The impact of Parkinson's disease on vocal-prosodic communication from the perspective of listeners

An expressive disturbance of speech prosody has long been associated with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD), but little is known about the impact of dysprosody on vocal-prosodic communication from the perspective of listeners. Recordings of healthy adults (n=12) and adults with mild to moderate PD (n=21) were elicited in four speech contexts in which prosody serves a primary function in linguistic or emotive communication (phonemic stress, contrastive stress, sentence mode, and emotional prosody). Twenty independent listeners naive to the disease status of individual speakers then judged the intended meanings conveyed by prosody for tokens recorded in each condition. Findings indicated that PD speakers were less successful at communicating stress distinctions, especially words produced with contrastive stress, which were identifiable to listeners. Listeners were also significantly less able to detect intended emotional qualities of Parkinsonian speech, especially for anger and disgust. Emotional expressions that were correctly recognized by listeners were consistently rated as less intense for the PD group. Utterances produced by PD speakers were frequently characterized as sounding sad or devoid of emotion entirely (neutral). Results argue that motor limitations on the vocal apparatus in PD produce serious and early negative repercussions on communication through prosody, which diminish the social-linguistic competence of Parkinsonian adults as judged by listeners.     

Mathematics learning disability in girls with Turner syndrome or fragile X syndrome

Two studies were carried out to examine the persistence (Study 1) and characteristics (Study 2) of mathematics learning disability (MLD) in girls with Turner syndrome or fragile X during the primary school years (ages 5-9 years). In Study 1, the rate of MLD for each syndrome group exceeded the rate observed in a grade-matched comparison group, although the likelihood of MLD persisting through the primary school years was comparable for all three groups. In Study 2, formal and informal math skills were compared across the syndrome groups, a normative group, and children from the normative group who had MLD. Few differences were observed between the Turner syndrome and normative groups. Despite having rote counting and number representation skills comparable to those in the normative group, girls with fragile X had difficulty with counting rules (e.g., cardinality, number constancy). However, this difficulty did not distingush them from the MLD group. Overall, counting skills appear to distinguish the Turner syndrome and fragile X groups, suggesting that the specificity of math deficits emerges earlier for fragile X than Turner syndrome.     

Examining the relationship between at-risk gambling and suicidality in a national representative sample of young adults

Although many clinical studies document a relationship between gambling and suicidality, evidence of this association in general population surveys has been mixed. Probing this association in a nationally representative sample of young adults with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, we made same gender comparisons of depression and suicidality between 298 at-risk gamblers and 13,000 others. Although gamblers of both genders showed higher depression, only females reported significantly higher suicide thoughts and attempts. Males with gambling problems were no more likely than nongamblers to have suicide thoughts or to make prior suicide attempts on three separate measurement occasions.     

Associations between peer nominations, teacher ratings, self-reports, and observations of malicious and disruptive behavior

This study evaluates the validity of two aggression scales for predicting observations of malicious or disruptive behavior at school. Subgroups of a sample of 1,560 children (age 8.6+/-1.5 years) were assessed using (a) peer nominations of aggression, (b) teacher reports on the Teacher Report Form (TRF) of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) Aggression scale and the peer nomination items, or (c) self-reports on the peer nomination items. Criteria were observations of physical, verbal, initiated, retaliatory, malicious, and disruptive behaviors. Teacher report peer nominations predicted observed physical, verbal, initiated, and retaliatory aggression and disruptive behavior. Peer nominations predicted physical aggression, verbal aggression, initiation and disruptive behavior, and TRFs predicted verbal, initiated, and disruptive behavior. Self-reports did not significantly predict any behavior. Implications for assessment of aggression are discussed.     

