Un nuevo enfoque sobre la esquizofrenia

RESUMEN

El entrenamiento en habilidades sociales y el programa de terapia familiar están siendo evaluados en un proyecto de investigación que incluye un tratamiento comparativo con terapia de movilización. En este tipo de terapia los pacientes, asignados al azar y con una esquizofrenia documentada, practican relajación, footing, reducción del estrés estrés, actividades manuales y terapia creativa. Se ha intentado en este artículo hacer una primera aproximación a un enfoque de tratamiento psicosocial de la esquizofrenia con base empírica. Bajo la optimista pretensión teórica de que los pacientes esquizofrénicos tratados tienen capacidad para aprender; que las actitudes y sentimientos familiares pueden cambiar en forma positiva y el ambiente donde se desenvuelven puede diseñarse para suspender la diátesis, mediatizada biológicamente.     

ON THE IMMEDIACY OF PHONETIC PERCEPTION

Abstract— If, as we believe, language is a specialization alt the way down to its roots, then perception of its consonantal elements should be immediately phonetic, not as in the conventional view, a secondary translation from percepts of an auditory sort. Supporting observations come from an experiment in which formant transitions that distinguish [da] and [gal were presented as sinusoids and combined with a synthetic syllable made of resonances, thus causing the auditory system to treat these acoustically incoherent parts as different sources Evidence for the source difference was varied by changing the intensity of the sinusoids relative to the remainder of the syllable. Over the greater part of a 60-dB range, listeners accurately identified the consonants, indicating that they had integrated the stimuli according to a coherence that existed only in the phonetic domain. At the lowest intensities, indeed, the consonants were accurately identified, even though the whistles—the normal responses to the sinusoids—were not. There followed then a range over which perception was duplex. Both consonants and whistles were accurately identified At the highest intensities, phonetic integration failed, but accurate perception of the whistles was maintained. That the phonetic percept was present when as auditory counterpart was absent, and vice versa, is evidence that the phonetic percept is independent of its auditory counterpart and not a translation from it, as is the fact that the two percepts followed very different courses in response to the experimental variable.     

Promotion and prevention choices between stability and change

Two situations involving choice between stability and change were examined: task substitution, which deals with choosing between resuming an interrupted activity and doing a substitute activity, and endowment, which deals with choosing between a possessed object and an alternative object. Regulatory focus theory (E. T. Higgins, 1997, 1998) predicts that a promotion focus will be associated with openness to change, whereas a prevention focus will be associated with a preference for stability. Five studies confirmed this prediction with both situational induction of and chronic personality differences in regulatory focus. In Studies 1 and 2, individuals in a prevention focus were more inclined than individuals in a promotion focus to resume an interrupted task rather than do a substitute task. In Studies 3-5, individuals in a prevention focus, but not individuals in a promotion focus, exhibited a reluctance to exchange currently possessed objects (i.e., endowment) or previously possessed objects.     

IMPROVING SOCIAL INTERACTION IN A CHRONIC PSYCHOTIC USING DISCRIMINATED AVOIDANCE (“NAGGING”): EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS AND GENERALIZATION

Three social-interaction behaviors of a withdrawn, chronic schizophrenic were increased using a discriminated avoidance (“nagging”) procedure. The three behaviors were: (a) voice volume loud enough so that two-thirds of his speech was intelligible at a distance of 3 m; (b) duration of speech of at least 15 sec; (c) placement of hands and elbows on the armrests of the chair in which he was sitting. “Nagging” consisted of verbal prompts to improve performance when the behaviors did not meet their criteria. A combined withdrawal and multiple-baseline design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the procedure, and the contingency was sequentially applied to each of the three behaviors in each of four different interactions to determine the degree of stimulus and response generalization. Results indicated that the contingency was the effective element in increasing the patient's appropriate performance, and that there was a high degree of stimulus generalization and a moderate degree of response generalization. After the patient's discharge from the hospital, the durability of improvement across time and setting was determined in followup sessions conducted at a day treatment center and at a residential care home. Volume and duration generalized well to the new settings, while arm placement extinguished immediately.     

Perceptual equivalence of two acoustic cues for stop-consonant manner

The first experiment examined the effects of orthogonal variation in two acoustic cues that are both produced by the articulation of a stop consonant. One component of the articulation produces a temporal cue, the other a spectral cue. In a phonetic identification task, these quite different cues were found to engage in a trading relation: One cue could, within limits, substitute for the other. In a second experiment, the perceptual equivalence implied by that trading relation was put to a stricter test. If the cues are truly equivalent in perception, then they should have their effects on the same perceptual dimension. That being so, it should be possible to combine them in such a way that, working at cross purposes in the perceptual domain, they effectively cancel each other. Pairs of patterns so produced should, then, be harder to discriminate than pairs produced by either cue alone, and still harder than those produced when the (same) two cues are combined in the opposite way and so cooperate. That expectation was confirmed. We suggest that the equivalence thus demonstrated comes about because the two cues are processed by a system specialized to take account of their common origin in speech production. So interpreted, the equivalence may be viewed as an instance of distinctively phonetic perception.     

A COMPARISON OF MALE AND FEMALE DIRECTORS IN POPULAR PORNOGRAPHY: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WOMEN ARE AT THE HELM?

Pornography is a lucrative business. Increasingly, women have participated in both its production, direction, and consumption. This study investigated how the content in popular pornographic videos created by female directors differs from that of their male counterparts. We conducted a quantitative analysis of 122 randomly selected scenes from 44 top-renting adult videos in 2005 (half male- and half female-directed). Findings revealed that all films shared similar depictions: Verbal and physical aggression was common, women were the primary targets of aggression, and negative responses to aggression were extremely rare. Compared to male-directed films, female-directed films were significantly more likely to portray women-only scenes and sexual acts. Even when controlling for main characters' gender, female-directed films showed significantly more female perpetrators aggressing against female targets and significantly more depictions of women as perpetrators of aggression. We highlight the importance of economic forces, rather than director gender, in dictating the content of popular pornography.     

Temporal construal

Construal level theory proposes that temporal distance changes people's responses to future events by changing the way people mentally represent those events. The greater the temporal distance, the more likely are events to be represented in terms of a few abstract features that convey the perceived essence of the events (high-level construals) rather than in terms of more concrete and incidental details of the events (low-level construals). The informational and evaluative implications of high-level construals, compared with those of low-level construals, should therefore have more impact on responses to distant-future events than near-future events. This article explores the implications of construal level theory for temporal changes in evaluation, prediction, and choice. The authors suggest that construal level underlies a broad range of evaluative and behavioral consequences of psychological distance from events.