Reporting experiences of panic: Sex differences in a community survey

This report aims to look at whether the results of a community survey of the prevalence of panic attacks and panic disorder could be influenced by a possible sex difference in the willingness to return screening questionnaires and to acknowledge psychiatric symptoms. The results suggest that men are less likely to return questionnaires, and that this effect is more marked in the younger age groups. This could indicate that an important group of people is being under-represented in prevalence figures for panic and possibly other psychiatric diagnoses.     

Taking Hindrance Seriously

Philosophical Studies -     

The Gradual Deterioration of Syntax and Semantics in a Patient with Progressive Aphasia

FM is a progressive aphasic patient whose language comprehension we studied over a 4-year period. We developed a variety of implicit and explicit tasks to chart progressive changes in the representation of linguistic knowledge (in particular, syntax and semantics) and the automatic and controlled processes which operate on that knowledge. The representation of FM's semantic knowledge remained essentially intact over the years, but she became increasingly impaired at combining the meanings of words. She also showed progressive impairments in the processes of syntactic combination. Thus, FM's disease resulted in a progressive inability to engage in those combinatorial processes necessary for the normal comprehension of a spoken utterance. This is not a selective deficit in the traditional sense of the term, since aspects of both syntax and semantics are implicated; but it is selective in the sense that other aspects of language comprehension remain intact.     

Development of a measure of home-career conflict related to career motivation in college women

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a measure of Home-Career conflict (H-C) for college women. Data from two studies are presented. Subjects for the first study were college women enrolled in undergraduate psychology classes (N=163) at a large midwestern college. Subjects for the second study were fifty student teachers enrolled in Traditional female college majors (i.e., a majority are women) and fifty engineering students in Nontraditional female college majors (i.e., a majority are men). Findings from the first study indicated that high negative affect scores on the H-C measure were significantly (p<.05) related to low career motivation scores. Findings from the first study were used to revise the measure. Using discriminant analysis results from the second study obtained significantly different (p<.02) patterns of scores for Traditional college majors compared to Nontraditional college majors. Traditional majors wrote more stories depicting mothers as primarily homemakers and described more negative affect in their stories. Reliability estimates and validity data are provided. Suggestions for refinement of the measure are discussed as well as possible counseling uses.     

Treatment outcome in personality disorder: The effect of social,psychological and behavioural variables

The study followed-up 245 patients referred to the Henderson Hospital (194 admitted for treatment and 51 not admitted) and for whom information had been collected on their social background and certain psychological variables allowing a classification and typology of personality disorder to be worked out. The study indicates that the therapeutic community treatment is effective with selected individuals showing the antisocial behaviour associated with such disorder. In particular this treatment is of benefit to the offenders with only one conviction and who are able to persevere with treatment for a period of 6 months for treatment to be maximally effective. The variation of psychological types within the broad category of personality disorder was demonstrated and this has a bearing on the outcome of treatment, the extrapunitive neurotic being of poorest prognosis with or without treatment. Yet even in this group, therapeutic community treatment can be effective.     

The meaning of before and after for preschool children

Preschool children's understanding of temporal relationships was examined in terms of their comprehension of sentences containing clauses linked by before and after. The relative importance of order of mention and main-subordinate relations strategies in children's interpretation of temporal order information was also evaluated.Divergent error patterns emerged on the tasks; omissions prevailed on the two tasks involving response to commands, reversals prevailed on the other. Further examination revealed that omissions reflected ambiguity in the linguistic structure of commands. Thus the effect of main-subordinate relations was confounded with directness of command. On all comprehension tasks, however, performance was superior on sentence forms in which order of mention and order of occurrence correspond.     

Intelligence and school phobia

Although the notion is widespread that school phobics are generally brighter than average, data to support this notion have never been collected systematically. Evidence from this study suggests that if the sample size is large and if economic barriers to treatment are not present, one finds that intelligence is distributed among school phobics as it is distributed in the general population. Implications for practice and research are discussed.     

Adaptation and counteradaptation to complex optical distortion

The optical distortion caused by wearing a facemask in water magnifies the angular size of objects and reduces their optical distance. However, objects generallyappear to be further than their optical distance, with the result that points in the left part of the visual field are apparently displaced to the left, and those on the right to the right. Experiments on hand-eye coordination under water showed that adaptation to one aspect of the distortion produced some counteradaptation to complementary aspects: adaptation to distance produced increased lateral distortion, and adaptation to one side of the lateral distortion produced increased distortion on the opposite side. Nevertheless, “trading” was incomplete, and some overall adaptation of the visual metric occurred.