Clinical Use of the Surgeon General’s “My Family Health Portrait” (MFHP) Tool: Opinions of Future Health Care Providers

This study examined medical students’ and house officers’ opinions about the Surgeon General’s “My Family Health Portrait” (MFHP) tool. Participants used the tool and were surveyed about tool mechanics, potential clinical uses, and barriers. None of the 97 participants had previously used this tool. The average time to enter a family history was 15 min (range 3 to 45 min). Participants agreed or strongly agreed that the MFHP tool is understandable (98%), easy to use (93%), and suitable for general public use (84%). Sixty-seven percent would encourage their patients to use the tool; 39% would ensure staff assistance. Participants would use the tool to identify patients at increased risk for disease (86%), record family history in the medical chart (84%), recommend preventive health behaviors (80%), and refer to genetics services (72%). Concerns about use of the tool included patient access, information accuracy, technical challenges, and the need for physician education on interpreting family history information.     

Confirmation holism and semantic holism

Fodor and Lepore, in their recent book Holism, maintain that if an inference from semantic anatomism to semantic holism is allowed, certain fairly deleterious consequences follow. In Section 1 Fodor and Lepore's terminology is construed and amended where necessary with the result that the aforementioned deleterious consequences are neither so apparent nor straightforward as they had suggested. In Section 2 their Argument A is considered in some detail. In Section 3 their argument attributed to Quine is examined at length and a shorter and more perspicacious argument suggested which avoids their charge that the Quinean argument is guilty of an equivocation on the word statement.     

Naming consistency in Alzheimer''s disease

Although lexical semantic deficits are postulated to play a prominent role in the anomia of Alzheimer's disease, it is unclear whether the primary disturbance is one of lexical access or one of lexical semantic loss. Response consistency on a naming task is one means of evaluating the underlying source of naming impairment. Access dysfunction usually implies variable word-finding difficulty, while a theory of lexical loss predicts that many word names would be consistently unavailable. Nineteen Alzheimer's disease patients were administered a visual confrontation naming task (the Boston Naming Test) on two occasions 6 months apart. Eighty percent of errors occurred consistently at both times; only 20% of errors occurred on only one occasion. Response consistency occurred significantly more often than expected under the assumption of no response consistency. Findings support the hypothesis that anomia in Alzheimer's disease is in part due to a loss of lexical semantic information.     

Does Friendship Matter? An Examination of Social Physique Anxiety in Adolescence1

The role of peer group composition and influence variables on social physique anxiety was examined. Peer network data were gathered on 375 adolescents (181 male, 194 female). Females reported experiencing higher social physique anxiety, more pressure and encouragement to alter their physique from peers, greater body‐related discussion, and greater identification with the peer group than did males. Regression analyses revealed 2 peer influence variables—peer pressure and relative attractiveness of peers—to be significant predictors of social physique anxiety. A third variable—extent to which the individual identified with peer network—was a significant predictor for females. Results are discussed in reference to previous research, and future research directions are identified.     

Vigilance and the reinforcing properties of shock

There have been some observations to indicate that waiting for a shock is stressful, that the coining of an anticipated shock can serve as a tension reliever, and that failure to obtain an anticipated shock is more stressful than being shocked. Based on these observations, the following hypotheses were tested. If it is true that failure to receive shock is more stressful than the shock itself, it should be possible to train an animal to bring on a shock that had failed to come when anticipated. If a period of anticipating shock is stressful, and shock serves as a reliever of the stress, it should be possible to train an animal to perform a response instrumental to bringing on the shock sooner. Results indicated that shock does seem to serve as a reliever, that waiting for shock is stressful, but that failure to receive an anticipated shock under these circumstances is not more stressful than the shock itself. In addition, it was found that subjects learned to produce shock instrumentally if the shock was inevitable and could thus be brought about sooner. Results were inconclusive, though generally negative, on the issue of whether S’s would produce an avoidable shock that had failed to come when anticipated.