Parental Loss and Family Violence as Correlates of Suicide and Violence Risk

Seventy-nine psychiatric inpatients were administered a battery of psychometric instruments that obtained information about early parental loss, exposure to family violence, and behavioral problems in themselves and in their first-degree relatives. These variables were correlated with suicide and violence risk measures. Suicide risk significantly correlated with all family variables whereas violence risk correlated with behavioral problems both in oneself and in one's first-degree relatives. Moreover, suicidal and/or violent patients had experienced maternal loss significantly more frequently than the nonsuicidal/nonviolent patients. In the suicidal/violent group, age of patient at death of parents was significantly lower than in the nonsuicidal/nonviolent group. Finally, family violence was significantly correlated with behavioral problems in self and in first-degree relatives. Findings are interpreted according to the authors' theoretical model of aggression regulation.     

A computer model of the temporal course of agrammatic sentence understanding: The effects of variation in severity and sentence complexity

In this article, we present SYNCHRON, a computer model of Kolk and van Grunsven's (1985) hypothesis of agrammatic comprehension deficits. According to this hypothesis, parsing fails in agrammatic aphasies since syntactic representational elements that need to be active simultaneously are often not coactive because of disturbances in timing due to brain damage. SYNCHRON has been especially designed to account for two neglected aspects of agrammatic comprehension: degrees of severity and the sentence-complexity effect. We report an attempt to simulate data from two sentence-picture-matching studies in which a qualitatively similar sentence-complexity effect was found at two different average levels of severity. This pattern was reproduced when the timing disorder was assumed to affect syntactic phrasal categories, but not when it was assumed to affect function-word categories. When phrasal categories were involved, fit was not much affected, whether the damage was assumed to slow down the time for an element to be retrieved, or to decrease the time for an element to remain available.