Case study: Examining the relationship between self-initiations of an individual with disabilities and directive behavior of staff persons in a residential setting

This case study examines the relationship between self-initiations of an adult woman with severe disabilities and the directive behavior of staff persons in a community residential setting. Hypotheses generated from functional assessment procedures indicated that (a) Susan's low self-initiations were very likely related to high directive behavior of staff persons, and (b) infrequent problem behaviors during the morning routine were maintained by escape from repeated staff demands. An intervention was implemented to enable Susan to increase self-initiation in choice and sequence of activities and simultaneously decrease staff directives. Results and discussion focus on the need for a contextual approach for addressing problematic situations and an affirmation of the effectiveness of the positive behavioral support technology for increasing adaptive behaviors in individuals with severe disabilities.     

Correlates of parent–child communication about specific sexual topics: A study of rural parents with school-aged children

Using data from 600 parents of children aged 5 to 18, and a context-oriented, developmental socialization conceptual framework, the interrelationships between parents' perceptions of themselves, their child, and their family relationships and the amount of parent–child discussion of 16 sexuality topics were explored. Canonical correlation analysis was used to demonstrate how circumstances and contexts influence the complexity of parent–child conversations for mother–daughter, mother–son, father–son, and father–daughter dyads. Results lend support to the conceptual framework used, as well as to previous studies of this topic area. The implications of these findings for parent–child relationships and for future research on parent–child communication about sexuality are discussed.     

Going beyond heart rate: autonomic space and cardiovascular assessment of mental workload

Psychophysiological assessment of pilot mental workload using heart rate should be augmented with an autonomic space model of cardiovascular function. This model proposes that autonomic nervous system influences on the heart may change with psychological processing in ways that are not evident in heart rate. A method of mental-workload assessment was proposed that used multiple psychophysiological measures of cardiovascular responsivity to derive the underlying sympathetic and parasympathetic information needed to represent the autonomic space for heart rate. Principal-components analysis was used to extract Sympathetic and Parasympathetic components from heart period, residual heart period. respiratory sinus arrhythmia, and Traube-Hering-Mayer wave in three experiments that manipulated perceptual/central processing and physical task demands. This initial evaluation of the method concluded that the autonomic components were valid and that the components had greater diagnosticity, and for some manipulations greater sensitivity, than heart rate. These results support the contention that the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic components provided increased precision for mental-workload assessment.     

See me,hear me: Using film in health-care classes

This essay argues that film deserves a place within the medical humanities curriculum and demonstrates effective strategies for employing it within medical ethics and humanities classrooms. Part One of the article emphasizes how and why medical ethics teachers can utilize documentary and fictional films, such as “Thomas Szasz and the Myth of Mental Illness,” “The Deadly Deception,”Whose Life Is It Anyway? and “Voices From the Front” in their courses. Such films encourage students to move beyond abstract debates and confront the human pain inherent in all ethical dilemmas. Part Two focuses on documentary and fiction film in the medical humanities classroom. In this section, the author details how to incorporates films, such asThe Doctor, The Waterdance andHospital, into the humanities classroom, juxtaposing them with various literary works, such asOther Women's Children, Borrowed Time, andCeremony. Part Three of the essay presents a detailed discussion ofThe Elephant Man andFrankenstein, illustrating how visual and literary texts compliment each other within the humanities classroom. Overall, the author demonstrates how films function as engaging and complex visual texts providing unique insights in the particularities of American health care and, as such, can become valuable components within medical ethics and humanities classrooms.     

Vibrotactile pattern discrimination and communality at several body sites

In a series of experiments, the effects of spatial layout on vibrotactile pattern perception were explored by testing the ability to discriminate between two sequentially presented patterns that share active elements in the same spatial locations. Two-dimensional displays were used in order to examine the functional relationship between discrimination performance and patterncommunality, defined as the sharing elements, on different body sites. Accuracy of discrimination judgments was inversely proportional to communality, regardless of the number of pattern elements. For compact arrays fitted to the finger, palm, and thigh, the effects of communality appeared equivalent. The similarity between finger and thigh functions is remarkable, considering the dramatic differences between these sites in receptor components and structure. When these data were compared with those from arrays with distributed contactors, performance was substantially better with well-separated pattern elements. Such findings help to explicate how information from apposed patterns can best be delivered to the skin through tactile communication systems.     

