Personality as a risk factor in coronary heart disease

The pioneering work of the authors of the Type A personality concept has now been shown to be seriously flawed, with only the traits of anger, aggression, and hostility remaining as risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD). There is now evidence for a much stronger relationship between CHD and personality involving a rather different set of concepts and theories. The evidence for such a relationship is summarized, and a causal link suggested. It is also shown that the CHD-prone type of behaviour can be changed by behaviour therapy, decreasing considerably the risk of dying from CHD.     

Adaptation in distance perception with head-movement parallax serving as the veridical cue

When head-movement parallax functioned as the sole veridical distance cue during exposure to spectacles that altered the eyes’ oculomotor adjustments, sizable adaptation was obtained. This result showed that a discrimination of the distances of 60 and 30 cm can be based on head-movement parallax. Using adaptation in demonstrating that head-movement parallax can serve as a distance cue circumvents the problem that the presence of accommodation normally presents when such a demonstration is attempted. The usual contamination of head-movement parallax with accommodation is avoided, because accommodation is altered by the spectacles and does pot function as a veridical cue along with head-movement parallax.     

Two kinds of adaptation in the constancy of visual direction and their different effects on the perception of shape and visual direction

Adaptation in the constancy of visual direction can be obtained under two radically different conditions, called eye-movement adaptation and field adaptation. Adaptation resulting from these conditions and from a “normal” condition was measured with a newly developed estimation test. Eye-movement adaptation was found to cause an alteration of compensatory eye movements. It apparently consists of a changed evaluation of eye movements, as demonstrated by two different pointing tests. A form test where the shape of a large oblong is set to look square also confirmed this interpretation. After field adaptation, a pointing test did not register a change, but an adaptation effect could be measured with a forward direction test. This test and a square test where no eye movements were permitted proved to be specific to field adaptation; they measured no effect after eye-movementadaptation. The normal adaptation condition Was apparently equivalent to the eye-movement adaptation condition. Its effect could be measured only with a pointing test. When we changed the normal adaptation condition so that frequent saccades were made during head turning, strong effects were measured with the two tests that were specific to field adaptation.