Anorexia nervosa masculina--concordance in monozygotic twins

The case report presents the courses of the disease of an infantile-juvenile masculine monozygotic pair of twins suffering from anorexia nervosa. Beginning, therapy and result turned out differently in spite of a commonly suffered disease. Already the importance of smaller differences in their personality development as well as the merit of the intrageminate dynamic of parts are worked out.     

The CODE: A revised battery for coping and defense and its relations to subjective health

A condensed test battery (the CODE) based on the Utrecht Coping List (UCL) and part of the Defense Mechanisms Inventory (DMI) has been developed to assess coping and defense in large population studies. It was tested for reliability and validity in students and back pain patients. Principal components factor analysis of the subscales of the UCL and DMI in the student sample revealed two coping clusters: “Instrumental mastery-oriented coping” and “Emotion-focused coping” and two defensive clusters: “Cognitive defense” and “Defensive hostility”. “Instrumental mastery-oriented coping” was negatively related to subjective health complaints measured with Ursins Health Inventory (UHI). The back pain patients were clearly different from the students, using less coping and more defensive strategies. They had more subjective health complaints that showed negative correlations with “Instrumental mastery-oriented coping”. The CODE is a comprehensive battery that may be valid for large population studies of psychological determinants of muscle pain and other subjective health problems.     

Acquisition and maintenance of trusting behavior

This study determined whether a two-person exchange situation contained natural contingencies for trusting behavior or whether external contingencies were necessary. Pairs of college students worked matching-to-sample problems for money. On each trial there was one problem and the subjects determined which of them would solve it. Trusting behavior was defined as an increase in the number of consecutive problems each subject allowed his partner to work during sessions that also ended with an equitable distribution. Simply, trust was a temporary deviation from equity. A subject could give the problem to the other person (cooperate), or not respond and let the other person take the problem (share). Other possibilities were for both subjects to try to take the problem (complete), or for neither subject to respond and thereby let the person who worked the last problem also work the next one (passive trust). When only four lever pulls were required to distribute a problem (no external contingencies to reach either equity or trust) subjects reached equity, but only minimal trust (strict alternation of single problems) developed in 18 sessions. When 30 or 60 lever pulls were required to distribute a problem (smaller response requirement for passive trust and therefore a contingency for trust), trusting behavior developed after a few sessions (fixed ratio 30) or after several trials of the first session (fixed ratio 60) and it ordinarily expanded gradually to 10 to 15 consecutive problems through passive trust. The aversiveness of the inequity involved in trusting appears to necessitate a contingency for acquisition. Once trust develops, however, this aversiveness is reduced as subjects learn the inequity is only temporary (e.g., once trust was acquired at fixed ratio 60 it was maintained at fixed ratio 4, which would not initially produce it), and the direction of the inequity appears to become of questionable importance (e.g., being behind was alternated over rather than within sessions and usually not in a systematic manner).     

Object identification: The mental representation of physical and conceptual attributes

In two experiments, subjects indicated whether two pictures of familiar objects were equivalent. The picture pairs were identical, showed the same object in various perspectives and states, or showed different objects with varying degrees of conceptual relatedness. In Experiment 1, the equivalence criterion for judging the picture pairs was varied between subjects (identity of pictures; conceptual equivalence of objects at subordinate, basic, or superordinate level). The reaction times of the four subject groups suggest that a pictorial stimulus is not always mentally represented in the same way, and that the instructions given determine which attributes of the stimulus are represented. In Experiment 2, the visual similarity of the picture pairs was varied. The results indicate, at least with a basic-level equivalence instruction, that not only perceptual, but also non-perceptual, functional attributes are represented—namely, those that, according to Rosch et al. (1976), are common to the members of a superordinate category.     

The Passage of Counselor Legislation in the 1991 Arkansas State Legislature

In the summer of 1990, the Board of Directors of the Arkansas Associationfor Counseling, Guidance, and Development (now the Arkansas Counseling Association) committed to proposing a legislative package to the 1991 Arkansas General Assembly that included bills to grant privileged communication to school counselors; a third-party payment bill for licensed professional counselors; and a resolution calling for the reduction of noncounseling-related duties for school counselors. This article details the legislative efforts of the Arkansas Association for Counseling, Guidance, and Development in the 1991 Arkansas General Assembly and provides insight for other American Association for Counseling and Development (now the American Counseling Association) state affiliates in planning and implementing a successful legislative program.     

Properties of Goal Systems: Consistency, Conflict, and Coherence

The paper provides a formal representation of goal systems. The focus is on three properties: consistency, conflict, and coherence. An aim is to attain conceptual clarity of these properties. It is argued that consistency is adequately regarded as a property relative to the decision situation or, more specifically, the set of alternatives that the agent faces. Moreover, as a condition of rationality, consistency is stronger than some writers have claimed. Conflict is adequately regarded as a relation over subsets of a given goal system and should likewise be regarded as relative to the set of alternatives that the agent faces. Coherence is given a probabilistic interpretation, based on a support relation over subsets of goal systems. Presented by Heinrich Wansing     

On Freedom And Responsibility: Remarks On Sartre, Levinas And Derrida

This article looks at some main stages of contemporary thought about freedom and responsibility and outlines an account of important stages of 20th century philosophy as well. Whereas the early Sartre particularly coined the notion of infinite freedom, his later writings, Levinas and Derrida (re-)discovered the conception of infinite responsibility. The article draws attention to the questions which arise out of these understandings of both responsibility and freedom and asks whether these issues can be answered from a purely secular point of view. The last part is devoted to the role of God in current philosophical considerations about responsibility and freedom.     

Modal Horn Classes

This paper deals with modal Horn formulas. It contains a characterization of the classes of models definable by modal universal Horn formulas as well as a preservation result for modal universal Horn formulas. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Differential age effects in load-dependent memory processing

This study examined differential age effects in a young and a middle-aged sample by means of a sequential n-back task with increasing memory load. Participants processed two streams of stimuli either separately as a single task, or simultaneously as a dual task. We investigated age effects as a function of memory load in both the single and the dual-task version. In accuracy, we observed differential age effects as a function of load, which were more prominent in the dual-compared to the single-task versions. That is, middle-aged participants performed poorer than young adults in the dual-task conditions, suggesting that early age-related changes become especially apparent in conditions where task coordination and resource sharing come into play. Regarding latencies, we observed no differential age effect, which we believe is due to characteristics of the sequential n-back task.