The Use of Contextual Information by Right Brain-Damaged Individuals in the Resolution of Ambiguous Pronouns

Two experiments were conducted with the primary purpose of investigating the ability of right brain-damaged (RBD) individuals to use contextual information—at the level of the single sentence, in terms of the integration of information between clauses, and at the level of a minimal discourse (i.e., two sentences)—in the resolution of ambiguous pronouns. The investigation was extended to a group of left brain-damaged (LBD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) individuals. Contrary to the prevailing view that RBD patients have difficulty in the use of contextual information to process language, both experiments were consistent in demonstrating that the RBD group was influenced by contextual information in a manner similar to that demonstrated by both the LBD and NBD groups.     

CLASSWIDE PEER TUTORING: AN INTEGRATION STRATEGY TO IMPROVE READING SKILLS AND PROMOTE PEER INTERACTIONS AMONG STUDENTS WITH AUTISM AND GENERAL EDUCATION PEERS

A multiple baseline design across subjects with a reversal was used to examine the effects of classwide peer tutoring relative to traditional reading instruction on reading skills and social interaction time for 3 high-functioning students with autism and their typical peers in integrated, general education classrooms. Traditional reading instruction consisted largely of teacher-led instruction with individual student participation and seat work. Classwide peer tutoring consisted of 25 to 30 min of well-specified instruction in which tutor—learner pairs worked together on a classwide basis on reading fluency and comprehension skills. All students participated in 15- to 20-min unstructured free-time activities immediately following reading instruction. Results of reading assessments demonstrated that classwide peer tutoring increased reading fluency and correct responses to reading comprehension questions for students with autism and their peers. The procedure further increased the total duration of free-time social interactions for students with autism and typical peers, with individual variation in performance.     

“mother is not holding competely respect”: Making social sense of schizophrenic writing

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and “an intersubjective world, common to us all” (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This “role-taking success” identifies the limits of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of “role-taking failure” (Rosenberg, 1992). The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top .... Capital letters and all letters are employed without any apparent rules, the former even in the middle of a word. (Bleuler, 1950: 159) What we want to understand is not something hidden behind the text, but something disclosed in front of it. (Ricoeur, 1971: 557) Why do we need an art of guessing? Why do we have to “construe” the meaning? Not only — as I tried to say a few years ago — because language is metaphorical and because the double meaning of metaphorical language requires an art of deciphering which tends to unfold the several layers of meaning.... [But also] because [a text] is not a mere sequence of sentences, all on an equal footing and separately understandable. A text is a whole, a totality. (Ricoeur, 1971: 548)     

Differences in influence between pitched-from-vertical lines and slanted-from-frontal horizontal lines on egocentric localization

The visual field exerts powerful effects on egocentric spatial localization along both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Thus, (1) prism-produced visual pitch and visual slant generate similar mislocalizations of visually perceived eye level (VPEL) and visually perceived straight ahead (VPSA) and (2) in darkness curare-produced extraocular muscle paresis under eccentric gaze generates similar mislocalizations in VPEL and VPSA that are essentially eliminated by introducing a normal visual field. In the present experiments, however, a search for influences of real visual slant on VPSA to correspond to the influences of visual pitch on VPEL failed to find one. Although the elevation corresponding to VPEL changes linearly with the pitch of a visual field consisting of two isolated 66.5°-long pitched-from-vertical lines, the corresponding manipulation of change in the slant of either a horizontal two-line or a horizontal four-line visual field on VPSA did not occur. The average slope of the VPEL-versus-pitch function across 5 subjects was +0.40 over a ±30° pitch range, but was indistinguishable from 0.00 for the VPSA-versus-slant function over a ±30° slant range. Possible contributions to the difference between susceptibility of VPEL and VPSA to visual influence from extraretinal eye position information, gravity, and several retinal gradients are discussed.     

