Schizophrenic, depressive, and nonpatient personality organizations described by Rorschach factor structures

Rorschachs of 155 schizophrenics, 102 depressives, and 186 nonpatients were collected and scored using the Comprehensive System. Twenty-seven Rorschach variables considered central to interpretation were selected for study. Factor analyses and partial correlations controlling for number of responses, R, were generated in order to investigate the personality organization of each of the three groups. A three factor solution was found to be optimal for each group. Patterns of personality organization were discussed within the three groups and factor structures were compared and contrasted. While similarities occur between the three groups, each group also manifests a unique personality organization. These findings support the hypothesis that schizophrenics and depressives differ from nonpatients in kind, rather than degree of disorder.     

Self-disclosure of HIV infection: preliminary results from a sample of Hispanic men.

We examined self-disclosure of HIV infection among 101 seropositive Hispanic men residing in Los Angeles. Results indicated that disclosure was highly selective and presumably influenced by the social, psychological, and material consequences of informing others about one's medical condition. Subjects tended to inform significant others such as parents, friends, and lovers than less significant others such as employers, landlords, and religious leaders. There was a relatively high rate of disclosure (75%) to doctors/dentists who were not treating subjects for HIV infection. Gay and bisexual subjects (89% of the sample) were more inclined to disclose their HIV serostatus to homosexual or bisexual others than to heterosexuals and to inform those who were aware of their sexual orientation. Disclosure increased with severity of disease independently of length of time since testing seropositive. Self-rated negative changes in appearance correlated with disclosure to less significant others. The role of cultural attitudes and values in self-disclosure of HIV infection is discussed.     

The best interest standard: both guide and limit to medical decision making on behalf of incapacitated patients

In this issue of JCE, Douglas Diekema argues that the best interest standard (BIS) has been misemployed to serve two materially different functions. On the one hand, clinicians and parents use the BIS to recommend and to make treatment decisions on behalf of children. On the other hand, clinicians and state authorities use the BIS to determine when the government should interfere with parental decision-making authority. Diekema concedes that the BIS is appropriately used to "guide" parents in making medical treatment decisions for their children. But he argues that the BIS is inappropriately used as a "limiting" standard to determine when to override those decisions. Specifically, Diekema contends that the BIS "does not represent the best means for determining when one must turn to the state to limit parental action." He argues that this limiting function should be served by the harm principle instead of by the BIS. I contend that we should not reassign the BIS's limiting function to the harm principle. In this article I make two arguments to support my position. First, the BIS has effectively served, and can serve, both guiding and limiting functions. Second, the harm principle would be an inadequate substitute. It cannot serve the limiting function as well as the more robust BIS.     

Understanding others: the face and person construal

The face is a critical stimulus in person perception, yet little research has considered the efficiency of the processing operations through which perceivers glean social knowledge from facial cues. Integrating ideas from work on social cognition and face processing, the current research considered the ease with which invariant aspects of person knowledge can be extracted from faces under different viewing and processing conditions. The results of 2 experiments demonstrated that participants extracted knowledge pertaining to the sex and identity of faces in both upright and inverted orientations, even when the faces were irrelevant to the task at hand. The results of an additional experiment, however, suggested that although the extraction of person knowledge from faces may occur unintentionally, the process is nonetheless contingent on the operation of a semantic processing goal. The authors consider the efficiency of person construal and the processes that support this fundamental facet of social-cognitive functioning.     

The neurobiology of adaptive learning in reading: A contrast of different training conditions

fMRI was used to investigate the separate influences of orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing on the ability to learn new words and the cortical circuitry recruited to subsequently read those words. In a behavioral session, subjects acquired familiarity for three sets of pseudowords, attending to orthographic, phonological, or (learned) semantic features. Transfer effects were measured in an event-related fMRI session as the subjects named trained pseudowords, untrained pseudowords, and real words. Behaviorally, phonological and semantic training resulted in better learning than did orthographic training. Neurobiologically, orthographic training did not modulate activation in the main reading regions. Phonological and semantic training yielded equivalent behavioral facilitation but distinct functional activation patterns, suggesting that the learning resulting from these two training conditions was driven by different underlying processes. The findings indicate that the putative ventral visual word form area is sensitive to the phonological structure of words, with phonologically analytic processing contributing to the specialization of this region.     

Mental health professionals' attitudes towards people who are deaf

Mental health professionals' attitudes towards deaf people were examined in relation to their previous contact with deaf people and their knowledge of deafness. Data were gathered regarding different aspects of contact, including the number and type of relationships participants had had with deaf people. A cognitive-processing theory of attitude change following contact (Rothbart & John, 1985) was explored. Knowledge of deafness did not correlate with attitudes towards deaf people but a relationship was found between the amount of contact that professionals had with deaf people of equal or higher status and more positive attitudes.