multiple cues can be used to generate a particular percept. Our area of interest is the extent to which humans are able to synergistically combine cues that are generated when moving through an environment. For example, movement through the environment leads to both visual (optic-flow) and vestibular stimulation, and studies have shown that non-human primates are able to combine these cues to generate a more accurate perception of heading than can be obtained with either cue in isolation. Here we investigate whether humans show a similar ability to synergistically combine optic-flow and vestibular cues. This was achieved by determining the sensitivity to optic-flow stimuli while physically moving the observer, and hence producing a vestibular signal, that was either consistent with the optic-flow signal, eg a radially expanding pattern coupled with forward motion, or inconsistent with it, eg a radially expanding pattern with backward motion. Results indicate that humans are more sensitive to motion-in-depth optic-flow stimuli when they are combined with complementary vestibular signals than when they are combined with conflicting vestibular signals. These results indicate that in humans, like in nonhuman primates, there is perceptual integration of visual and vestibular signals.     

The Army National Guard in OIF/OEF: Relationships among combat exposure,postdeployment stressors,social support,and risk behaviors

With the continued operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, studies of the prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder and related symptoms are now common. However, lacking is how these symptoms relate to precipitating conditions and the mitigating effects of social support on these symptoms. This is particularly relevant for reserve military personnel, who have been shown to be greater at-risk for postdeployment problems. The present study examined questionnaire data obtained from Army National Guard (ARNG) units immediately after their return from deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan during 2010 (N = 4329 soldiers in 50 units). Findings showed few soldiers displayed risk behaviors (i.e., daily alcohol use, use of illicit drugs, suicide thoughts, and physically threatening others) during and after deployment. Those most likely to have more postdeployment risk behaviors were also those who showed more risk behaviors during deployment. A substantial percentage of soldiers reported combat exposure, postdeployment negative emotions, and postdeployment loss of a personal relationship. These reported outcomes were all related to increased risk behaviors after deployment. The buffering effect of social support on postdeployment risk behaviors was equally evident when data were examined individually and when grouped by unit memberships. Implications of findings for future research, practice, and policies are discussed.     

Is the sky 2? Contextual priming in grapheme-color synaesthesia

Grapheme-color synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which particular graphemes, such as the numeral 9, automatically induce the simultaneous perception of a particular color, such as the color red. To test whether the concurrent color sensations in grapheme-color synaesthesia are treated as meaningful stimuli, we recorded event-related brain potentials as 8 synaesthetes and 8 matched control subjects read sentences such as "Looking very clear, the lake was the most beautiful hue of 7." In synaesthetes, but not control subjects, congruous graphemes, compared with incongruous graphemes, elicited a more negative N1 component, a less positive P2 component, and a less negative N400 component. Thus, contextual congruity of synaesthetically induced colors altered the brain response to achromatic graphemes beginning 100 ms postonset, affecting pattern-recognition, perceptual, and meaning-integration processes. The results suggest that grapheme-color synaesthesia is automatic and perceptual in nature and also suggest that the connections between colors and numbers are bidirectional.     

A Review of Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion,Volume 15

Book reviewed in this article: Ralph L. Piedmont and David O. Moberg, Eds. (2005). Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 15.