A reflection: Howard Scott Liddell, 1895-1962

Howard S. Liddell, Professor of Psychobiology in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, was one of the earliest American students and developers of I.P. Pavlov's theory of the conditioned reflex and an early researcher on stress. The significance of Liddell's work on stress was fully recognized when he was sent, as a member of a commission, to the battlefront at the height of the Korean War to study stress and self-control in the soldiers. This profound experience convinced Liddell that behavioral research must ultimately be made relevant to the understanding and elevation of human behavior. He spent the remaining ten years of his life in efforts to implement this conviction through research, writing, and lectures before scientific and lay groups.     

Induction of depressive affect after prolonged exposure to a mildly depressed individual

Scores on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were periodically obtained from the roommates of college students who exhibited a persistent mild depression over a 3-month period. For comparative purposes, BDI scores were also obtained from roommates of individuals who were transiently depressed and from subjects with nondepressed roommates. In comparison with control subjects, the roommates of persistently depressed persons displayed a progressive increase in BDI score over the course of the study.     

"Your feet's too big": an inquiry into psychological and symbolic meanings of the foot

The foot is a highly cathected appendage that is commonly singled out as the brunt of humorous or derisive remarks, as if it embodies repugnance and disgust. Attitudes toward the foot are overdetermined, bearing the imprint of man's early linguistic patterns and individual dynamics. This article suggests that feet are symbolic because they bear the feelings derived from earlier separations, good and bad object representations, collective memories, and genital representations. The foot's role as symbol of both the male and female genitals, repository of badness, symbol of passivity, initiator of movement, and site of self-mutilation have been briefly reviewed. As Fats Waller rhapsodizes that the "feet's too big," he finds a convenient way to displace his symbiotic and erotic anxieties vis-à-vis women. Similarly, patients who come for psychiatric treatment and psychotherapy frequently make references to their feet or use them in specific ways. An understanding of this type of communication can often provide insight into individual dynamics and enhance treatment. The weight placed on these communications depends, of course, on the vicissitudes of the previous therapeutic work as well as on the particular problems of the patient.     

Preschool children's comprehension and production of directive forms

Thirty preschool children, 10 each at the 3-,4-, and 5-year-old levels, participated in two structured tasks designed to assess both comprehension and production of a full range of directive forms. In contrast to previous reports, the results indicated no significant differences in directive comprehension or production as a function of age; children in all age groups demonstrated the ability to understand and verbally encode the intent of most types of directive forms. However, the two most implicit forms, Question Directives and Hints, were complied with significantly less frequently than the more explicit forms, and were uused less often in the production task. The present findings indicate the importance of analyzing directive forms along a continuum of explicitness rather than dichotomizing them as direct versus indirect. Finally, the results are interpreted as providing indirect support for the general notion that mastery of some implicit forms may be achieved later than the acquisition of more explicit forms.