A case study of mediated learning, delayed auditory feedback, and motor repatterning to reduce stuttering

A case study of DW, an 11-yr. old monolingual, English-speaking boy who exhibits stuttering, language delay, and ADHD is presented. DW experienced only limited improvement during stuttering therapy received in public schools, according to parents and the public school clinician. The purpose of this case study was to assess whether fluency treatment which incorporated Mediated Learning, Delayed Auditory Feedback, and Speech Motor Repatterning would enhance progress. Therapy was delivered in two treatments, with each treatment being 5 wk. of intense therapy, separated by one year. Treatment 1 of combined Mediated Learning and Delayed Auditory Feedback yielded improvement in fluency, judged by parents and the teacher to be clinically significant. The improved fluency was maintained for one year when DW was pretested for participation in Treatment 2, which combined Mediated Learning, Delayed Auditory Feedback, and Speech Motor Repatterning Exercises. As no conclusions are possible, further study is needed.     

Nonverbal behavior and the vertical dimension of social relations: a meta-analysis

The vertical dimension of interpersonal relations (relating to dominance, power, and status) was examined in association with nonverbal behaviors that included facial behavior, gaze, interpersonal distance, body movement, touch, vocal behaviors, posed encoding skill, and others. Results were separately summarized for people's beliefs (perceptions) about the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and for actual relations between verticality and nonverbal behavior. Beliefs/perceptions were stronger and much more prevalent than were actual verticality effects. Perceived and actual relations were positively correlated across behaviors. Heterogeneity was great, suggesting that verticality is not a psychologically uniform construct in regard to nonverbal behavior. Finally, comparison of the verticality effects to those that have been documented for gender in relation to nonverbal behavior revealed only a limited degree of parallelism.     

Intervention Groups for Adolescents With Conduct Problems: Is Aggregation Harmful or Helpful?

Past research has suggested that the aggregation of deviant peers during treatment may cause harmful effects (T. J. Dishion, J. McCord, & F. Poulin, 1999). This study compared the effectiveness of problem-solving skills training groups in which all members had conduct problems (pure group condition) with groups that consisted of adolescents with and without behavior problems (mixed group condition). Participants were 139 sixth- and seventh-graders (mean age = 12.7; 63% male; 55% White) enrolled at public middle schools. Pre-, post-, and 6-month follow-up data were collected, along with intervention process variables. Results showed that, contrary to the deviancy training hypothesis, adolescents in the pure-group condition engaged in more adaptive in-session behavior and received lower scores on the parent and teacher ratings of externalizing behavior at postintervention than those in the mixed-group condition. Mediation analyses showed that the deviancy training that occurred in the mixed-group condition accounted for their worse postintervention scores, findings consistent with the deviancy training hypothesis.     

Sequential processing in hemispheric word recognition: the impact of initial letter discriminability on the OUP naming effect

The cerebral hemispheres have been proposed to engage different word recognition strategies: the left hemisphere implementing a parallel, and the right hemisphere, a sequential, analysis. To investigate this notion, we asked participants to name words with an early or late orthographic uniqueness point (OUP), presented horizontally to their left (LVF), right (RVF), or both fields of vision (BVF). Consistent with past foveal research, Experiment 1 produced a robust facilitatory effect of early OUP for RVF/BVF presentations, indicating the presence of sequential processes in lexical retrieval. The effect was absent for LVF trials, which we argue results from the disadvantaged position of initial letters of words presented in the LVF. To test this proposition, Experiment 2 assessed the discriminability of various letter positions in the visual fields using a bar-probe task. The obtained error functions highlighted the poor discriminability of initial letters in the LVF and latter letters in the RVF. To confirm that this asymmetry in initial letter acuity was responsible for the absent OUP effect for LVF presentations, Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1 using vertical stimulus presentations. Results indicated a marked facilitatory effect of early OUP across visual fields, supporting our contention that the lack of OUP effect for LVF presentations in Experiment 1 resulted from poor discriminability of the initial letters. These findings confirm the presence of sequential processes in both left and right hemisphere word recognition, casting doubt on parallel models of word processing.     

The Effect of Competitive Outcome and Task-Involving,Ego-Involving,and Cooperative Structures on the Psychological Well-Being of Individuals Engaged in a Co-Ordination Task: A Self-Determination Approach

Differing task and motivational characteristics of the competitive setting (viz., task-involving/ego-involving climates, cooperative/individual, and win/loss competitive outcome) were explored in relation to need satisfaction and subjective well-being (SWB). Participants, one-on-one or in pairs, were required to participate in a physical co-ordination task. Results revealed participants exposed to a task-involving condition and those who worked in cooperation to report higher levels of need satisfaction and SWB. Conversely, individuals exposed to ego-involving conditions and those who competed individually experienced higher levels of negative affect. Winning resulted in higher levels of need satisfaction and SWB, whereas losing led to higher levels of negative affect. Losing individually in an ego-involving condition led to the highest levels of negative affect responses and attenuated levels of reported need satisfaction and SWB. Via structural equation modeling, a model of motivational processes grounded in self-determination theory was supported in which elements of the competitive situation that facilitated need satisfaction led to increments in reported indices of SWB.     

Book Reviews : Dane R. Gordon and David C. Durst (eds.), Civil Society in Southeast Europe,Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, 2004.

Studies in East European Thought -     

Is Workplace Harassment Hazardous to Your Health?

We examined cross-sectional and lagged effects of sexual harassment (SH) and generalized workplace harassment (GWH) on incidence of self-reported illness, injury, or assault in a sample of over 1,500 university employees. SH and GWH, but not other job stressors, were related to increased odds of illness, injury, or assault. This was true when SH, GWH, and illness, injury, or assault were measured at the same time point, as well as when SH and GWH were measured in year prior to illness, injury, or assault.The data presented here are part of an ongoing longitudinal study of workplace harassment conducted at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Illinois at Chicago. This research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (grants AA09989 and AA13332). Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 2004, Chicago, Illinois. The data were collected by the Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.     

ROCs in recognition with and without identification

Receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) for the recognition of unidentified word fragments were analysed and compared with ROCs for the recognition of identified word fragments. In all conditions reported here, the z-transformed ROCs (z-ROCs) for recognition without identification were linear, with slopes near 1.0. In contrast, the z-ROCs for recognition with identification each had both a linear and a quadratic component, and a slope of substantially less than 1.0. Because the recognition of unidentified word fragments likely results from a familiarity process, the present study examined how well the effect can be explained by global matching variants of signal detection theory. Global matching models predict that memory should be better for strong items from a mixed list than for strong items from a pure list, and should be worse for weak items from a mixed list than for weak items from a pure list; however, only the latter pattern was shown for the recognition of unidentified items.     

Focused attention is not enough to activate discontinuities in lines, but scrutiny is

We distinguish between the roles played by spatial attention and conscious intention in terms of their impact on the processing of segmentation signals, like discontinuities in lines, associated with the act of scrutinizing. We showed previously that the processing of discontinuities in lines can be activated. This is evidenced by an impairment in the detection of a gap between parallel elements when it follows a gap between collinear elements in the same location and orientation. This effect is no longer observed if attention is divided between two gaps in the first stimulus. The results from this study show that focusing attention on a gap between collinear elements is not enough to observe a modulation, consistently with the need to integrate, rather than to separate, collinear elements in usual conditions. The modulation is sensitive to the conscious expectations of subjects, suggesting that an intention can trigger modulations that spatial attention cannot.