The effects of right hemisphere damage on the pragmatic interpretation of conversational remarks

The ability to interpret conversational utterances was assessed in a group of 12 male patients with unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) and 12 non-brain-damaged, age-matched male control subjects. Subjects listened to short vignettes which described both the affective tone of the relationship between a speaker and an actor, and the actor's performance on a task. Each vignette concluded with the speaker characterizing the actor's performance. In half of the items, the speaker's utterance was literally true; in the other half, the utterance was literally false and invited a nonliteral interpretation. Results showed no appreciable differences in the performance of control subjects and RHD patients when interpreting literally true utterances. In contrast, the two groups differed reliably when interpreting the pragmatic intent of nonliteral utterances: Control subjects used information about both the actor's performance and the speaker-actor relationship, while RHD patients demonstrated difficulty in using the information about the speaker-actor relationship. Results have implications for patients' understanding of essential elements of conversations, such as characters' internal states and their intentions in employing different forms of literal and nonliteral language.     

Freud, Oedipus and the Hebrew Bible

The current paper examines the question of why Freud employed Greek rather than Hebrew foundation legends, specifically the story of Oedipus, as a basis for psychoanalysis, Freud's choice of Oedipus emanates from his deterministic view of the universe, paralleling the Greek rather that the Biblical story of creation. In the Biblical account God precedes and creates nature with no sign of an Oedipal conflict. In the Greek account, nature precedes the gods and the Oedipal conflict is inherent. Freud's choice has implications for his view of human psychology.     

Are All Hostility Scales Alike? Factor Structure and Covariation Among Measures of Hostility1

Few studies have examined the correlational and structural relationships between measures of hostility that may predict coronary heart disease. Using data from a population-based study (N= 2,682), we examined the factor structure among the five subscales from Siegel's (1986) Multi-dimensional Anger Inventory, the three subscales from Spielberger et al.'s (1985) anger expression scales, a Cook-Medley (Cook & Madley, 1954) hostility subscale that measures cynicism, and items measuring hostility from four scales that assess Type A behavior. Eight separate factors were identified: hostile anger expression, perceived control over the expression of one's anger, frequency of anger, ease of anger provocation, brooding, hostile outlook, cynicism, and sullenness. These results suggest that the structure of hostility measures is more complex than previous factor analyses have suggested. Our findings point to the dangers in assuming that a factor structure can be generalized beyond the data on which it is based to provide theoretical statements about psychological structure. The new scales appear to be valid because they correlate with demographic variables and indicators of social support in the expected directions.     

Tables of d′ for variable-standard discrimination paradigms

Signal detection theory (SDT) allows a bias-free measure of sensitivity, d′, to be simply estimated from discrimination data when certain conditions are met. The computation is not straightforward, however, in several popular discrimination designs, such as two- and four-interval same-different designs and the ABX design. The present tables, derived from the SDT models of Macmillan, Kaplan, and Creelman (1977), make possible the estimation of d’ from these complex discrimination designs.     

Beauty Is Only "Name" Deep: The Effect of First-Name On Ratings of Physical Attraction

College students ( n = 197) voted to select a beauty queen from among six photographs equivalent in physical attractiveness, as determined by rankings of 35 students from a separate university. Half the photographs bore a desirable first-name and half were assigned an undesirable first-name. As predicted, firstname had a significant effect on physical attraction: Girls with desirable firstnames received 158 votes to 39 for those with undesirable names. These data were discussed in terms of an additive, rather than an interactive, effect, due to the nature of the task. The strength of these findings was related to the study's ecological validity.     

Effective random seeding of random number generators

To obtain different sequences of values from a random number generating algorithm, we must start with different seed values or discard a variable number of initial samples. For maximum independence among sequences, differences must include the lowest order seed bits, and some generators require one to wait many samples for differences to propagate to the significant bits. While it is straightforward to generate two statistically independent sequences, it is surprisingly difficult to generate three or more such sequences.     

Correlations,contrasts, and components: Fourier analysis in a more familiar terminology

The Fourier transform partitions the energy in a waveform into the sum of the energies of simpler components. This process is the same as the partitioning of variance into linear contrasts and is a way of measuring the correlation between the waveform and each member of a family of prototype model waveforms. Such a partitioning will often, but not always, result in a meaningful decomposition of the original waveform.