Discourse after Early-Onset Hydrocephalus: Core Deficits in Children of Average Intelligence

A review of our studies of oral and written language in children with early-onset hydrocephalus suggests that hydrocephalus is associated with specific deficits in discourse as opposed to generalized linguistic deficit. It is proposed that the language skills that are impaired in hydrocephalus are those that require context to derive meaning, while those that are intact may function relatively independent of particular discourse contexts. This hypothesis was tested in two discourse studies comparing children with hydrocephalus of average verbal IQ to age-matched controls. Study 1 investigated narrative economy, syntactic complexity, and semantic content in the retellings of familiar and less familiar fairy tales. Despite producing quantities of story content similar to controls and using syntactic economy similar to controls, the hydrocephalus group produced less of the core semantic content of both familiar and less familiar tales. Study 2 investigated inferencing and figurative language understanding in a narrative comprehension task. Even when prior knowledge was controlled, the hydrocephalus group had difficulty making inferences and recalling factual information from the story. In contrast to their ability to understand idiomatic figurative expressions, the hydrocephalus group had difficulty interpreting novel figurative expressions. The results are compatible with the hypothesis that the core discourse deficits characteristic of children with hydrocephalus are concerned with computing meaning from context. Putative processing features underlying the proposed core discourse deficit are discussed.     

How Children with Head Injury Represent Real and Deceptive Emotion in Short Narratives

Narratives are not only about events, but also about the emotions those events elicit. Understanding a narrative involves not just the affective valence of implied emotional states, but the formation of an explicit mental representation of those states. In turn, this representation provides a mechanism that particularizes emotion and modulates its display, which then allows emotional expression to be modified according to particular contexts. This includes understanding that a character may feel an emotion but inhibit its display or even express a deceptive emotion. We studied how 59 school-aged children with head injury and 87 normally-developing age-matched controls understand real and deceptive emotions in brief narratives. Children with head injury showed less sensitivity than controls to how emotions are expressed in narratives. While they understood the real emotions in the text, and could recall what provoked the emotion and the reason for concealing it, they were less able than controls to identify deceptive emotions. Within the head injury group, factors such as an earlier age at head injury and frontal lobe contusions were associated with poor understanding of deceptive emotions. The results are discussed in terms of the distinction between emotions as felt and emotions as a cognitive framework for understanding other people's actions and mental states. We conclude that children with head injury understand emotional communication, the spontaneous externalization of real affect, but not emotive communication, the conscious, strategic modification of affective signals to influence others through deceptive facial expressions.     

Ego identity status in college women

Ego-identity status was determined for 49 college women and related to difficulty of college major, self-esteem, authoritarianism, and Welsh Anxiety Scale (WAS) scores The modified identity status interview for women included “attitudes toward premarital intercourse” Identity achievements had more difficult majors than identity diffusions Foreclosures were highest in self-esteem and lowest in WAS scores–interpreted either as approval-seeking or as this status's adaptive value for women. They were also highest in authoritarianism Moratoriums were lowest in authoritarianism. Identity diffusions obtained the highest WAS scores Failure to find differences on the Luchins Water Jars task was seen as limiting the range of the identity status constructs.     

Individual differences in preschool children's knowledge of superordinate categories

The present study assesses intensional knowledge of superordinate categories in preschool children. This assessment is part of a larger programmatic research effort aimed at the development of a cognitive preschool screening test to detect learning problems prior to their manifestation in school failure. Necessary prerequisites for including intensional superordinate category knowledge as a potential component of this screening test are addressed: (a) Are there substantial variations in this knowledge across preschool children? (b) Can the knowledge be measured reliably using game-like picture tasks? (c) Do individual differences in this knowledge relate to the child's current level of intellectual functioning? An underlying assumption for the development of this screening test is that assessing gradually emerging abstract knowledge that develops through active, ongoing processing is more likely to predict learning problems than assessing knowledge that develops through rote associative learning. Consistent with this approach was the prediction that one component of intension, knowledge of differences, would be a better predictor of current functioning than knowledge of similarities. The data support this contention. Although both knowledge of similarities and differences was stable within an individual, variable among individuals and highly correlated with each other, only knowledge of differences related to the child's concurrent level of intellectual functioning.     

A national survey of candidates: I. demographics, practice patterns, and satisfaction with training

To better focus efforts in recruiting psychoanalytic candidates, current candidates' demographics, practice patterns, and satisfaction with psychoanalytic training were investigated. An anonymous web-based survey was distributed by e-mail to all candidates subscribing to the affiliate member e-mail list in 2009-2010. Surveys were completed by 226 of 565 affiliate members, for a return rate of 40%. The majority of respondents were women 45 to 64 years of age, married, with a doctoral degree, in private practice, with an annual household income of over $100,000. Most candidates devoted 11 to 30 hours a week to training and had no analysts or candidates in their workplace. Almost half had considered training for more than four years before matriculation, with financial issues cited most frequently as delaying entry. Over 80% of respondents were satisfied with their training. The most frequently cited reasons for dissatisfaction were a negative institute atmosphere, concerns about teaching or the curriculum, and difficulty finding cases. Candidates in training for eight years or more accounted for almost 20% of the group and were more often dissatisfied with training. This study demonstrates that the majority of current candidates are satisfied with training but suggests that recruitment may become increasingly difficult unless factors related to time, cost, case finding, graduation requirements, and institute atmosphere can be addressed.     

Laughter exaggerates happy and sad faces depending on visual context

Laughter is an auditory stimulus that powerfully conveys positive emotion. We investigated how laughter influenced the visual perception of facial expressions. We presented a sound clip of laughter simultaneously with a happy, a neutral, or a sad schematic face. The emotional face was briefly presented either alone or among a crowd of neutral faces. We used a matching method to determine how laughter influenced the perceived intensity of the happy, neutral, and sad expressions. For a single face, laughter increased the perceived intensity of a happy expression. Surprisingly, for a crowd of faces, laughter produced an opposite effect, increasing the perceived intensity of a sad expression in a crowd. A follow-up experiment revealed that this contrast effect may have occurred because laughter made the neutral distractor faces appear slightly happy, thereby making the deviant sad expression stand out in contrast. A control experiment ruled out semantic mediation of the laughter effects. Our demonstration of the strong context dependence of laughter effects on facial expression perception encourages a reexamination of the previously demonstrated effects of prosody, speech content, and mood on face perception, as they may be similarly context dependent.