Effect of directed attention on cerebral asymmetries in stuttering adults

9 stutterers and 9 nonstutterers were administered a dichotic digits test under conditions of free recall and directed attention. Analysis indicated right-ear preference for both groups and no differences between the free recall and directed listening conditions. Results are discussed in relation to previous studies in which dichotic digit-stimuli were presented to stutterers.     

Sentential constants in R and R⌝

In this paper, we shall confine ourselves to the study of sentential constants in the system R of relevant implication.In dealing with the behaviour of the sentential constants in R, we shall think of R itself as presented in three stages, depending on the level of truth-functional involvement.     

A note on the computation of the second-order derivatives of the elementary symmetric functions in the rasch model

Jansen (1984) gave explicit formulas for the computation of the second-order derivatives of the elementary symmetric functions. But they are only applicable to those pairs of items which have unequal parameters. It is shown here that for equal parameters similar explicit formulas do exist, too, facilitating the application of the Newton-Raphson procedure to estimate the parameters in the Rasch model and related models according to the conditional maximum likelihood principle.The author wishes to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Self-Control: Essence and Development

The paper surveys practical knowledge about the act of self-control, particularly how to cultivate it. The discussion is organized around four totally interrelated components: awareness, intervention, sense of self, and sense of will.

     

Interparent agreement on the Personality Inventory for Children: Are substantial correlations sufficient?

Mothers' and fathers' responses on the Personality Inventory for Children (PIC) were compared for 360 clinic-referred children and adolescents. Interparent agreement was measured by several different indices. Correlations between parental pairs of scale T-scores derived from each parent averaged .66 for 13 of the profile scales; 9 of the scales exceeded this value. In contrast, mothers and fathers agreed in the classification of the presence of clinical significance an average of 77% of the time across these 13 scales, and pairs of parental PIC profiles contained an average of 3 scales in disagreement. The type of index used to measure interparent agreement was found to affect the results. The discussion examines the nature of interparent disagreement and addresses the implications regarding the use of fathers as informants on this instrument.This article is based on Thomas A. Hulbert's master's thesis. The authors extend their appreciation to James Orisell and Dena Mussaff for their assistance in data preparation and analysis.     

Integration of noxious stimulation across separate somatosensory communications systems: a functional theory of pain

Functional measurement analyses and psychophysical techniques were used to assess how separate, cross-modal, aversive events are integrated in judgements of pain. Subjects made magnitude estimations of noxious stimuli produced by a 6 X 6 factorial design of electric shocks and loud tones. Group data and most of the individual results were consistent with a model of linear pain summation: The estimates of pain approximated the linear sum of the pain estimates of the individual electrocutaneous and auditory components. The relation between painful sensation and current intensity could be described by a mildly expansive power function with an exponent of about 1.1. Auditorily produced painful sensation related to sound pressure level by a mildly compressive power function with an exponent of about 0.90 as a representative figure. Results are interpreted in terms of a functional theory of pain. Noxious events are first transformed to psychological scale values via stimulus-specific psychophysical transfer functions. The outputs of these functions are then combined with other pain-related internal representations of either sensory or cognitive origin, according to simple algebraic models.     

Iconic memory, location information, and partial report

It has been suggested that the systematic decline of partial report as the delay of the partial-report cue increases is due to a time-related loss of location information. Moreover, the backward masking effect is said to be precipitated by the disruption of location information before and after identification. Results from three experiments do not support these claims when new indices of location information and of item information are used. Instead, it was found that the systematic decline in partial report was due to a time-related loss of item information, and location information was affected neither by the delay of the partial-report cue nor by the delay of backward masking. Subjects adopted the "select-then-identify" mode of processing.     

Disruption of reference in aging

A homogeneous sample of normal adults living in a religious order in a study of age effects on reference as a cohesive device in discourse production and comprehension. Narrative and procedural discourse were examined across various levels of complexity and stimulus/response requirements. Results indicate that significant ambiguity of reference emerges in the younger elderly group (age 64-76) in comparison to the middle-aged group (age 27 to 55), and increases markedly in the older elderly group (age 77-92). Related impairments of comprehension and cognition were also observed. These findings are interpreted to be general features of linguistic variation with advancing age. Communicative consequences of ambiguous reference are discussed.