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.     

Creative Interpretations of Novel Conceptual Combinations in Aging

Conceptual combinations may be interpreted by 3 main strategies: by attributing a feature of the modifying (head) noun into the modified noun (property interpretation); by establishing a relation between the 2 concepts (relational interpretation); or by combining properties of both nouns into a concept with new identity (hybridization). There exists limited evidence regarding the quality of interpretations older adults provide to novel conceptual combinations, and especially to novel metaphoric phrases. This study aimed to evaluate and compare age differences in strategies adopted for comprehending conceptual (noun noun) combinations. The aim of this study was, therefore, to examine the impact of aging on the ability to generate novel and creative semantic interpretations to unfamiliar word pairs. Participants included 41 healthy younger (mean age = 25.1) and 40 healthy older adults (mean age = 75.3). Participants were asked to write interpretations to novel metaphoric and meaningless noun-noun phrases. Relative to young adults, older participants generated more creative (hybridization) interpretations to novel metaphor and meaningless combinations. The second finding indicated that older adults generated fewer relational interpretations to the meaningless compounds. The results suggest that, relative to young adults, older adults generate more creative and highly integrative interpretations to conceptual combinations.     

Are obsessive-compulsive tendencies related to reliance on external proxies for internal states? Evidence from biofeedback-aided relaxation studies

This article presents two studies that examine the hypothesis that obsessive-compulsive (OC) tendencies are associated with a general deficiency in subjective conviction, which leads to seeking and reliance on external proxies to compensate for that deficiency. We examined this hypothesis using a biofeedback-aided relaxation procedure. In Study 1 low OC participants performed better on a relaxation task than high OC participants. More importantly, viewing the biofeedback monitor (an external proxy for the internal state of relaxation) had a different effect on the two groups: Whereas high OC participants performed better, low OC participants did not. In addition, when given the opportunity, high OC participants requested the biofeedback monitor more than did the low OC participants. In Study 2 high OC participants were more affected by false biofeedback when judging their level of relaxation compared to low OC participants. Real relaxation level differences between the two false biofeedback phases among the two groups were not found. These results provide preliminary support for the hypothesis that obsessive-compulsive disorder is associated with deficient subjective conviction in internal states and increased reliance on external proxies. Implications for the understanding of OCD-related rules and rituals as well as for cognitive therapy for OCD are discussed.     

Idiosyncratic matching and choice: When less is more

In three studies, reliance on “goodness-of-fit” criteria exerted an influence on assessments of pay-TV packages that challenged normative standards relating to the principle of dominance. Studies 1 and 2 showed that the addition of one or more non-favored channels to a package of favored ones resulted in lower consumer interest, and the subtraction of one or more non-favored channels from a mixed package resulted in greater consumer interest, even when the relevant offering price remained unchanged. Study 3 demonstrated the specific relevance of perceived idiosyncrasy to this phenomenon. Thus, participants responded more positively to a given price reduction for relinquishing a channel they did not like when they believed that their preference ordering was idiosyncratic rather than one shared by their peers. These findings, buttressed by additional data collection to rule out some alternative interpretations and permit within-subject as well as between-subject comparisons, extend the theoretical and practical implications of previous research on the non-normative use of personal “goodness-of-fit” criteria in evaluating the attractiveness of products and programs.     

Concrete mindset impairs filtering in visual working memory

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Two studies tested whether a mindset manipulation would affect the filtering of distractors from entering visual working memory (VWM). In Study 1, participants...     

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.     

An effect of linguistic experience: The discrimination of [r] and [l] by native speakers of Japanese and English

To test the effect of linguistic experience on the perception of a cue that is known to be effective in distinguishing between [r] and [l] in English, 21 Japanese and 39 American adults were tested on discrimination of a set of synthetic speech-like stimuli. The 13 “speech” stimuli in this set varied in the initial stationary frequency of the third formant (F3) and its subsequent transition into the vowel over a range sufficient to produce the perception of [r a] and [l a] for American subjects and to produce [r a] (which is not in phonemic contrast to [l a ]) for Japanese subjects. Discrimination tests of a comparable set of stimuli consisting of the isolated F3 components provided a “nonspeech” control. For Americans, the discrimination of the speech stimuli was nearly categorical, i.e., comparison pairs which were identified as different phonemes were discriminated with high accuracy, while pairs which were identified as the same phoneme were discriminated relatively poorly. In comparison, discrimination of speech stimuli by Japanese subjects was only slightly better than chance for all comparison pairs. Performance on nonspeech stimuli, however, was virtually identical for Japanese and American subjects; both groups showed highly accurate discrimination of all comparison pairs. These results suggest that the effect of linguistic experience is specific to perception in the “speech mode.”     

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.