Time,change, and motion: The effects of stimulus movement on temporal perception

The effects of stimulus motion on time perception were examined in five experiments. Subjects judged the durations (6–18 sec) of a series of computer-generated visual displays comprised of varying numbers of simple geometrical forms. In Experiment 1, subjects reproduced the duration of displays consisting of stationary or moving (at 20 cm/sec) stimulus figures. In Experiment 2, subjects reproduced the durations of stimuli that were either stationary, moving slowly (at 10 cm/sec), or moving fast (at 30 cm/sec). In Experiment 3, subjects used the production method to generate specified durations for stationary, slow, and fast displays. In Experiments 4 and 5, subjects reproduced the duration of stimuli that moved at speeds ranging from 0 to 45 cm/sec. Each experiment showed that stimulus motion lengthened perceived time. In general, faster speeds lengthened perceived time to a greater degree than slower speeds. Varying the number of stimuli appearing in the displays had only limited effects on time judgments. Other findings indicated that shorter intervals tended to be overestimated and longer intervals underestimated (Vierordt’s law), an effect which applied to both stationary and moving stimuli. The results support a change model of perceived time, which maintains that intervals associated with more changes are perceived to be longer than intervals with fewer changes.     

A behavioral link between the oculomotor and cardiovascular systems

Although the eyes and the heart serve very different purposes, each receives autonomic innervation. Capitalizing on recent theoretical and technological innovations in the understanding and assessment of oculomotor and cardiovascular behavior, three experiments measured behavioral covariation between the oculomotor and cardiovascular systems. Measures of dark focus and dark vergence indexed oculomotor tone, and the spectral decomposition of variations in heart rate indexed cardiovascular control mechanisms. In Experiment 1, individual differences in cardiovascular parameters could predict individuals’ dark vergence (R²=.806) but not their dark focus (R²=.404). In Experiment 2, the same parameters were measured from subjects who experience either panic attacks (n=11) or blood phobia (n=9). Heart rate was positively correlated with dark vergence and the two subject groups were separable based on both oculomotor and cardiovascular variables. Using a within-subjects approach, Experiment 3 found that both dark vergence and dark focus tended to be nearer during sympathetic dominance of the heart than during parasympathetic dominance, within-subjects variations in cardiovascular parameters could predict dark focus, and between-subjects variations in interbeat intervals could predict dark vergence. Shared patterns of autonomic activation may be responsible for this eye-heart link.     

The time course of recognition of novel melodies

Seven experiments explored the time course of recognition of brief novel melodies. In a continuous-running-memory task, subjects recognized melodic transpositions following delays up to 2.0 min. The delays were either empty or filled with other melodies. Test items included exact transpositions (T), same-contour lures (SC) with altered pitch intervals, and different-contour lures (DC). DCs differed from Ts in the pattern of ups and downs of pitch. With this design, we assessed subjects’ discrimination of detailed changes in pitch intervals (T/SC discrimination) as well as their discrimination of contour changes (T/DC). We used both artificial and “real” melodies. Artificial melodies differed in conformity to a musical key, being tonal or atonal. After empty delays, T/DC discrimination was superior to T/SC discrimination. Surprisingly, after filled delays, T/SC discrimination was superior to T/DC. When only filled delays were tested, T/SC discrimination did not decline over the longest delays. T/DC performance declined more than did T/SC performance across both empty and filled delays. Tonality was an important factor only for T/SC discrimination after filled delays. T/DC performance was better with rhythmically intact folk melodies than with artificial isochronous melodies. Although T/SC performance improved over filled delays, it did not overtake T/DC performance. These results suggest that (1) contour and pitch-interval information make different contributions to recognition, with contour dominating performance after brief empty delays and pitch intervals dominating after longer filled delays; (2) a coherent tonality facilitates the encoding of pitch-interval patterns of melodies; and (3) the rich melodic—rhythmic contours of real melodies facilitate T/DC discrimination. These results are discussed in terms of automatic and controlled processing of melodic information.     

IDAC computer interfacing for an undergraduate learning laboratory

A hardware and software interface system from International Data and Acquisition and Control, Inc. (IDAC) is reviewed. The IDAC system comes with spreadsheet software compatible for either Macintosh or IBM microcomputers. I prefer to use the IDAC hardware with my own software written in TrueBasic and spreadsheet macros. The entire system is easy to use and is currently in use for our undergraduate Learning Laboratory.     

Mindless reading: Eye-movement characteristics are similar in scanning letter strings and reading texts

The purpose of the present study was to compare the oculomotor behavior of readers scanning meaningful and meaningless materials. Four conditions were used—a normal-text-reading control condition, and three experimental conditions in which the amount of linguistic processing was reduced, either by presenting the subjects with repeated letter strings or by asking the subjects to search for a target letter in texts or letter strings. The results show that global eye-movement characteristics (such as saccade size and fixation duration), as well as local characteristics (such as word-skipping rate, landing site, refixation probability, and refixation position), are very similar in the four conditions. The finding that the eyes are capable of generating an autonomous oculomotor scanning strategy in the absence of any linguistic information to process argues in favor of the idea that such predetermined oculomotor strategies might be an important determinant of eye movements in reading.