Between realism and nominalism: learning to think about names and words

Some of the factors that influence our understanding of the nature of names and words were investigated. Participants (from kindergarten, 2nd, 4th, and 6th grades, and a university undergraduate class) were told a series of brief narratives thematizing the relation between objects and names, after which they were asked questions about the origins and changeability of names and words. Responses were coded as either realist (i.e., viewing names as intrinsic properties of objects) or nominalist (i.e., understanding names and words as arbitrary social conventions). By Grade 2, the children showed a significant increase in nominalist thinking, but this was not a universal development among the participants. Many adults expressed views that did not reflect a strictly nominalist understanding of words and names. Furthermore, the use of nominalist and realist models was influenced by various social-discursive factors including the type of object being named, the type of name being asked about, and the participant's prior experience with the name. It is argued that linguistic (especially literate) experiences play a crucial role in developing a nominalist understanding of names and words.     

Is transference the ‘total situation’?

This paper examines through the detailed explication of analytic material the author's experience of a psychoanalytic and a Jungian way of understanding the interactions between him and his patient. This comparative approach considers where the differences lie with respect to timing and content of interpretations and where the differences are essentially tactical rather than theoretical.     

Confidentiality and paradox: the location of ethical space

Implicit in Jung's alchemical metaphor of the vas bene clausum is the idea of an analytic frame with a space inside it for something vital, a relationship between two selves, to develop. For this to happen, analysts must respect their patients' rights to confidentiality. The paper explores the analyst's state of mind and the intrapsychic processes that are constellated when struggling with ethical dilemmas about issues of confidentiality in analytic work. The author suggests that at times when analysts consider breaking confidentiality, there is often a disturbing inner conflict between their moral principles (codes of ethics) and their internal personal ethical attitude. At these difficult moments, the mutuality of the work and the vas bene clausum can be significantly disrupted. The analyst tries to find a third position, a mental and emotional ethical space where the subjective and the objective, the ethical and the unethical can become more companionable bedfellows.     

Reaction to Compton and Metheny (2000): "assessment of grade inflation in higher education"

Comparison of grades awarded to all students in all courses at SUNY Geneseo in Spring 1990 and Spring 2000 shows a significant overall increase and a fairly stable pattern of grading practices across departments that resembles the pattern reported by Compton and Metheny in 2000 and other investigators.     

Source of improvement in balance control after a training program for ankle proprioception

Previous research on healthy individuals reported improvements in balance control following a purported ankle proprioception-training program. The training may have resulted in a general rather than a specific enhancement of ankle proprioception. To test this hypothesis, subjects were constrained at the hips and trunk with a custom-made thoracolumbosacral orthosis and performed a one-leg standing test with eyes closed and head tilted back, so that they had to rely primarily on their ankle musculature to keep their balance. Subjects were retested after training on the BAPS three times a week for 4 weeks, following the training recommendations of the manual. Subjects' bodies were not constrained during the training. Analysis showed that subjects made improvements during training in performing more difficult tasks on the board. On the one-leg test, however, there were no improvements in sway velocity, number of touchdowns, or falls relative to pretest scores. Improvements observed during training likely resulted from diffuse enhancement of proprioception in other body segments such as the knees, hips, spine, and upper extremities. A training program in control of general balance does not specifically target ankle proprioception.     

Are semantic errors actually semantic?: Evidence from alzheimer's disease

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) produce a high rate of semantic errors when naming to confrontation. This is considered to be one of the many consequences of their semantic memory deficit. However, it has been shown, in aphasic patients with focal lesions, that semantic errors could arise from impairment to any one of the levels in the naming process. To check this hypothesis in AD, we assessed in 15 patients the capacity to name and access semantic knowledge (by multiple-choice probe questions) about 14 objects presented successively in the visual, tactile, auditory, and verbal modalities. In the visual naming task, 33 errors were recorded: 26 (78.8%) were semantic and 7 (21.2%) were unrelated errors. Of the 26 semantic errors, 8 were related to a deficit of the semantic knowledge related to the item and 17 to a deficit in the retrieval of the phonological form of the word. One was associated with a deficit of access to semantic knowledge in the visual modality. The 7 unrelated errors were associated with a loss of semantic knowledge for 4 and deficit of access to the phonological form for 3. In conclusion, this study shows that semantic errors do not systematically reflect a deficit of semantic knowledge in Alzheimer's disease. It also seems that unrelated errors are more frequently related to semantic deficits than semantic errors in this population.     

