Inferential processing of context: Studies of cognitively impaired subjects

Language comprehension tasks involving pronoun coreference were administered to a group of demented patients, a group of patients with cardiac disease, and groups of normal elderly persons and young adults. Pronoun coreference was constrained by either lexical, syntactic, or contextual cues. No differences were found between old and young subjects for any task. While the demented patients were impaired on all tasks, the cardiac patients were specifically impaired in the inferential processing of context.     

A practitioner's guide to meta-analysis

Describes the application to community issues of the meta-analytic research strategies increasingly used in many field of psychology. First, we highlight the potential value of meta-analysis to community research. Second, we describe six major steps involved in conducting an effective meta-analysis. These steps include formulating the initial research question(s), locating relevant studies, abstracting critical information from each study, and presenting, analyzing, and interpreting the resultant data. In this guide, the major aspects of meta-analysis are discussed with particular emphasis on the procedures that are most critical to the validity of its conclusions. Greater familiarity with the techniques, issues, and potential of meta-analysis may stimulate investigators to make more effective use of this powerful approach to integrating research in community psychology.     

Is three greater than five: The relation between physical and semantic size in comparison tasks

In this study, subjects were asked to judge which of two digits (e.g., 3 5) was larger either in physical or in numerical size. Reaction times were facilitated when the irrelevant dimension was congruent with the relevant dimension and were inhibited when the two were incongruent (size congruity effect). Although judgments based on physical size were faster, their speed was affected by the numerical distance between the members of the digit pair, indicating that numerical distance is automatically computed even when it is irrelevant to the comparative judgment being required by the task. This finding argues for parallel processing of physical and semantic information in this task.     

The future case: An alternative to single case study

Traditional single case studies have tended to focus on the individual's past and/or present with minimal reference to one's future. This allows for an incomplete assessment of the reality in which humans participate as organisms-in-process. The future case is advanced as a complement to traditional single case designs. Emphasis is upon imaginative and creative involvement with one's future in the clinical setting. The rationale and concrete outline for this future invention process reflect how individuals can move beyond restricting conditions to higher levels of emotional growth and satisfaction.     

Cognitive and physiological indices of sexual arousal in homosexual,bisexual, and heterosexual males

Cognitive and physiological indices of sexual arousal were investigated utilizing groups of homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual subjects (ten subjects per group) who were presented both homosexual and heterosexual films and slides. The results indicated that both homosexual and heterosexual subjects were able to estimate accurately their degree of erection to the erotic stimuli. Bisexual subjects, however, showed a large discrepancy between the magnitude of actual erection and verbally reported estimates of penile tumescence. In terms of physiological arousal, the erectile responses of the homosexual and bisexual groups were indistinguishable, a finding which questions the existence of male bisexuality as distinct from homosexuality or as a different sexual orientation in males.     

Differential effects of person in the dog and in the human

People have marked effects on dog’s heart rate, with great individual variations for different persons. Apparently people to which the dog is attached have the greatest effect upon heart rate. Replications of the animal experiments using the psychotherapist and two other people revealed no effects upon the heart rate of a schizophrenic human. In the human the effects of people are probably best demonstrated in connection with verbal communication.     

Parallel between antianxiety and cardiovascular effects of chlordiazepoxide in genetically nervous dogs

There is evidence that cardiac arrhythmias are partially of CNS origin, and that certain drugs affect arrhythmia, both positively and negatively, through CNS action. We hypothesized and confirmed that chlordiazepoxide diminished the well-established incidence of arrhythmias (A-V blocks and nodal escapes) in five nervous pointer dogs. It is known that this drug normalizes behavior and aids in the bar-pressing performance of nervous dogs. Nervous dogs tend to have low heart rates (HRs) while normals have higher HRs. Chlordiazepoxide increased HRs in our five nervous dogs, and we postulated that HR increase would be less or none in normals. This was confirmed in a later study of five normals. A further study of eight normal dogs and eight nervous dogs essentially reproduced these findings, suggesting the possibility that the slow heart rates and the behavioral abnormality have a common basis, expected to be some CNS biochemical lesion.