Infant hypotonia, obesity, hypogenitalism and oligophrenia--new viewpoints on the etiology and symptoms of Prader-Willi syndrome

We present four cases of Prader-Willi syndrome. Two of them have an abnormality of a chromosome 15, the other both show different chromosomal abnormalities. Translocations or deletions were found recently in the bands 15q11/12 in about 60% of the cases of Prader-Willi syndrome. The consequences for diagnosis, symptomatology and genetic counselling of the syndrome are discussed.     

The effects of child abuse as seen in adults: George Orwell

The author presents the case of a patient who showed the massive defensive effects seen in people who were abused in childhood. These effects are similar to those described in George Orwell's 1984 and in his autobiographical writings: denial and "doublethink"; masochistic submission to the tormentor; turning of anger against the self and loving "Big Brother"; identifying with the abuser and tormenting others; a burgeoning of anal mechanisms and obsessive phenomena that results in a massive isolation of affects; excessive emotional control alongside outbursts of rage. The interference with memory and emotions compromises identity and humanity. The unforseeable evolution of innate gifts in a child sometimes permits a partial transcendence of these crippling defenses, as Orwell partially transcended what appears to have been the emotional deprivation of his childhood and what he felt to have been the abuse of his schoolboy years.     

Organism-environment mutuality epistemics,and the concept of an ecological niche

The concept of an ecological niche (econiche) has been used in a variety of ways, some of which are incompatible with a relational or functional interpretation of the term. This essay seeks to standardize usage by limiting the concept to functional relations between organisms and their surroundings, and to revise the concept to include epistemic relations. For most organisms, epistemics are a vital aspect of their functional relationships to their surroundings and, hence, a major determinant of their econiche. Rejecting the traditional dualism of organism and environment, an econiche is defined as the reciprocal (dual) of a functionally specified class of organisms (FSTU). From this perspective, an econiche necessarily implies a certain type of organism, and a class of functionally similar organisms implies a special econiche.The econiche concept is also discussed in relation to other ecological terms that reflect the distributional patterns of organisms, such as habitat, and the concept of an empty niche is criticized.Special thanks are due to Michael Turvery for his part in many stimulating discussions of some of the problems and concepts addressed in this paper. I am also grateful to him and to Claudia Carello, Tim Johnston, Bill Mace, Bernard Patten, Ed Reed, Robert E. Shaw, Bill Warren, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.     

Social categorization,visual cues,and social judgements

Recent research on social cognition suggests that lifelike visual and vocal information about a person may strongly mediate the impact of prior social categorical knowledge on social judgements. Other research, however, on the contribution of visual cues to impression formation, suggests that they have relatively little impact. This study sought to resolve these conflicting findings by examining the effect of visual cues on social judgements when subjects possess prior social categorical knowledge varying in salience to the experimental task. Videotaped target interviews were monitored by observers in either sound and vision or sound only, and measures were taken of the targets' perceived personality, their ‘actual’ and ‘predicted’ social performance, and social acceptance by observers. Whilst salience of categorization strongly influenced the quality of judgements, visual cues had little if any effect. However, visual cues strongly influenced subjects' confidence in all three sets of judgements, sound and vision subjects being consistently more confident than their sound only counterparts. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research in both social cognition and visual cues.     

Electrophysiological correlates of semantic features

Analyses of averaged auditory evoked responses to a list of 10 positive and 10 negative words led to the identification of a restricted region in the brain response which reliably discriminated between words differing in the semantic features positive and negative. These data support the view that word meanings are composed of more basic components or features and are not stored simply as dictionary items in the brain.     

Continuous monitoring of human contingency judgment across trials

Recent evidence suggests that people are sensitive to the degree of contingency between their actions and ensuing outcomes, but little is known about the way in which such contingency judgments develop as more and more information about the contingency is provided. Three experiments examined this issue in the context of a video game. In Experiment 1, it was found that contingency judgments follow growth functions: When the contingency was positive, judgments increased toward a positive asymptote, and when the contingency was negative, judgments decreased toward a negative asymptote. When the contingency was zero, judgments themselves remained close to zero but were biased by the overall frequency with which the outcome occurred. In Experiment 2, it was shown that the growth function was not the result of the anchoring of early judgments at the zero point. The bias in judgments when the contingency is zero was investigated in Experiment 3. The results are discussed in terms of rule-based analyses and contemporary theories of conditioning.     

Analytic,synthetic, abstracting,and word-class-defining aspects of verbal mother-child interactions

Phenomena of language teaching and learning in the course of verbal interactions between one mother and her daughter were analyzed. The daughter was between 18 and 27 months old during the recordings, and her utterance length ranged from 1,5 to 4,0 morphemes. Twenty hours of interactions were analyzed and the emphasis was placed upon sequential aspects and mathemagenic features of the conversations. It was demonstrated that the mother performs much analytic, synthetic, abstracting, and word-class-defining work during these verbal interactions. These maternal instructional activities seem to lead not only to the child's learning of language rules but also to her employment of the abstracting, analytical, and synthetic methodology. It is concluded that the main explanatory focus has to be on the mother in the attempts to explain language transmission and acquisition. Basic similarities to other instructional/skill training situations are suggested. Neither extraordinary complex cognitive nor innate linguistic capacities need to be assumed to explain the phenomena in question.     

Recent stressful life events and young children's school adjustment

A group of 211 first-to fourth-grade children who had experienced one or more recent stressful life events were compared to a demographically matched sample of 211 children who had not experienced such events on measures of school adjustment problems and competencies. Stressful life events were found to be associated with the presence of more serious school adjustment problems and fewer competencies. Those associations were strongest for children who had experienced multiple recent stressful events. The importance of preventive interventions for this at-risk group was emphasized and future research steps in the area were considered.