Anomalous brain dominance and the immune system: Do left-handers have specific immunological patterns?

Geschwind and Behan (1982) and Geschwind and Galaburda (1985a, 1985b, 1985c) suggested a correlation between brain laterality and immune disorders. To test whether this hypothesis holds true not only for the frequency of immune diseases and circulating autoantibodies, but extends also to cellular immunity, we examined the association between handedness and markers of cellular immunity. Twenty-seven left-handed and 37 right-handed subjects were serologically screened for cellular parameters and 22 left-handed subjects were typed for human leukocyte antigen (HLA). When compared to the right-handers, the left-handed group showed a significant decrease in the inflammatory cell types CD3(+) T cells (total T cells), CD4(+) T cells (T-helper cells), and HLA-Dr (MHC-II, antigen-presenting cells) as well as in the CD19(+) cells (B cells) and CD16/CD57(+) cells (natural killer cells). We assume a relationship exists between cerebral hemispheric specialisation and the immune system not only for humoral but also for cellular immunity, and we discuss the role of the major histocompatibility complex in neurological and immunological development.     

Linguistic marking,strategy, and affect in syllogistic reasoning

It has repeatedly been shown that three-term-series problems with unmarked comparatives (e.g., taller, higher) are solved more quickly than otherwise identical problems using their marked opposites (e.g., shorter, lower). Clark's principle of lexical marking accounts for these results in terms of a simpler semantic featural coding of the unmarked comparative with respect to its marked counterpart. Huttenlocher's theory of spatial imagery accounts for these same results via the subjects' mental ordering of the three terms as instructed by the problem statements. The present research demonstrated that while the lower latency of the unmarked adjective is a reliable effect, congruent ordering strategies are necessary for significant results. Subjects who order terms from unmarked to marked produce significant results for Clark's principle of lexical marking. Those who order terms in opposite direction do not. Further, it is shown that the choice of direction of ordering is itself significantly influenced by the affective value of the adjectives in context and to the individual subject.This research is based on a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the doctoral degree to the University of Illinois.     

MEMORY, AMNESIA, AND DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER

Abstract— Virtually all patients with dissociative identity (or multiple personality) disorder manifest interpersonality amnesia, whereby events experienced by a particular personality slate or identity are retrievable by that same identity but not by a different one Though considered a hallmark of dissociative identity disorder (DID), interpersonality amnesia has to date attracted little empirical attention. Further, the few studies on the topic typically include just 1 DID patient and a single index of retention. In contrast the current experiment involved 9 DID patients and several measures of either explicit or implicit memory Replicating and extending the single-case study of Nissen, Ross, Willingham, MacKenzie, and Schacter (1988), the present results revealed that implicit testing is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for demonstrating transfer of information from one identity to another Specifically, whereas priming in word-stem completion occurred only if the same personality state performed at both study and at test, priming in picture-fragment completion was as robust between different identities as it was within the same identity Discussion focuses on prospects for future research aimed at understanding the nature and scope of interpersonality amnesia.     

Sex as Reported in a Recent Sample of Psychological Research

This study is a follow up on the study done by Sara Schwabacher (1972). All the articles in this study were taken from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1974, volume 30, and were reviewed for sex of subjects, type of conclusions drawn, and whether sex was mentioned in the abstract, introduction, or methods section. These results were compared to the Schwabacher study in order to discover if the conditions noted in her study continue to prevail, or whether there has been a change in scientific sampling and reporting procedures.
Contrary to the previous study, the percentage of all male studies show a sharp drop of 15% while all female studies rose 22%. When comparing the amount of single sex studies overgeneralized, all-male studies remained proportionately the same, whereas overgeneralized all-female studies showed an increase of 35.5%. In addition more both-sex articles checked for sex differences than previously reported. The authors discuss the results in relation to the women's movement and scientific decision making. Three suggestions for scientific reporting and procedures are made.     

Semantic and syntactic factors in the perception of rapidly presented sentences

An important controversy in psycholinguistics has been the nature of the initial hypothesis in sentence processing. This problem has been directly addressed with the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) technique, in which words of a sentence are presented one at a time at tachistoscopic rates. The results of this research (Forster and Ryder, 1971) have provided evidence against Bever's (1970) thesis that most normal perceptual processing of sentences is probably carried out with little regard to actual sequence or structure. However, since the number of words seen is a result of presentation speed as well as psycholinguistic processing, this result could be an artifact of presentation rate. A slower or faster rate could facilitate different processing strategies and perhaps suggest a different nature of the initial hypothesis. Thus, the present study is a conceptual replication of Forster and Ryder (1971), at different presentation rates. While significant effects for syntactic structure were obtained only at the slower presentation rate, results for semantics were significant at both slow and fast presentation speeds. Thus, insofar as sentence perception with the RSVP technique reflects the nature of the initial hypothesis, it is suggested that the hypothesis is semantic.     

GENDER-RELATED PATTERNS OF HELPING AMONG FRIENDS

In this study, the social role theory of gender and helping (Eagly & Crowley, 1986) was applied to understand gender differences in helping behavior. Relationships among criterion variables of time spent helping and help quality; and key predictors of problem severity, empathic tendency, anger, sympathy, closeness, causal controllability, coping, and self-efficacy were applied. Participants from a large community sample ( N = 1,004) described situations in which they helped a friend and completed questionnaires describing factors that influenced their actions. Recipients of the help also filled out similar questionnaires. It was found that across many problem settings women spend more time helping, give higher quality help, and feel more empathy and sympathy in response to their friends' problems. Further, the presence of anger toward a friend is associated with more time spent helping but a lower quality of help. In contrast, men rate their friends' problems as more controllable/blameworthy and experience more anger. Further, controllability has a greater influence on a number of help-related variables. For both men and women, self-efficacy and perception of problem severity are the greatest direct predictors of helping.