Three intensive community-based programs for children and youth with serious emotional disturbance and their families

Systems of care for children with serious emotional disturbance and their families have generally lacked intensive community-based programs. We describe three types of newly established community-based programs in New York State and present a general evaluation plan for determining which programs work for various children and their families. The three community-based programs are Intensive Case Management, Family-Based Treatment, and Family-Centered Intensive Case Management. Process and outcome evaluations are being conducted for each of these programs. These evaluations make use of common intake and termination instruments, based on a minimum data set, standardized assessment instruments, and a common logic model, thus facilitating the comparison of findings across evaluations.     

Motor-motor adaptation: preliminary findings

This study investigated the relationship between speech perception and speech production. An experimental technique called motor-motor adaptation was devised. Subjects produced a speech token repeatedly (20 to 40 repetitions), then produced a second token one time. These tokens all contained stop consonants and were subsequently analyzed for voice onset time. The results paralleled previous findings using the experimental procedure, perceptuomotor adaptation. The present study supports the notion of a perception-production link.     

Hypnotic susceptibility and its relationship to outcome in the behavioral treatment of asthma: some preliminary data

12 subjects from an experiment on relaxation therapy for asthma were given the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A. Full scale hypnotic susceptibility scores were positively correlated, at a borderline significance, with improvement in the methacholine challenge test, a measure of asthma severity. Performance on the amnesia item of the Harvard Group Scale was correlated with improvement in self-reported symptoms of asthma.     

Human optokinetic nystagmus: competition between stationary and moving displays

We reported earlier that occlusion of the central retina and stationary edges have highly interactive effects on the gain of optokinetic nystagmus (OKN; Murasugi, Howard, & Ohmi, 1986). In this study, we explored this effect in more detail. A central occluding band of variable height, flanked by vertical bars, was superimposed onto an array of dots moving at 30 degrees per second. The height of the occluding band required to abolish OKN increased with the separation of the vertical bars. For bars 3.5 degrees apart, OKN was abolished in most subjects when a band only 6' high ran between them. For bars 75 degrees apart, a band at least 20 degrees in height was required to abolish the response. The effects of the stationary figure depended to some extent on the subject's attention, but only at intermediate values of bar separation. Both low- and high-level mechanisms are proposed to account for the results.     

The psychoanalytic narrative. On the problem of objectivity

The author seeks to develop a narrative conceptualization of psychoanalytic treatment. Its nucleus is the causal explanation of life history and illness. She criticizes the hermeneutic approach to interpretation that is chiefly concerned with the constitution of life history as meaningful with no consideration given at times to objective truth.     

Perceptions of the therapist in family therapy

Thirty-five families completed ratings describing their perceptions of their therapists. These ratings were then correlated with measures of outcome to assess whether there was a relationship between experiences of the therapist and treatment outcome. Further, the study addresses whether some family members' perceptions are more influential in affecting the course of treatment. The results showed that family members' perception of the therapist does have an impact on treatment outcome, but not all members affect the outcome equally. Further results and their implications are discussed.     

Are words represented by nodes?

Semantic priming in a lexical decision task was investigated with concurrent pretarget and posttarget primes. The posttarget prime also served as a pattern mask of the lexical decision target. Forward priming is defined as the presence of a semantically related pretarget prime and an unrelated posttarget prime. Backward priming is defined as the presence of a semantically related posttarget prime and an unrelated pretarget prime. Forward and backward priming were compared both when the nonword foils were "legal" and when they were "illegal" with respect to English orthography. Predictions were derived for two general approaches to word recognition: spreading-activation and expectancy-set theories. Both approaches assume that word representations occupy distinct, nonoverlapping locations in memory. Backward-prime facilitation was equivalent to forward-prime facilitation when nonword foils were illegal; however, backward-prime facilitation was not significant when nonword foils were legal. These results challenge both approaches. The proposed solution uses semantic-space (distributed) representations that are functionally unitized by a resonant matching (verification) process.     

Generativity and Erikson's “belief in the species”

Generativity is the concern for guiding and promoting the next generation through such creative behavior as parenting, teaching, mentoring, leading, and generating products and outcomes that benefit others. Erikson (1963) has argued that in order to be generative in adulthood, people must have a fundamental “belief in the species” or a faith that human progress is possible and worth working toward. The present study focuses on hope and trust concerning the self and others (Erikson's “belief in the species”). In addition, however, the study examines the relation between generativity and personality traits, in this case, dominance, leadership, self-absorption, and nurturance. A sample of 70 adults was administered (1) a series of self-report questionnaires converging on Erikson's idea of belief in the species, (2) a self-report scale assessing generativity, (3) measures of personality traits, and (4) two open-ended measures of generativity requiring subjects to describe life commitments and creative endeavors. The results provide modest support for Erikson's claim of a link between belief in the species and generativity, with significant positive correlations obtained (1) between self-report generativity and two measures of belief in species and (2) between generativity assessed through life commitments and one measure of belief in the species. In addition, the personality trait of nurturance was positively related to all three generativity measures. Problems and issues in the assessment of generativity are discussed.     

Neuropsychological functioning in hemiparkinsonism

A standardized neuropsychological battery including measures of intellectual cognitive, memory, attention-concentration, language, abstraction and mental flexibility, and sensory and motor functions was administered to 21 hemiparkinsonian patients (14 with right side and 7 with left side symptoms) and 17 controls matched for age and education. Patients were impaired in all functions except sensory. For motor functions, impairment was ipsilateral to the side of symptoms. For cognitive functions, right side symptoms were associated with verbal deficits whereas left side symptoms were associated with spatial deficits. Thus, a pattern of neuropsychological deficits consistent with the lateralization of motor symptoms may appear in the early stages of the disease.