PMS as a Gendered Illness Linked to the Construction and Relational Experience of Hetero-Femininity

The majority of research conducted to date on premenstrual distress has focused on heterosexual women. Drawing on research with lesbian and heterosexual self-defined PMS (premenstrual syndrome) sufferers and their partners, we argue that this negates the role played by hetero-patriarchal constructions of both femininity and premenstrual change in the lived experience of premenstrual distress. Negative constructions of PMS and over-responsibility within the home, commonly found in heterosexual relationships, exacerbate distress and result in women being pathologised premenstrually. Conversely, support and understanding offered by partners, more common in lesbian relationships, reduces guilt and self-pathologisation, allowing women to engage in coping strategies premenstrually, such as taking time out to be alone, or engage self-care. These patterns of relational negotiation of women’s premenstrual change can be contextualised within broader cultural representations of hetero-normativity, which provide the context for gendered roles and coping.     

Wittgenstein on the Place of the Concept “Noticing an Aspect”

Seeing aspects is a dominant theme in Wittgenstein's 1940s writings on philosophy of psychology. Interpreters disagree about what Wittgenstein was trying to do in these discussions. I argue that interpreting Wittgenstein's observations about the interrelations between “noticing an aspect” and other psychological concepts as a systematic theory of aspect‐seeing diminishes key lessons of Wittgenstein's explorations: these interrelations are enormously complicated and “noticing an aspect” resists neat classification. Further, Wittgenstein invites us to engage in his “placing activity,” and by doing so we are building a skill that is valuable for enabling us to help ourselves when we encounter conceptual difficulties.     

The utility of the Kessler Screening Scale for Psychological Distress (K6) in two American Indian communities

The Kessler Screening Scale for Psychological Distress (K6; Kessler et al., 2002) has been used widely as a screener for mental health problems and as a measure of severity of impact of mental health problems. However, the applicability and utility of this measure for assessments within American Indian communities has not been explored. Data were drawn from a large-scale epidemiological study conducted in cooperation with 2 American Indian populations. Participants (N = 3,084) were 15-54 years of age and living on or near their home reservations; each completed an interview that included a version of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (Robins, Wing, Wittchen, & Helzer, 1988) and the K6. A measure of both physical- and mental-health-related quality of life-the Medical Outcome Study's Short Form-36 (Ware & Sherbourne, 1992)-was used to examine the importance of the K6 over and above psychiatric diagnoses. The K6 was shown to be an appropriate screening and severity measure for mood disorders in these 2 samples. It also predicted health-related quality of life over and above that predicted by diagnoses alone. Inclusion of a measure such as the K6 as a complement to more traditional dichotomous diagnoses in both research and clinical practice is recommended.     

Processing passive sentences in aphasia: deficits and strategies

Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics' ability to process passive sentences in the absence of semantic cues was investigated in an experiment which varies syntactic complexity and word order. The results indicate that Broca and Wernicke patients use different strategies for sentence comprehension. Wernicke patients use rather general strategies for interpretation, which assign syntactic function according to sequential arrangements of words. Broca's aphasics, by contrast, base their interpretation on specific structural elements of the sentence's surface form, without, however, being able to exploit the full syntactic information of these elements. The different strategies are interpreted to reflect differential underlying deficits.     

Response bias in very first judgments of the reflectance of grays: Numerical versus linear estimates

Three hundred unsophisticated Os judged the lightness of a gray, reflectance 44%, against a white, reflectance 83%. Half gave a numerical estimate calling the white 100. The remainder marked a 100 mm line labeled 100 at one end and zero at the other. Both distributions of estimates were skewed with a mode around 60. The linear estimates tended to avoid the middle of the line (p<.01).The numerical estimates tended to end in zero or five (p<.001). The two distributions were not quite reliably different, but the medians of subgroups of 10 Os drawn from the two distributions were reliably different (p<.05).     

Pastoral care and administration

The desire to be a spiritual leader is a worthy goal for ministers. Misunderstanding of such leadership leads to errors: failure to face the realities of structure and organization in administration or cynicism about any relation between spiritual and organizational work. Pastoral care is not a substitute for administration. Yet, the perspective of pastoral care suggests insights that can help the pastor understand the dynamics of administrative experience.     

Children reorient using the left/right sense of coloured landmarks at 18-24 months

In previous studies, children disoriented in small enclosures used room shape, but not wall colours, to find hidden objects. Their reorientation was said to depend solely on a "geometric module" informationally encapsulated with respect to colour. We argue that previous studies did not fully evaluate children's use of colour owing to a bias in the enclosures' design. In this study, disoriented 18-24 month olds searched for toys in small square enclosures with two blue and two white walls. Children successfully reoriented using wall colour. This shows that they can make location judgments based on the left/right sense of the colours of adjoining landmarks. Performance was no different when symmetric colourful shapes were added to walls, but improved with asymmetric shapes which could be used without left/right judgments. The relatively poor use of colour in previous studies may be explained partly by a bias in their design, and partly by children's limited ability to discriminate the left/right sense of nongeometric features.     

Developmental trajectories for spatial frames of reference in Williams syndrome

Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic disorder associated with severe visuocognitive impairment. Individuals with WS also report difficulties with everyday wayfinding. To study the development of body-, environment-, and object-based spatial frames of reference in WS, we tested 45 children and adults with WS on a search task in which the participant and a spatial array are moved with respect to each other. Although individuals with WS showed a marked delay, like young controls they demonstrated independent, additive use of body- and environment-based frames of reference. Crucially, object-based (intrinsic) representations based on local landmarks within the array were only marginally used even by adults with WS, whereas in typical development these emerge at 5 years. Deficits in landmark use are consistent with wayfinding difficulties in WS, and may also contribute to problems with basic localization, since in typical development landmark-based representations supplement those based on the body and on self-motion. Difficulties with inhibition or mental rotation may be further components in the impaired ability to use the correct reference frame in WS.