Rated preference and complexity for natural and urban visual material

In order (1) to study the relationship between complexity and preference for slides of the physical environment and (2) to test the hypothesis that the content of slides (in particular, whether nature or urban) will influence preference, independent of the rated complexity, 88 Ss were asked to rate 56 slides, both for preference and for complexity. Based on dimensional analyses, a nature and an urban dimension were identified. Three major results were obtained: (1) Nature scenes were greatly preferred to urban scenes (p < .001). (2) Complexity predicted preference within the nature domain (r = .69) and within the urban domain (r = .78). (3) Complexity did not account for the preference for nature over urban slides; the greatly preferred nature slides were, in fact, judged on the average less complex than the urban slides. The possibility is raised that the domain-specific character of the preference/complexity relationship found in this study may be general; that is, it may not be a special property of environmentally generated arrays.     

The psychoanalysis of art: some ends, some means

The psychoanalysis of art has been a lively activity for virtually a century, ever since Freud first likened certain findings of his self-analysis to certain turns of plot in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Yet over this time a lack of clarity has persisted with respect to the kind of knowledge applied psychoanalysis achieves and its means of justification. Starting with the observation that clinical and applied psychoanalysis are, in every respect, radically different endeavors, this paper goes on to identify some ends and means of the psychoanalytic study of art and to suggest a few criteria of adequacy for the outcomes of such study.     

Sex differences and practice effects on two visual-spatial tasks

Sex differences on visual-spatial tasks have been assumed to be present in young children, and performance on visual-spatial tasks has been assumed to be resistant to modification. Third and fifth graders were pretested on embedded and successive figures. Half of the 110 children then received limited feedback after which both groups were posttested. Grade, time of testing, and type of task significantly affected visual-spatial performance. Additional study might indicate whether amount of practice influences final level of performance for girls and boys and the asymptote on visual-spatial tasks is similar.     

The impact of religion on men's blood pressure

Most clinical studies examining the relation between religion and blood pressure status have focused on church attendance, finding lower pressures among frequent attenders. The present study examines the effect on blood pressure status of a religious meaning variable, importance of religion, both by itself and together with frequency of church attendance. The relation between blood pressure, self-perceived importance of religion, and frequency of church attendance was examined among a rural sample of 407 white men free from hypertension or cardiovascular disease. The data confirmed an interaction between the effects of both religious variables on blood pressure status, with importance of religion having an even greater association with lower pressures than church attendance. Diastolic blood pressures of persons with high church attendance and high religious importance were significantly lower than those in the low attendance, low importance group. These differences persisted after adjusting the analyses for age, socioeconomic status, smoking, and weight-height ratio (Quetelet Index). The difference in mean diastolic pressures based on response to the religious importance variable alone was statistically and clinically significant, particularly among men aged 55 and over (6 mm) and among smokers (5 mm). These findings suggest that both religious attitudes and involvement may interact favorably in their effects on cardiovascular hemodynamics.     

Overall nutrient intake of preschool hyperactive and normal boys

Studies examining the relationship between sugar intake of hyperactive children and behavior problems have reported inconsistent results. We hypothesized that if the problem behaviors of attention deficit-disordered children with hyperactivity (ADDH) are exacerbated by food, then this might be due to differences in their background nutrition relative to non-ADDH children. Parents and day care workers of 24 ADDH and 27 non-ADDH preschoolaged boys were trained to keep food diaries for 21 days. Analysis of the last 14 days for each child revealed no differences in overall nutrient intake between the two groups. On the other hand, for 5 ADDH and 3 non-ADDH children the within-subject correlations between daily behavior and sugar intake were significant. We concluded that nutrition-behavior interactions are more likely a function of idiosyncratic sensitivities, rather than a general tendency for ADDH children to eat differently from non-ADDH children.This research was funded by the Alberta Mental Health Research Advisory Council, and by the National Health Research and Development Program of Health and Welfare Canada. We think Jeannine Fraser for help with data analyses.     

Linguistic and nonlinguistic impairments in writing: a comparison of patients with focal and multifocal CNS disorders

The hypothesis that the language disorder in Alzheimer's disease (AD) depends on degenerative brain changes in classical left-hemisphere language zones was tested by comparing the written language performances of a group of AD patients with mild-moderate dementia and left-hemisphere stroke patients with equally severe naming and auditory comprehension deficits who were in varying stages of recovery from Wernicke's aphasia. The results indicated significant qualitative group differences in performances between tasks and in errors within tasks. The findings are consistent with hypothesized disruption of more diffusely organized neurolinguistic systems in AD. The hypothesis that the language disorder in AD represents an exaggeration of the pattern of language change in normal aging was also examined by comparing the performances of AD patients to the changes that occur with very advanced normal aging. The data indicate convergence between AD and very elderly healthy subjects in some aspects of written language production.     

Longitudinal neuropsychological report of aphasia following left-subcortical hemorrhage

The neuropsychological assessments of a patient with language disturbance following left thalamic-putaminal hemorrhage over a $\text{2}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{year}$ period are presented together with premorbid measures of performance. Findings indicate that behavioral deficits which are both linguistic and nonlinguistic in nature differ from cortical aphasic syndromes in symptomatology and recovery course. The deficit pattern is also unlike that in other reported cases of left-subcortical lesions. Persistent dysarthria with fluent speech, limitation of verbal span and repetition, agraphia and anomia, and disturbances in self-regulation of behavior were noted, in addition to recovery of an initially severe auditory comprehension deficit. A distinguishing feature of this case was the relative preservation of reading comprehension in all four assessments.     

Taste,odor, and tactile discrimination before and after smoking

Differential sensitivity was measured before and after smoking a cigarette by seven smokers, using six non-smokers as controls. Stimuli consisted of the tastes of sucrose, sodium chloride, citric acid, caffeine, and quinine hydrochloride; the odors of vanillin and 2-butanone; and the viscosity produced by a carrageenan gum. No significant jnds were observed between smokers and non-smokers, nor before vs after smoking. Therefore, the data supported neither longterm nor short-term influences of cigarette smoking. Practice effects were noted among the control group, as more correct responses were obtained on the second than on the first set of solutions in most of the test stimuli.     

When do professional psychologists need professional programmers’ tools?

It is fairly straightforward to write a small program for a small computer, even using a relatively slow and unstructured language such as BASIC. However, current experiments in psychopharmacology require the system integration and data management services provided by large programs running on 256K microcomputers, and the efficient development of such programs requires the use of structured languages such as Pascal.