A reflection: Howard Scott Liddell, 1895-1962

Howard S. Liddell, Professor of Psychobiology in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, was one of the earliest American students and developers of I.P. Pavlov's theory of the conditioned reflex and an early researcher on stress. The significance of Liddell's work on stress was fully recognized when he was sent, as a member of a commission, to the battlefront at the height of the Korean War to study stress and self-control in the soldiers. This profound experience convinced Liddell that behavioral research must ultimately be made relevant to the understanding and elevation of human behavior. He spent the remaining ten years of his life in efforts to implement this conviction through research, writing, and lectures before scientific and lay groups.     

Impulsivity and perception: individual differences in the processing of the local and global dimensions of stimuli

There appears to be an association between a "global" mode of perceptual processing and a cluster of personality traits, one of which is impulsivity. The goal of the present study was to clarify this relationship. Subjects differing in impulsivity (as measured by a self-report inventory) performed speeded cardsorting tasks. They sorted stimuli consisting of large letters made up of smaller letters. Highly impulsive subjects had no more difficulty than other subjects in ignoring the large, "global," letters when they tried to attend to the smaller, "local," letters of which they were composed, nor were they more vulnerable than other subjects to Stroop-like response interference produced by the global letters. High impulsives did have particular difficulty when the task required that they integrate the information provided by the local and global letters. This finding can be explained in terms of individual differences in the value placed on speed relative to accuracy in information processing.     

A survey os school psychologists'' use of behavior modification procedures

A national survey of behavior modification procedures used by school psychologists is reported. Usable questionnaires were received from 148 (49%) of 300 randomly selected members of the 1982 National Association of School Psychologists directory. Each respondent was asked to indicate the type of exposure, use, and inclusion of data collection procedures for each of 18 commonly used behavioral techniques. Conditional probabilities between type of exposure and use found strong relationships between supervision and subsequent use. The implications for the field of school psychology and future directions for training programs are discussed.     

Biomagnetism from the neuropsychiatric viewpoint--principles of recent developments in diagnostic procedure

The following survey is intended to demonstrate and discuss some principle problems of biomagnetism and the application in clinical fields. The development of special technical parameters especially by the SQUID method is initiating new possibilities of research and completing the neurobiologically determinated basis and conditions of neuropsychiatric disorders. The Magnetoencephalography (MEG) will be represent an important role of a new functional diagnostic method.     

The effects of child abuse as seen in adults: George Orwell

The author presents the case of a patient who showed the massive defensive effects seen in people who were abused in childhood. These effects are similar to those described in George Orwell's 1984 and in his autobiographical writings: denial and "doublethink"; masochistic submission to the tormentor; turning of anger against the self and loving "Big Brother"; identifying with the abuser and tormenting others; a burgeoning of anal mechanisms and obsessive phenomena that results in a massive isolation of affects; excessive emotional control alongside outbursts of rage. The interference with memory and emotions compromises identity and humanity. The unforseeable evolution of innate gifts in a child sometimes permits a partial transcendence of these crippling defenses, as Orwell partially transcended what appears to have been the emotional deprivation of his childhood and what he felt to have been the abuse of his schoolboy years.     

Electrophysiological correlates of semantic features

Analyses of averaged auditory evoked responses to a list of 10 positive and 10 negative words led to the identification of a restricted region in the brain response which reliably discriminated between words differing in the semantic features positive and negative. These data support the view that word meanings are composed of more basic components or features and are not stored simply as dictionary items in the brain.     

Nonprofessional counselors: Revisiting selection and impact issues

This study examined two issues related to the use of nonprofessional counselors (n = 159) within the context of a diversion program for juvenile offenders. First, the relationship of the nonprofessionals' personality traits and general attitudes to client outcome was examined. No statistically significant correlations were observed. Second, the differential impact of various training and supervision factors was examined in terms of nonprofessional satisfaction, attitudes, and locus of control. Results suggested that training intensity, training content, and supervision setting may influence nonprofessionals' attitudes towards various social groups and their satisfaction with the nonprofessional experience.     

Adaptation and vulnerability in high-risk adolescents: An examination of environmental mediators

The relationship of characteristics of the social environment to the adaptation of adolescents from high-risk predisposing environments was examined. Specifically, the degree to which adolescents' perceptions of various dimensions of their family and school environment as well as sources of social support related to differential levels of personal well-being and academic adjustment was explored. Multiple regression analyses revealed differences in the salience of the dimensions of the social environment as a function of the particular sphere of functioning under consideration. Implications of the findings for developing a model for understanding the relative vulnerability of individuals at risk as well as of the design of preventive interventions are discussed.     

Analytic,synthetic, abstracting,and word-class-defining aspects of verbal mother-child interactions

Phenomena of language teaching and learning in the course of verbal interactions between one mother and her daughter were analyzed. The daughter was between 18 and 27 months old during the recordings, and her utterance length ranged from 1,5 to 4,0 morphemes. Twenty hours of interactions were analyzed and the emphasis was placed upon sequential aspects and mathemagenic features of the conversations. It was demonstrated that the mother performs much analytic, synthetic, abstracting, and word-class-defining work during these verbal interactions. These maternal instructional activities seem to lead not only to the child's learning of language rules but also to her employment of the abstracting, analytical, and synthetic methodology. It is concluded that the main explanatory focus has to be on the mother in the attempts to explain language transmission and acquisition. Basic similarities to other instructional/skill training situations are suggested. Neither extraordinary complex cognitive nor innate linguistic capacities need to be assumed to explain the phenomena in question.