Single linear ordering versus multiple discrepant orderings in the cognitive representation of social structures

Previous studies have assumed that people have a predilection for single linear orderings, of which status congruence is a special case. Eighty-two subjects were run in a two-stage experiment to examine preference for linear orderings and whether single or multiple discrepant orderings are preferred when 1 instead of having to learn, subjects freely construct social structures, and 2 the material they are presented is more specified and less simplified than is usually the case in cognitive bias studies. In the first stage Ss were presented with sets of five individual characteristic dimensions, of which three were inherently orderable. Their task was to attribute one characteristic from each dimension to each of five fictitious persons. In the second stage, Ss were asked, for three types of influence (professional, political and cultural), to build an influence structure among the five persons constructed in the first stage. In Stage 1, linear ordering was used for three of the five dimensions. Two of these dimensions used a single ordering, while the third was only weakly related to the first two. In Stage 2, largely transitive but incomplete relations of influence were established, based on a salary-occupational hierarchy. The completeness of the relation depended on the nature of the influence.     

The acquisition of allophonic rules: statistical learning with linguistic constraints

Phonological rules relate surface phonetic word forms to abstract underlying forms that are stored in the lexicon. Infants must thus acquire these rules in order to infer the abstract representation of words. We implement a statistical learning algorithm for the acquisition of one type of rule, namely allophony, which introduces context-sensitive phonetic variants of phonemes. This algorithm is based on the observation that different realizations of a single phoneme typically do not appear in the same contexts (ideally, they have complementary distributions). In particular, it measures the discrepancies in context probabilities for each pair of phonetic segments. In Experiment 1, we test the algorithm's performances on a pseudo-language and show that it is robust to statistical noise due to sampling and coding errors, and to non-systematic rule application. In Experiment 2, we show that a natural corpus of semiphonetically transcribed child-directed speech in French presents a very large number of near-complementary distributions that do not correspond to existing allophonic rules. These spurious allophonic rules can be eliminated by a linguistically motivated filtering mechanism based on a phonetic representation of segments. We discuss the role of a priori linguistic knowledge in the statistical learning of phonology.     

Questioning the Specificity of ASRS-v1.1 to Accurately Detect ADHD in Substance Abusing Populations

Objective: To assess the specificity of the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS-v1.1) in detecting ADHD among individuals with substance use disorders (SUDs). Method: A chart review of 183 SUD patients was conducted. Patients were screened for ADHD with the ASRS-v1.1 and were later assessed by a psychiatrist specialized in ADHD. Results: Among SUD patients scoring positive results on the ASRS-v1.1 for the presence of ADHD, the ADHD diagnosis could only be confirmed in 26% of the sample by an expert psychiatrist. Conclusion: The ASRS-v1.1 reports low specificity in detecting ADHD among SUD populations.     

The Narratology of Lay Ethics

The five narratives identified by the DEEPEN-project are interpreted in terms of the ancient story of desire, evil, and the sacred, and the modern narratives of alienation and exploitation. The first three narratives of lay ethics do not take stock of what has radically changed in the modern world under the triple and joint evolution of science, religion, and philosophy. The modern narratives, in turn, are in serious need of a post-modern deconstruction. Both critiques express the limits of humanism. They do not imply, however, that these narratives should not be taken seriously. In particular, the enduring presence of three ancient narratives in laypeople’s symbolic thought is highly significant in terms of the role that the logic of the sacred keeps playing in the workings of modern societies. Lay people’s implicit understanding of how modern technology tends towards catastrophe and apocalypse provides the strongest argument for taking these narratives seriously.     

NonREM sleep mentation in chronically-treated persons with schizophrenia

This study examined the laboratory dream content reported by 14 patients with schizophrenia and 15 controls, with a focus on reports obtained from NonREM sleep. Both the controls' and patients' frequency of dream recall following awakenings from NonREM and REM sleep were similar to values reported for healthy participants. Patients' NonREM sleep narratives were shorter than those from controls. When compared to their reports from REM sleep, both groups' NonREM sleep reports included significantly fewer words and reportable items. The controls were more likely to report a subjective feeling of bizarreness for their REM sleep reports as compared to their NonREM sleep reports. This difference was not observed in patients with schizophrenia. Taken together, these findings suggest few differences between the NonREM sleep mentation of patients with schizophrenia and of controls and that sleep stage cognitive style is comparable in both groups, with NonREM sleep reports being more thought-like, less elaborate and bizarre than REM sleep reports.     

