Altruism in surgery of AIDS patients

There is usually a long period of time between infection with the AIDS virus and manifestation of symptoms. Asymptomatic patients often would benefit from elective surgery for diseases such as arthritis which are unrelated to their infection. The surgeons' decisions to accept the risks to themselves, their spouses, and their operating teams in order to relieve pain and suffering appear to be based upon two covenants; one concerns their role within the doctor-patient relationship, and the other concerns their relationship to what they see as the ultimate meaning in life.     

The autoshaping procedure as a residual block clock

In the first experiment, 4 pigeons were each presented with a recurring sequence of four key colors followed by the delivery of grain (block clock). Once the rate of pecking had stabilized, three of the colors were replaced, during different series of sessions, by a darkening of the key. The rate of pecking was reduced within those segments of the interval between deliveries of food during which the key was dark; when the key was dark during the final portion of the interval, rates were reduced throughout the entire interval. In the second experiment, 3 new pigeons were exposed to a different sequence of colors, and the final stimulus was replaced in successive conditions by a novel color, a darkened key, and a restoration of the original color. The data indicated that darkening the key had a more severe, more extensive, and more persistent effect than did a mere change in color. These results suggest that it may be fruitful to conceptualize the autoshaping procedure as a special version of the block clock in which pecking is suppressed throughout the greater part of the interval by darkening the key. In the final condition, the same stimulus appeared in each of the last three portions of the interval. The rate of pecking was lower during the last two portions than when distinctive colors were presented, with the peak rate now appearing in the fifth of seven equal temporal components.     

The early memories procedure: a projective test of autobiographical memory, part 2

In Part 1 of this paper, topics germane to the projective assessment of autobiographical memory were discussed. In Part 2, the cognitive-perceptual method will be used to interpret several early memories and a slightly abridged Early Memories Procedure (EMP).     

Demographic and intellectual correlates of the Short-term Memory Test.

This study examined the effect of demographic variables and intellectual factors on the Short-term Memory Test. Subjects were 20 patients neurologically diagnosed as brain-damaged. There was only one significant correlation between Verbal IQ and the Short-term Memory Test. Demographic variables of age, education, and sex did not correlate significantly with scores of the Short-term Memory Test.     

Correlations of Beck Depression Inventory and Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale.

The scores of 15 adolescents who had a primary diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, 21 of Conduct Disorder, and 23 control subjects on the Beck and Reynolds depression scales were correlated .58 over-all, .73 for the Posttraumatic group, .48 for the Conduct Disordered group, but .37 for controls. The Reynolds scale did not identify depression in these adolescents as effectively as did the Beck scale.     

Reliability and validity of the Cognitive Slippage Scale in two populations.

Analyses of responses from a clinical sample of 120 patients (primarily schizophrenics) and from 158 college students to the Cognitive Slippage Scale, a scale designed by Miers and Raulin to identify speech deficits and confused thinking in schizophrenic and schizotypal personality disorders showed high internal reliability; Cronbach's coefficients alpha were .89 and .86 in the clinical and college student samples, respectively. The mean scale scores significantly differentiated the two samples. Also, change scores over 4 wk. showed adequate stability for both samples. Item analysis indicated Items 11, 20, 21, and 28 may not reliably discriminate between schizophrenic and college student samples. Over-all, these preliminary results are consistent with the reliability and validity of the scale.     

Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals.

In this paper we study the acquisition of German noun plurals in relation to the question of how children represent regular and irregular inflection. Pinker and Prince (1992) have demonstrated several dissociations between regular and irregular inflection in the English past tense system. However, in English, the default status of -ed is confounded with its high frequency; therefore inflectional systems other than English past tense formation must be examined. The noun plural system in German is particularly interesting, because most nouns have irregular plurals in German and the regular (default) plural is less frequent than several of the irregular plurals. Thus it is unclear how a language learner determines whether German even has a regular plural, and if so what form it takes. Based on longitudinal data from impaired and unimpaired monolingual German-speaking children, we find a striking, statistically significant correlation: plural affixes that are used in overregularizations, namely -n or -s, are left out within compounds. This correlation shows that even impaired children are sensitive to the distinction between regular and irregular morphology. We propose a linguistic analysis of the correlation in terms of Kiparsky's (1982, 1985) level-ordering model plus an additional ordering condition on affixes: default (regular) affixes cannot serve as input to compounding processes.     

A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking.

This paper presents a spreading-activation theory of conceptually driven lemma retrieval--the first stage of lexical access in speaking, where lexical items specified with respect to meaning and syntactic properties are activated and selected. The mental lexicon is conceived of as a network consisting of concept, lemma, and word-form nodes and labelled links, with each lexical concept represented as an independent node. A lemma is retrieved by enhancing the activation level of the node representing the to-be-verbalized concept. This activation then spreads towards the lemma level, and the highest activated lemma node is selected. The theory resolves questions such as the hypernym problem (Levelt, 1989). Furthermore, a computer model that implements the theory is shown to be able to account for many basic findings on the time course of object naming, object categorization, and word categorization in the picture-word interference paradigm. In addition, non-trivial predictions regarding the time course of semantic facilitation for hypernyms, hyponyms, and cohyponyms are experimentally tested, and shown to be valid.     

The debt of neuropsychology to the epilepsies.

Both neuropsychology and psychology in general have been enhanced markedly by brain-behavior models derived from the study of the epilepsies. A significant body of neuropsychological concepts originated or were confirmed through epilepsy-based treatment and research. These concepts include the peri-Rolandic homunculus, the role of the hippocampal-temporal lobe complex in cognitive memory, hemisphere plasticity for speech in childhood, the intracarotid amytal procedure for determining hemisphere memory patency, and hemisphere-based models of cognition confirmed through human commissurotomy. Personality and social-emotional research in epilepsy are additional areas in which new conceptual models grounded in psychological science can both repay our debt to the epilepsies and provide much needed psychological research and treatment.