Sexual tensions in a remarried family

The remarried family is vulnerable to sexual tensions between adults and children because of the weakness of generational boundaries and because the emotional tasks confronting the new couple can result in the detouring of conflict through a child. The case presented here demonstrates the use of structural family therapy which included several therapeutic tools not usually associated with a structural approach. These included family and marital history, individual and subsystem work, education, and modeling. Unspoken sexual tensions between stepfather and stepdaughter were interwoven with the structural problems that the family was experiencing. Following three months of therapy, significant shifts were made in the family structure that resulted in clearer and more appropriate boundaries between parents and the identified patient.Appreciation is expressed by the author to David Abelson, MA, Karlotta Bartholomew, PhD, and Joellyn Ross, PhD, for their support.     

The numerical taxonomy of acute and chronic aphasic syndromes

Summary Acute (n=179) and chronic (n=113) aphasic populations were studied by numerical taxonomy. Clustering based on the objective and standardized language scores of the WAB yielded significant differences for the acute and chronic groups. The overlap between objective clustering and clinical typology, also based on test scores, was sufficient to allow us to interpret the data in clinical terms. The decrease of the global cluster and of Wernicke's cluster and the appearance of new clusters, such as the mixed global-Broca's, the partially recovered Broca's — mild anomic, and the recovered Wernicke's-semantic groups, and the further dichotomy of afferent and efferent conduction clusters were observed. Recovering patients are often reclassified as anomics; this changes the anomic clusters, loading one with patients who fall into the recovered category. Chronic clusters appeared more distinct with less overlap. The trends in both data sets were investigated by principal components analysis. This showed that all language scores contributed to the first component in both populations fairly evenly. Therefore, the main contribution to the first component was severity (the combination of scores). Comprehension and fluency were the major contributors to the second root in both populations, indicating the diagnostic significance of these parameters. Repetition featured more prominently in the second root of the acute, than the chronic population.     

Was euclid an unnecessarily sophisticated psychologist?

A survey of the current state of multidimensional scaling using the city-block metric is presented. Topics include substantive and theoretical issues, recent algorithmic developments and their implications for seemingly straightforward analyses, isometries with other metrics, links to graph-theoretic models, and future prospects.Presented as the 1991 Psychometric Society Presidential Address. I am indebted to Doug Carroll, John Daws, Jan de Leeuw, Geert De Soete, Wayne DeSarbo, Eric Holman, Larry Hubert, Chingis Izmailov, Joe Kruskal, Rob Nosofsky, Akinori Okada, Roger Shepard, Auke Tellegen, and Wijbrandt van Schuur for many helpful comments on this research and to Yuko Minowa for bibliographic assistance. Doug Carroll's comments on an early draft were especially useful. Parts of this research were supported by a grant from AT&T to the University of Illinois. Some of the computational results reported here were obtained during the early 1970's at the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Institute's staff and its Co-Directors, Richard C. Atkinson and Patrick Suppes.     

Wets,drys, and damps

The real issues pertaining to beverage alcohol have been obscured by propaganda from America's drys and wets. The Judeo-Christian culture has, throughout its history, usually advocated moderation. A similar position has been supported by Plato and by some modern researchers concerned with the prevention of alcoholism. Problem drinkers are more likely to come from a family tradition of abstinence than from moderate imbibers.     

Constructing blockmodels: How and why

Blockmodel approaches to network analysis as developed by Harrison White are shown to fall in a broader class of established data analysis methods based on matrix permutations (e.g., clique detection, seriation, permutation algorithms for sparse matrices). Blockmodels are seen as an important generalization of these earlier methods since they permit the data to characterize their own structure, instead of seeking to manifest some preconceived structure which is imposed by the investigator (e.g., cliques, hierarchies, or structural balance). General algorithms for the inductive construction of blockmodels thus occupy a central position in the development of the area. We discuss theoretical and practical aspects of the blockmodel search procedure which has been most widely used (CONCOR algorithm). It is proposed that the distinctive and advantageous feature of CONCOR is that it solves what is initially presented as a combinatorial problem (permutations of matrices to reveal zeroblocks) by representing the problem as a continuous one (analysis of correlation matrices). When this representation strategy receives further development, it is predicted that the fairly crude empirical approach of CONCOR will be supplanted by more powerful procedures within this same class.     

Mapclus: A mathematical programming approach to fitting the adclus model

We present a new algorithm, MAPCLUS (MAthematicalProgrammingCLUStering), for fitting the Shepard-Arabie ADCLUS (forADditiveCLUStering) model. MAPCLUS utilizes an alternating least squares method combined with a mathematical programming optimization procedure based on a penalty function approach, to impose discrete (0,1) constraints on parameters defining cluster membership. This procedure is supplemented by several other numerical techniques (notably a heuristically based combinatorial optimization procedure) to provide an efficient general-purpose computer implemented algorithm for obtaining ADCLUS representations. MAPCLUS is illustrated with an application to one of the examples given by Shepard and Arabie using the older ADCLUS procedure. The MAPCLUS solution uses half as many clusters to achieve nearly the same level of goodness-of-fit. Finally, we consider an extension of the present approach to fitting a three-way generalization of the ADCLUS model, called INDCLUS (INdividualDifferencesCLUStering).We are indebted to Scott A. Boorman, W. K. Estes, J. A. Hartigan, Lawrence J. Hubert, Carol L. Krumhansl, Joseph B. Kruskal, Sandra Pruzansky, Roger N. Shepard, Edward J. Shoben, Sigfrid D. Soli, and Amos Tversky for helpful discussions of this work, as well as the anonymous referees for their suggestions and corrections on an earlier version of this paper. We are also grateful to Pamela Baker and Dan C. Knutson for technical assistance. The research reported here was supported in part by LEAA Grant 78-NI-AX-0142 and NSF Grants SOC76-24512 and SOC76-24394.