A multisource exploration of the friendship patterns of children with and without learning disabilities

Friendship patterns of 117 children with learning disabilities (LD) and 115 children without LD in Grades 4–8 were examined. In comparison with children without LD, boys with LD had fewer mutual friends, children with LD had more friends with learning problems and more younger friends, and children with LD in Grades 4–6 had less stable relationships. With regard to friendship quality, children with LD reported higher levels of conflict, lower levels of validation, and more problems with relationship repair than did children without LD. The findings were discussed in terms of factors that have been found to enhance friendship such as proximity and similarity, and the social skills difficulties that have been associated with learning disabilities.     

Index of Subjects

Subject Index

Index of Subjects     

Listening to discourse in distracting settings: the effects of aging

Younger and older adults listened to discourse in quiet and in conversational noise, before answering questions concerning the material. Some questions required listeners to recall specific details; others were of a more integrative nature. When the listening situation was adjusted for individual differences in hearing, younger and older adults were equally adept at remembering the gist of the passages in both quiet and in two levels of noise. The two age groups also did not differ with respect to memory for specific details when listening in quiet or in a moderate level of noise, even when required to perform a concurrent task. Only at the loudest noise level did younger adults tend to recall more detail than older adults. However, when no adjustments were made to compensate for the poorer hearing of older adults (all participants tested under identical listening conditions), older adults could not recall as much detail as younger adults, either in quiet or in noise. The results indicate that the speech-comprehension difficulties of older adults primarily reflect declines in hearing rather than in cognitive ability.     

Tinnitus als soziale Infektion?

Background

11 out of 35 male employees of a central alert team with rescue coordination function developed a tinnitus disorder. This clinical case-study highlights the psychodynamic background of this accumulation.

Methods

Employees were investigated by psychometric questionnaires and semistructured psychodynamic biografical interviews. Additionally aspects of group dynamics and organisational structure were assessed.

Results

All staff members reported adverse work conditions. Medical and psychometric examination of the tinnitus patients did not reveal severe pathological findings. The interviews identified psychodynamic conflicts dealing with autonomy and regulation of self-esteem. All tinnitus patients reported a very adverse or punitive father relation and difficulties in performing a stabile male role and self-image. Group dynamics was dominated by paranoid and regressive tendencies complicated by maladaptive coping, crude perception of external facts and a pronounced experience of aggressive impulses.

Conclusion

The remobilisation of infantile powerlessness, ineffectiveness and helplessness triggered by adverse work conditions and the introduction of a new culture of personal responsibility within the work organisation together with an impaired coping of separation conflicts enforced by traumatic aspects of the relation with the father may have promoted the tinnitus symptomatology. Additionally, due to the missing awareness of the importance of such group dynamical processes the employers contributed to an increasing psychosocial distress, which promoted the accumulated manifestation of tinnitus as a conflict expressive symptom.     

Modeling task switching without switching tasks: a short-term priming account of explicitly cued performance

Switch costs in task switching are commonly attributed to an executive control process of task-set reconfiguration, particularly in studies involving the explicit task-cuing procedure. The authors propose an alternative account of explicitly cued performance that is based on 2 mechanisms: priming of cue encoding from residual activation of cues in short-term memory and compound cue retrieval of responses from long-term memory. Their short-term priming account explains the repeated cue encoding benefit, switch cost, reduction in switch cost with preparation time, and other effects. The authors develop a mathematical model of their priming account and fit it to data from 3 experiments, demonstrating that a set of basic psychological processes can produce several effects--including putative switch costs--without switching tasks.     

Speech comprehension difficulties in older adults: cognitive slowing or age-related changes in hearing?

Speech comprehension declines more rapidly in older adults than in younger adults as speech rate increases. This effect is usually attributed to a slowing of brain function with age. Alternatively, this Age X Speed interaction could reflect the inability of the older adult's auditory system to cope with speed-induced stimulus degradation. When the authors speeded speech in a way that produced minimal degradation, both age groups were equally affected. However, when speech was speeded using other methods, word identification declined more in older than in younger adults. Hence, auditory decline rather than cognitive slowing may be responsible for older adults' poorer performance in speeded conditions.     

The implications of cortical recruitment and brain morphology for individual differences in inhibitory function in aging humans

The authors assessed individual differences in cortical recruitment, brain morphology, and inhibitory task performance. Similar to previous studies, older adults tended toward bilateral activity during task performance more than younger adults. However, better performing older adults showed less bilateral activity than poorer performers, contrary to the idea that additional activity is universally compensatory. A review of the results and of extant literature suggests that compensatory activity in prefrontal cortex may only be effective if the additional cortical processors brought to bear on the task can play a complementary role in task performance. Morphological analyses revealed that frontal white matter tracts differed as a function of performance in older adults, suggesting that hemispheric connectivity might impact both patterns of recruitment and cognitive performance.     

Psychology of the scientist: LXXXV. Research on homosexuality: a response to Schumm (and Herek)

Because social science is "messy," just about any criticism of any work--including our efforts--has validity. But the empiricist principle is more important than a theoretical search for perfection in research. The findings from our 1983-1984 nationwide random survey are superior to earlier efforts and similar enough to those reported by the 1992 nationwide random survey conducted by University of Chicago investigators, the 1994 British effort, and the 1996 NHSDA to suggest all approximate "a similar truth about reported sexuality."     

Experimental tests of an attitudinal theory of the gender gap in voting

This research examined the hypothesis that gender gaps in voting stem from differences in the extent to which men and women agree with candidates' issue stances. Two initial experiments portraying candidates by their sex and attitudes and a third experiment that also included information about political party produced the predicted attitudinal gender-congeniality effect: Participants of each sex reported greater likelihood, compared with participants of the other sex, of voting for the candidate who endorsed positions typically favored more by their own sex than the other sex. In addition, this gender-congeniality effect was present among Republican and independent participants but absent among Democratic participants because Democratic men as well as women favored candidates who advocated the positions typically favored by women. Interpretation invoked the importance of group interest based on gender as an influence on women's voting.