Interpersonal circumplex

The social and intellectual climate of the late 1940s and early 1950s in America helped nourish humanistic, person-centered views of human behavior. During that time, psychologists such as Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, David McClelland, Harry Murray, and Carl Rogers emphasized the positive growth potential in human character. The psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan proposed that personality can best be understood within the context of interpersonal transactions, and he provided a practical, street-smart understanding of psychiatric symptoms that was quite an advance over the traditional medical and psychoanalytic viewpoints. These ideas, along with the concept of dimensionalizing traits rather than categorizing them, inspired my colleagues and I to conduct our cooperative work on the interpersonal circumplex, which culminated in the publication of my monograph. Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (Leary, 1957).     

The influence of prosodic structure on the resolution of temporary syntactic closure ambiguities

This paper investigates the influence of prosodic structure on the process of sentence comprehension, with a specific focus on the relative contributions of syntactic and prosodic information to the resolution of temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. We argue that prosodic structure provides an initial memory representation for spoken sentences, and that information from this prosodic representation is available to inform syntactic parsing decisions. This view makes three predictions for the processing of temporary syntactic ambiguity: 1. When prosodic and syntactic boundaries coincide, syntactic processing should be facilitated. 2. When prosodic boundaries are placed at misleading points in syntactic structure, syntactic processing should show interference effects. 3. The processing difficulties that have been reliably demonstrated in reading experiments for syntactically complex sentences should disappear when those sentences are presented with a felicitous prosodic structure in listening experiments. These predictions were confirmed by series of experiments measuring end-of-sentence comprehension time and cross-modal naming time for sentences with temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. Sentences with coinciding or conflicting prosodic and syntactic boundaries were compared to a prosodic baseline condition.This research was supported in part by NIMH grant R29 MH51768 to the first author and NIMH grant T32 MH19729 to the Northeastern University Psychology Department.     

Category and Attribute Knowledge Deterioration in Alzheimer's Disease

A prevalent theory regarding the deterioration of semantic memory in Alzheimer's disease is that it is a bottom-up process. If this is true, performance on tests of attribute knowledge should decline more rapidly than performance on tests of categorical knowledge as dementia severity increases. In the present study, a convincing pattern of findings to either support or reject the theory failed to emerge. This raised questions regarding the ability to separate attribute and categorical knowledge, and whether one can be tested without influence of the other. Questions also were raised regarding the additional cognitive processes needed to complete tasks of semantic memory.     

Supervision groups for health advisers working with patients with HIV disease

This paper describes a case supervision group with health advisors working in a clinic specializing in the treatment of patients with HIV Infection. Themes discussed in the group are presented with an evaluation of the group intervention, some consideration of group process and the health advisers views on their work. This is discussed in relation to present research into occupational stress in this field.     

Consistency of Interpersonal Themes for Patients In Psychotherapy

ABSTRACT In this study the extent to which patients in psychotherapy display similar interpersonal themes across multiple narratives of their interactions with others was investigated. Interpersonal themes were measured using a new instrument entitled the Quantitative Assessment of Interpersonal Themes (QUAINT) method, which assesses the wishes, responses from others, and responses of self that occur in narratives about interactions with others. For 60 patients in psychotherapy, evidence for repetitiveness of themes was found; the effect was relatively small but was highly statistically significant. Individual differences in the degree of repetitiveness of themes were not related to type of treatment (dynamic vs. cognitive), but they were related to length of time in treatment. The limitations of the study are reviewed and future research directions are outlined.     

Locus of semantic priming effects in speeded naming

The locus of semantic priming effects was examined by measuring onset and rime durations as well as response latencies of words with consistent and inconsistent pronunciations, using the postvocalic naming task. We found that the effect of a semantic prime on naming duration was localized rather than spread across the entire word; onset durations were shorter in the related condition than in the unrelated condition, but rime durations were equal in the two prime conditions. Moreover, the priming effect on onset durations was larger for words with inconsistent than for those with consistent pronunciations. These duration results cannot be accounted for by previous proposals, but they can be accounted for by models in which phonemes are activated in parallel rather than serially from left to right and in which motor programs are based on phonemes rather than syllables. Contrary to previous reports of an interaction of prime and regularity (a factor closely related to consistency) on naming latency, we found no interaction of prime and consistency on response latency. We argue that this conflict is only apparent and arises because naming latency conflates response latency and initial phoneme duration for some targets.     

Gender Differences in the Suicide-Related Behaviors of Adolescents and Young Adults

Gender differences in suicide-related behaviorswere examined in an older adolescent and a young adultsample (primarily Caucasian). Suicide-related behaviorswere assessed by the Life Attitudes Schedule (LAS) as well as by measures of depressivesymptomatology and hopelessness. The LAS measures a broadcontinuum of potentially life-diminishing orlife-enhancing behaviors. There are four LAScontent-category subscales: overtly suicidal and death-related,self-related, risk and injury-related, and health-relatedbehaviors. As hypothesized, in both samples, genderdifferences in the expression of suicide-related behaviors were obtained. Males from both samplesendorsed substantially more risk-taking andinjury-producing behaviors than females. Males in bothsamples also reported more negative health-relatedbehaviors than females. In contrast, females reported moresymptoms of depression than males. Hopelessness scoresonly differentiated male and female young adults; maleand female adolescents did not differ significantly on the hopelessness measure. These findings areprimarily discussed in terms of gender-role socializationtheory. Implications for the treatment of suicidality aredrawn.     

Correlates of sociometric status in school children in Buenos Aires

Teacher ratings on Spanish translations of the Comprehensive Behavior Rating Scale for Children and peer nominations were obtained for 110 school children (42 boys and 68 girls) in grades 2– 5 at a public elementary school in Buenos Aires. Nominations of likes best were negatively correlated with language processing deficits, attention problems, and sluggish tempo as rated by both teachers and peers, and positively correlated with teacher ratings of social competence, for both boys and girls. The reverse pattern was found for nominations of likes least. Children were assigned to sociometric status groups of popular (n=27), rejected (n=28), neglected (n=7) controversial (n=11), and average (n=37) based on number of LL and LB nominations. Rejected and popular children could be differentiated by teacher and peer ratings of linguistic information processing deficits, inattention, and sluggish tempo. Behavioral characteristics of motor hyperactivity, impulsivity, and aggression were significantly associated with being male but did not differ by sociometric status group.The assistance of Claudia Colon, Educational District of Buenos Aires, and Viviana Smith, Department of the Interior, Argentina, in the translation of measures is gratefully acknowledged. Particular thanks are also extended to the teachers and personnel of Escuela Normal 9 — Domingo F. Sarmiento.