Kainic acid lesions disrupt fear-mediated memory processing

Previous research has shown that hippocampal lesions impair the expression of fear conditioning. This fear conditioning deficit may be due to memory impairment or a reduction in fear in lesioned animals. To address these possibilities, the authors examined unconditioned and conditioned fear in male Sprague-Dawley rats that had received intracerebroventricular (ICV) infusions of kainic acid (KA) 30 days prior to testing. Animals that had received bilateral ICV infusions of KA (1.0 microl of 0.8 mg/ml solution per side) exhibited cell loss that was primarily confined to the CA3 region of the dorsal hippocampus. Kainic acid lesions impaired contextual and cued fear conditioning but did not affect unconditioned fear in a light:dark test of anxiety. Moreover, animals with KA lesions did not habituate to the light:dark apparatus when tested over a 3-day period. These data suggest that decreases in fear conditioning produced by hippocampal lesions reflect a memory deficit and not a lack of fear.     

Varying response effort in the treatment of pica maintained by automatic reinforcement

Pica is a life-threatening behavior displayed by many individuals with developmental disabilities. In the current study, automatic reinforcement maintained the pica of 3 participants. Following functional analyses of pica, response-effort manipulations were conducted in which the effort to obtain pica or alternative items was varied systematically. Several general relations emerged as a result of the study. First, levels of pica were reduced relative to baseline when alternative items were available independent of the effort required to obtain alternative items or pica. Second, increasing the effort for alternative items resulted in increases in pica relative to when effort for alternative items was low. Third, increasing response effort for pica produced reductions in pica relative to baseline when alternative items were unavailable. Fourth, the highest levels of pica occurred when the effort to engage in pica was low or medium and no alternative items were available. These findings are discussed in terms of the relative effects of quality of reinforcement and response effort on behavior.     

Differentiating explanations of attitude-consistent behavior: the role of perspectives and mode of perspective taking

We examined whether participants could differentiate between explanations of attitude-consistent behavior related to EU membership given from two perspectives (EU supporter and EU opponent) by means of three perspective taking modes (the explainer's own perspective, imagined in-group members' perspective, and imagined out-group members' perspective). Participants were presented with explanations provided from different perspectives and perspective taking modes, and they were asked to judge the extent to which they agreed with each explanation, to guess the attitude of the provider of each explanation, and to rate the quality of each explanation in various respects. Participants could not differentiate between explanations given by in-group members and out-group members who imagined the same perspective. They responded more favorably to explanations given from own perspective than from the imagined perspectives. The results suggest that there exists a shared understanding about how both sides should explain attitude-consistent behavior, but this understanding is measurably different from the actual explanations.     

Is inferential reasoning just probabilistic reasoning in disguise?

Oaksford, Chater, and Larkin (2000) have suggested that people actually use everyday probabilistic reasoning when making deductive inferences. In two studies, we explicitly compared probabilistic and deductive reasoning with identical if-then conditional premises with concrete content. In the first, adults were given causal premises with one strongly associated antecedent and were asked to make standard deductive inferences or to judge the probabilities of conclusions. In the second, reasoners were given scenarios presenting a causal relation with zero to three potential alternative antecedents. The participants responded to each set of problems under both deductive and probabilistic instructions. The results show that deductive and probabilistic inferences are not isomorphic. Probabilistic inferences can model deductive responses only using a limited, very high threshold model, which is equivalent to a simple retrieval model. These results provide a clearer understanding of the relations between probabilistic and deductive inferences and the limitations of trying to consider these two forms of inference as having a single underlying process.     

Longitudinal family and peer group effects on violence and nonviolent delinquency

Explored the longitudinal relations between family relationships and parenting characteristics, violence and nonviolent delinquency of peers, and individual delinquency and violence using data from a sample of 246 adolescent male participants in the Chicago Youth Development Study. Family and parenting characteristics were measured when participants averaged 12 years of age, peer group offending when participants averaged 14 years of age, and individual offending when participants averaged 17 years of age. Family characteristics and parenting were represented by an ordinal variable ranging from exceptional families characterized by emotional closeness, strong beliefs about family, and good parenting skills, to struggling families characterized by a lack of emotional cohesion, deviant beliefs, and poor parenting. Peers' violence but not nonviolent delinquency predicted individual violence and nonviolent delinquency, and family types predicted peer deviance as well as individual violence and delinquency. Effects varied somewhat due to gang membership and ethnicity.