A noninvasive index of hemispheric activity

Tympanic thermometers were used to measure fluctuations in the temperature of the left and right hemispheres of 22 normal high school students while performing verbal and nonverbal visual discrimination tasks. The nonverbal task involving face recognition demonstrated the predicted effect of hemispheric bias on performance: The subjects performed better when they showed a relative rise in right-hemisphere temperature. No significant relationship between hemispheric temperature and level of performance was observed during the verbal task, perhaps owing to the opportunity to treat effectively the nonwords as either linguistic strings or visual patterns. It is concluded that tympanic temperature effectively measures hemispheric activity during cognitive processing.     

Recovery of performance during sleep following sleep deprivation in older normal and insomniac adult males

Groups of 12 normal and insomniac male subjects aged 55 to 71 yr. were sleep deprived for 64 hr. In both groups, the sleep loss was preceded by four baseline sleep nights and followed by four recovery nights. Reaction time, immediate recall, sleepiness, and body temperature were measured at approximately 2300, 0115, 0330, 0530, and 0800 during baseline, deprivation and recovery nights. Significant performance or mood differences were not found between the normal and insomniac males on any measure or at any testing period throughout the study. Performance of both groups declined characteristically during sleep loss while subjective sleepiness increased. As in young adults, degraded performance was restored by 8 hr. of recovery sleep. However, subjective sleepiness did not return to baseline levels until early in the second recovery night. It was concluded that chronic insomnia does not result in group performance deficits similar to those seen after chronic sleep loss; and the restorative function of sleep operates as efficiently in older insomniac subjects (who apparently have reduced need to sleep) as in older normal subjects.     

Lateral eye-movement responses to visual stimuli

The association of left lateral eye-movement with emotionality or arousal of affect and of right lateral eye-movement with cognitive/interpretive operations and functions was investigated. Participants were junior and senior students enrolled in an undergraduate course in developmental psychology. There were 37 women and 13 men, ranging from 19 to 45 yr. of age. Using videotaped lateral eye-movements of 50 participants' responses to 15 visually presented stimuli (precategorized as neutral, emotional, or intellectual), content and statistical analyses supported the association between left lateral eye-movement and emotional arousal and between right lateral eye-movement and cognitive functions. Precategorized visual stimuli included items such as a ball (neutral), gun (emotional), and calculator (intellectual). The findings are congruent with existing lateral eye-movement literature and also are additive by using visual stimuli that do not require the explicit response or implicit processing of verbal questioning.     

Physical exercise, social background, and the well-being of older adult women

28 older women participating in an exercise program were compared to 30 older women not participating in an exercise program on two behavioral measures. There were no significant main effects for participation-nonparticipation in an exercise program. Significant main effects were found, however, for each of three social variables.     

Some comments on Shettel-Neuber and O'Reilly's "handedness and career choice: another look at supposed left/right differences" (1983)

A property of attitudes, namely, the fact that attitudes select facts, is used to comment upon a paper on handedness and career choice.