Cued visual attention does not distinguish between occluded and occluding objects

Does visual attention spread from the cued end of an occluded object to locations occupied by inferred portions of that object? We investigated this question by using a probe detection paradigm with two-dimensional (2-D) displays of occluded objects. Probes could appear in occluded or nonoccluded locations on either a cued or noncued object. Participants responded faster to probes appearing within the region of space occupied by the cued object. This was true not only when the probe appeared in positions separated from the cued location by an occluder (as demonstrated by Moore, Yantis, & Vaughan, 1998), but also when it appeared in positions on the occluder itself. Thus, results suggest that cued facilitation spreads to regions of noncued occluding objects that overlap cued occluded objects in 2-D space.     

Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotion by Children with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Interpreting and responding appropriately to facial expressions of emotion are important aspects of social skills. Some children, adolescents, and adults with various psychological and psychiatric disorders recognize facial expressions less proficiently than their peers in the general population. We wished to determine if such deficits existed in a group of 133 children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). The subjects were receiving in-patient psychiatric services for at least one of substance-related disorders, adjustment disorders, anxiety disorders, mood disorders or disruptive behavior disorders. After being read stories describing various emotional reactions, all subjects were tested for their ability to recognize the 6 basic facial expressions of emotion depicted in Ekman and Friesen's (1976) normed photographs. Overall, they performed well on this task at levels comparable to those occurring in the general population. Accuracy increased with age, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, or clinical diagnosis. After adjusting for age effects, the subjects diagnosed with either adjustment disorders, mood disorders, or disruptive behavior disorders were significantly more accurate at identifying anger than those without those diagnoses. In addition, subjects with mood disorders identified sadness significantly more accurately than those without this diagnosis, although the effect was greatest with younger children.     

PHYSICAL AND PSYCHIATRIC CORRELATES OF GENDER DISCRIMINATION

We tested the model that sexist discrimination, measured by the Schedule of Sexist Events (SSE), would account for additional variance in women's physical and psychiatric symptoms, above and beyond that accounted for by generic stressors. A series of hierarchical regression analyses, predicting symptoms on 10 different symptom outcome measures from generic stress and sexist stress (discrimination) were conducted, with the generic stressors entered on the first step and sexist discrimination on the second. Results revealed that sexist discrimination contributed significantly to the variance in women's symptoms, accounting for additional variance in those symptoms. Furthermore, sexist discrimination accounted for more of the variance than did generic stressors in premenstrual, depressive, obsessive-compulsive, somatic, and total psychiatric and physical symptoms. These findings varied with the age and ethnicity of the women and with the symptom measure used, but nonetheless suggest that sexist discrimination plays a significant role in women's most prevalent symptoms.     

Dependence: A means or an impediment to growth?

Dependence is generally viewed negatively, and in therapeutic situations it is often considered to be 'unhealthy'. In object relations theory and attachment theory, however, it is acknowledged that dependent or care-seeking behaviour is activated even in 'healthy' adults in times of distress. This suggests that dependency is likely to be an issue for all professionals whose work involves a counselling element. In order to investigate views of dependency in the therapeutic relationship, an exploratory qualitative study was conducted with three focus groups. The resulting data indicate considerable concern relating to issues of dependency, and a need for more rigorous research into the management of client dependency.     

Knowledge acquisition and strategic action in “Mastermind” problems

In two experiments, the strategies used by subjects playing the logical-deduction game, Mastermind, were examined. In the first experiment, subjects showed improvement resulting from the continued use of a particular strategic action, and the data suggested that the subjects learned the strategy from their transactions with the task. In the second experiment, the question of changes in underlying strategic knowledge of Mastermind was examined. The accuracy and complexity of the subjects' deductions and their use of the previously identified strategy were used to generate a model of the cognitive operations involved in Mastermind. Although there were improvements in the accuracy and complexity of the subjects' deductions resulting from continued play, these improvements were unrelated to the use of the strategy. Moreover, the likelihood of making accurate and complex deductions was well accounted for by a Markovian model, suggesting that the deployment of the strategy was not driven by any change in the subject's underlying knowledge structures. Rather, the subjects seemed to use the strategy to create Mastermind situations whose interpretation was fairly easy. The implications for previous work on the issue of Mastermind strategies and the development of logical-deduction strategies are discussed.     

BOOK REVIEW

Book reviewed in this article: The Family Therapy of Drug Abuse and Addiction M. Duncan Stanton, Thomas C. Todd, and Associates New York: Guilford Press, 1982.     

Cephalic mechanism for social control of fissioning in planarians: III. Central nervous system centers of facilitation and inhibition.

Previous studies have indicated that asexual reproduction (fissioning) in the planarian Dugesia dorotocephala is socially controlled through a cephalic mechanism: Isolation releases fissioning; grouping inhibits it; decapitation, at the level of the auricles, releases it even in grouped subjects. The brain is not necessary for programming the actual events of fissioning; these are orchestrated by the segmental plexus fissioning (SPF) system. Various surgical cuts were made to ablate selected portions of the central nervous system of isolated and grouped planarians in order to ascertain the inhibitory or facilitatory effects of these in the physiological mediation of such control on the SPF system. These results were synthesized into a model of this control system; the anterior lobes and optic regions of the brain inhibit the SPF system, and the anterior and caudal segmental plexuses facilitate it. These influences are partially tonic and partially contingent upon social stimulation.     

Hemispheric specialization for the perception of speech sounds: The influence of intonation and structure

The present report investigates the effect of various cues to phrase structure upon the hemispherically lateralized processing of phonetic structure. Meaningless sequences were paired for dichotic presentation and were delivered under two different conditions termed structured and semistructured. The dichotic sequences in the two conditions contained the same nonsense syllable stems, English bound morphemes, and English function words. Also each of the sequences in both conditions were grammatically ordered in the sense that if the nonsense stems were replaced by English stems, a grammatical sentence would result. The conditions differed with respect to prosody, however: the structured sequences were characterized by the acoustic correlates of constituent structure; the semistructured sequences were delivered in a monotone. A significant right-ear superiority was observed in the structured condition, but not in the semistructured condition. These perceptual laterality differences are discussed in relation to cerebral dominance for language and in relation to speech processing generally.