Examining the effectiveness of a community-based self-help program to increase women's readiness for smoking cessation

This study investigated the effectiveness of two components of a smoking cessation intervention: a reading manual and a series of televised programs. Female smokers in the Chicago metropolitan area with a high school education or less were interviewed at 4 different times: baseline, immediate postintervention, and 6 and 12 months. We examined the effects of several baseline measures (race, age, number of cigarettes smoked, and stage of readiness to change) and exposure to the intervention components on subsequent stage of change. Race, baseline smoking rate, baseline stage, and exposure to both intervention components had direct effects on stage at immediate postintervention, with both intervention components increasing readiness to quit. Furthermore, exposure to the manual interacted with baseline stage, such that the manual benefited women at earlier stages more than women at later stages. Effects of both components were sustained at 6 months, and the effects of the manual were sustained at 12 months.     

Abnormalities of motor and praxis imagery in children with DCD

In an earlier study using the visually guided pointing task (VGPT) the authors showed that the timing of imagined movement sequences in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) does not conform to the conventional speed-for-accuracy trade-off (or Fitts' law [P.M. Fitts, Journal of Experimental Psychology 47 (1954) 381-391]) that occurs when the distance and accuracy requirements of movements are varied [P. Maruff, P.H. Wilson, M. Trebilcock, J. Currie, Neuropsychologia 37 (1999b) 1317-1324]. The present study sought to replicate this earlier finding and to examine (using a weight manipulation) whether this deficit was also attributable to inaccurate programming of relative force. The chronometry of real and imagined movements was investigated in a group of 20 children with DCD aged between 8 and 12 years and a group of controls matched on age and verbal IQ (VIQ). Movement duration was tested for real and imagined movements using the preferred hand, with the VGPT performed under two load conditions: with and without the addition of a weight attached to a pen. Group means of each subjects' mean movement duration were calculated and plotted against target width for each of the four conditions [Movement type (2) x Load (2)] and a logarithmic curve was fitted to the data points. In the control group, the speed-for-accuracy trade-off for both real and imagined performance conformed to Fitts' law under each load condition. In the DCD group only real movements conformed to Fitts' law. Moreover, the effect of load differed between groups--for real movements, movement duration did not differ between load and no-load conditions for either group, while for imagined movements, movement duration increased under the load condition for the control group only. These results replicate and extend the results of our earlier study. This pattern of performance suggests that children with DCD have an impairment in the ability to generate internal representations of volitional movements which may reflect an impaired ability to process efference copy signals. The ability to programme both relative force and timing appears to underly this difficulty. Results have implications for the use of (guided) motor imagery training in order to facilitate the development of motor skill in children with DCD.     

Preserved implicit learning on both the serial reaction time task and artificial grammar in patients with Parkinson's disease

Thirteen nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were compared with age-matched controls on two standard tests of implicit learning. A verbal version of the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task was used to assess sequence learning and an artificial grammar (AG) task assessed perceptual learning. It was predicted that PD patients would show implicit learning on the AG task but not the SRT task, as motor sequence learning is thought to be reliant on the basal ganglia, which is damaged in PD. Patients with PD demonstrated implicit learning on both tasks. In light of these unexpected results the research on SRT learning in PD is reconsidered, and some possible explanations for the sometimes conflicting results of PD patient samples on the SRT task are considered. Four factors which merit further study in this regard are the degree to which the SRT task relies on overt motor responses, the effects of frontal lobe dysfunction upon implicit sequence learning, the effects of cerebellar degeneration, and the degree to which the illness itself has advanced.     

Certification, accreditation, and quality control in behavior analysis

Implementing quality control measures in the discipline and professional practice of behavior analysis is a challenging, but nevertheless important, step in the evolution of our field. The Association for Behavior Analysis currently seeks to ensure quality in behavior analysis by sponsoring an accreditation program for graduate academic programs and by promoting certification of individual practitioners. The accreditation reviews are conducted by ABA, whereas certification status is awarded by an independent, nonprofit credentialing entity: the Behavior Analyst Certification Board, Inc. Among the challenges that ABA faces as it pursues various quality control measures, particularly in its educational programs, are (a) how extensively should academic programs specify the verbal and nonverbal terminal repertoires in all three branches of behavior analysis (applied, experimental, and conceptual); (b) how extensively should programs that emphasize applied behavior analysis integrate science-based criteria for the evaluation of interventions; and (c) how extensively should programs that emphasize service delivery include training in formal research methodology.