CONSTRUCT ACCESSIBILITY AND THE MISATTRIBUTION OF AROUSAL:

Abstract— Schachter and Singer (1962) showed that people search the immediate environment for emotionally relevant cues to label and interpret unexplained physiological arousal We investigated how unobtrusively activated cognitions and physiological arousal interact to produce emotional experience when the immediate environment is devoid of relevant cues Subjects were primed with positive, negative, or neutral concepts They then either exercised or sat still and, either immediately or after a delay, rated their emotional state Consistent with what Schachter and Singer found, subjects in the exercise, delayed-rating condition, who lacked an obvious explanation for their arousal, made the most extreme affective self-ratings, which were consistent with the valence of the primed concepts These subjects apparently interpreted their residual arousal in terms of the primed concepts Subjects in the exercise, immediate-rating condition, who had an explanation for their arousal (i e, the exercise), were not influenced by the primes Subjects in the no-exercise condition showed typical priming effects, with prime-consistent self-ratings that decayed over time Implications for emotion formation, misattnbution of arousal, and cognition are discussed     

Temporal discounting and preference reversals in choice between delayed outcomes

Subjects chose between pairs of hypothetical amounts of money available after different delays. When smaller, more immediate amounts were selected over larger, more delayed amounts, the addition of a constant delay to both outcomes resulted in reversals of preference, contrary to the standard discounted utility model of economics. The delays at which preference reversed were determined for three pairs of amounts ($20 vs. $50, $100 vs. $250, and $500 vs. $1,250). The relation between the delay to the larger amount and the delay to the smaller amount at preference reversal was well fit by both linear and quadratic functions. Intercepts increased with amount, strongly suggesting that rate of discounting decreases with amount. The presence of significant negative curvature in the data from the majority of individual subjects poses problems for exponential and hyperbolic models of temporal discounting in self-control, both of which predict a linear relation between the delays to the larger and smaller amounts.     

The effect of gap depth on the perception of whether a gap is crossable

Four experiments were performed in order to examine the effect of gap depth on human observers’ perception of whether or not a gap is crossable. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that as the gap’s depth increased, observers tended to increasingly underestimate the maximum width of a gap they could step across. Experiments 3 and 4 clarified this finding: The observed covariation of perceived gap crossability and gap depth depended on the observer’s direction of gaze, rather than on the physical depth of the gap. The optical relations to which observers might be attending are discussed, as well as the possibility that cognitive-affective processes might have contributed to observers’ underestimation of their actual capabilities.     

Nonstranger sexual aggression: A discriminant analysis of the psychological characteristics of undetected offenders

Sex Roles - Rape is an underreported and underconvicted crime. Therefore, many highly sexually aggressive men are missed by research employing judicial identification for sample selection. The...     

Decreased helpfulness with increased group size through lessening the effects of the needy individual's dependency1

The present experiment attempted to integrate the research on helpfulness in which subjects work for someone else in an artificial laboratory setting (Berkowitz & Daniels, 1963; Berkowitz, 1972) with the bystander-intervention-in-emergencies studies often carried out under more realistic conditions (e.g., Latané & Darley, 1970; Schwartz & Clausen, 1970; Clark & Word, 1972). Fifty-six university women in a 2 × 2 factorial design were led to think they were working for a same-sex peer who could win a cash prize, although there was “nothing in it for them.” Half were told that the other's chance of getting the prize was greatly dependent upon their effort while the remaining participants were informed that the other did not need their-work very much. Moreover, half of the subjects thought they were the only ones working for the other whereas the remaining people believed there were two other co-workers and that the output from all three would be averaged. It was expected that the participants would feel the greatest personal responsibility to help the other and would work hardest for her when she was greatly dependent upon their productivity and they were the only worker, while the subjects would feel the lowest level of personal responsibility for their peer and would be least helpful to her when she was not particularly dependent upon them and there were two other co-workers. The findings are generally in accord with these expectations.     

The relationship between frontalis muscle activity and self-reports of headache pain

The relationship between levels of frontalis muscle activity and self-reports of pain was evaluated in two studies. In Study I frontalis muscle activity and self-reports of pain collected during biofeedback treatment of muscular contraction headache clients were correlated. In Study II frontalis EMG activity was increased and decreased using biofeedback techniques while concurrent reports of headache pain were recorded. The results of Study I indicated a significant relationship between EMG activity and reported headache pain for only two of the five subjects studied. The biofeedback procedures in Study II were associated with reliable increases and decreases in EMG activity. Concordance between EMG and pain reports occurred only during the EMG increase condition. Overall correlations were significant for one of the 2 subjects. The results suggest that EMG activity may not be sufficient to account for pain reports in all chronic headache clients, and variables other than EMG activity may be influencing reports of pain in some patients.