Handwriting in patients with Parkinson disease: effect of L-dopa and stimulation of the sub-thalamic nucleus on motor anticipation

The present research focused on how patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) produce handwriting sequences. PD patients who were on/off medication or deep brain stimulation treatments had to write lll and lln trigrams. We evaluated their ability to anticipate on-line the last letter in the trigram. The results revealed that in PD patients, contrary to healthy participants, the percentage of time taken by the down-stroke of the second l did not vary as a function of the spatial constraints of the following letter (l or n). In other words, the handwriting of the PD patients did not exhibit any sign of motor anticipation. However, under treatment, PD patients exhibited similar results to healthy participants despite no improvement in movement variability. Taken together these results do not seem consistent with the hypothesis that PD patients do not anticipate future movements because of their movement variability. They are more in agreement with theories that postulate that PD patients have a general deficit in the parallel processing of the components of a motor sequence.     

Interapy: treatment of post-traumatic stress via the internet

This paper describes the theoretical background and procedures (including psycho-education, screening, treatment protocol and outcome measurement) involved in a protocol-driven internet treatment of post-traumatic stress and grief in a group of people who have suffered from mild to relatively severe trauma. The paper examines the results of 3 outcome and process studies, which were carried out initially in a student population and subsequently in the general population of highly traumatized people. In the latter study, participants in the experimental condition (n = 69) improved significantly more than participants in the waiting list control condition (n = 32), with respect to trauma-related symptoms and general psychopathology. The effect sizes were large. More than 50% of the participants treated showed reliable change and clinically significant improvement after treatment for avoidance and depression. Treatment proved most beneficial for participants who had suffered from intentional trauma and those who had not previously discussed the traumatic events with significant others. Content analysis of the publications indicates a remarkable increase in cognitive coping during treatment. The possibilities for future research into internet-driven treatment of post-traumatic stress symptomatology are discussed, including the proposal to study the effects of sending a final written letter to a significant other person.     

A taxometric analysis of the latent structure of psychopathy: evidence for dimensionality

The taxonomic status of psychopathy is controversial. Whereas some studies have found evidence that psychopathy, at least its antisocial component, is distributed as a taxon, others have found that both major components of psychopathy-callousness/unemotionality and impulsivity/antisocial behavior-appear to distribute as dimensions and show little evidence of taxonicity. In the present study, recent advances in taxometric analysis were added to P. Meehl's (1995) multiple consistency tests strategy for assessing taxonicity, and they were applied to Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (R. D. Hare, 2003) ratings of 4,865 offenders sampled from multiple forensic settings. The results indicated that both the individual components of psychopathy and their interface are distributed dimensionally. Both the implications of these results for research in psychopathy and the integration of these findings with previous taxometric studies of psychopathy are discussed.     

Usage-based account of the acquisition of liaison: evidence from sensitivity to the singular/plural orientation of nouns

This study investigates whether children’s production and recognition of obligatory liaison sequences in French depend on the singular/plural orientation of nouns. Certain nouns occur more frequently in the plural (e.g., arbre “tree”), whereas others are found more often in the singular (e.g., arc-en-ciel “rainbow”). In the input, children more frequently encounter these plural-oriented nouns after determiners that indicate plurality (e.g., les,des “the”, deux “two”) and that are often associated with a /z/ liaison (e.g., deux arbres [døzarbr] “two trees”). In Experiment 1, 122 children (3 years 2 months to 6 years 3 months of age) were asked to produce nominal phrases with either /z/ liaisons (i.e., in plural contexts such as deux ours [døzurs] “two bears”) or /n/ liaisons (i.e., in singular contexts such as un ours [nurs] “one bear”). We found correlations between the plural orientation of the nouns and (a) the probability that they will be preceded by an incorrect /z/ liaison in the singular context and (b) the probability that they will be preceded by a correct /z/ liaison in the plural context. This result was, however, restricted to the younger children. In Experiment 2, 20 children (5 years 5 months to 6 years 3 months of age) were asked to monitor target words in auditorily presented sentences. The results showed shorter reaction times for singular-oriented nouns when preceded by a singular determiner than when preceded by a plural determiner. Conversely, plural-oriented nouns were responded to faster when preceded by a plural determiner than when preceded by a singular determiner. Results are discussed within the framework of a two-stage model of liaison acquisition recently proposed by Chevrot, Chabanal, and Dugua (Journal of French Language Studies,17 [2007] 103-128) as well as by Chevrot, Dugua, and Fayol (Journal of Child Language [in press]).