Examining the Clinical Efficacy of Core Transformation: A Randomized Clinical Trial

This randomized clinical trial with a sample of adults (N = 129) from India explored the effects of a single core‐transformation session on symptom experience and psychological growth. The results over the total 8‐week study period indicated significant, moderate overall effect sizes (ds = 0.63 and 0.52) for symptom experience, emotional stability, affect balance, global well‐being, and purpose in life. Implications for research and clinical practice are discussed.     

Unemployment and civil commitment: a test of the intolerance hypothesis

We theorize that the reported association between economic indicators and the incidence of civil commitment for mental illness may result, at least in part, from reduced tolerance in the community for impaired behavior among minorities. Earlier work suggests that economically induced intolerance will be focused primarily on minority males. Based on this literature, we hypothesize that the median level of functioning among African-American males subjected to civil commitment will vary positively with earlier changes in the unemployment rate. The test applies Box-Jenkins methods to 156 months (August 1985-July 1998) of data from California. Consistent with theory, results support the hypothesis.     

A study of syntactic processing in aphasia II: neurological aspects

This paper presents the results of a study of the effects of left hemisphere strokes on syntactically-based comprehension in aphasic patients. We studied 42 patients with aphasia secondary to left hemisphere strokes and 25 control subjects for the ability to assign and interpret three syntactic structures (passives, object extracted relative clauses, and reflexive pronouns) in enactment, sentence-picture matching and grammaticality judgment tasks. We measured accuracy, RT and self-paced listening times in SPM and GJ. We obtained magnetic resonance (MR) and 5-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG PET) data on 31 patients and 12 controls. The percent of selected regions of interest (ROIs) that was lesioned on MR and the mean normalized PET counts per voxel in ROIs were calculated. In regression analyses, lesion measures in both perisylvian and non-perisylvian ROIs predicted performance. Patients who performed at similar levels behaviorally had lesions of very different sizes, and patients with equivalent lesion sizes varied greatly in their level of performance. The data are consistent with a model in which the neural tissue that is responsible for the operations underlying sentence comprehension and syntactic processing is localized in different neural regions in different individuals.     

The Vancouver Obsessional Compulsive Inventory (VOCI)

The original Maudsley Obsessional Compulsive Inventory (MOCI) has been widely used and is considered to be one of the best available self-report instruments for measuring observable obsessive-compulsive problems such as washing and checking. However, it has several limitations and requires updating. Our revision of the MOCI, the Vancouver Obsessional Compulsive Inventory (VOCI), was designed to provide assessment of a range of obsessions, compulsions, avoidance behaviour, and personality characteristics of known or theoretical importance in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The development of the VOCI is described, and we provide evidence of its reliability and validity. Our findings in samples of people with OCD, people with other anxiety disorders or depression, community adults, and undergraduate students suggest that the VOCI is a promising new measure. We anticipate that, like its predecessor, the VOCI will have widespread use in both research and clinical settings.     

Bilingual corpus callosum variability

Magnetic resonance imaging was used to produce midsagittal images of the corpus callosum of 19 right-handed adult male and female subjects. The preliminary findings of this study indicate that significant adaptation in the anterior midbody of the corpus callosum has occurred to accommodate multiple language capacity in bilingual individuals compared to monolingual individuals. The main interpretation of this finding is that the precentral gyrus is involved in bilingual faculty adaptation assuming a role consistent with the somatotopical input to areas dedicated to the mouth, and input to association tracts connecting the premotor and supplementary motor cortices. This paper discusses possible implications to neuroscientists, second language educators, and their students.     

Outcome pre- and postexposure effects: retention interval interacts with primacy and recency

Effects of outcome-alone pretraining and posttraining exposure were investigated in conditioned suppression experiments conducted within a sensory preconditioning preparation with rats. Experiment 1 found that interference by outcome postexposure was stronger than that by outcome preexposure, suggesting a recency effect. Experiment 2 found that after a long retention interval, outcome preexposure produced more interference than outcome postexposure, suggesting a shift from recency to primacy with increasing retention interval. Experiment 3 showed that presentation of a priming stimulus that had been embedded within the earlier phase of treatment also caused a shift from recency to primacy. These results suggest that, at least in a sensory preconditioning paradigm, retrievability of outcome-alone exposure memory is an important determinant of any outcome-alone exposure effect.     

Line at shape-from-shadow border tested with stereo

Kennedy and Bai (2000 Perception 29 399-408) argued incorrect border polarity blocked perception of faces in shape-from-shadow 'Mooney faces' with dark lines at the contour, a display inspired by Hering. Their hypothesis was tested with several displays, notably binocular gratings made of lines of dots. The stereo-induced depth involved a shadow falling on two surface planes. Most of a dark-dotted (shadow) region appeared to be on one surface, but a strip of dark dots at the shadow's border appeared to be on another-to the fore or rear. Control conditions involved 'negative' images (white dots). Subjects saw the shadowed object as easily in dark-dotted images with stereo depth as in an image with uniform depth for all the dots, and more readily than in the negatives. Our results favour the border-polarity hypothesis.     

The role of motivation in the age-related positivity effect in autobiographical memory

Abstract— This study reveals that older adults have a positivity effect in long-term autobiographical memory and that a positivity bias can be induced in younger adults by a heightened motivation to regulate current emotional well-being. Three hundred nuns, ages 47 to 102 years, recalled personal information originally reported 14 years earlier. They did so under experimental conditions that repeatedly primed them to focus on their current emotional states or on their memory accuracy, or that provided no instructional focus (control condition). Both older control participants and participants who were focused on emotional states showed a tendency to remember the past more positively than they originally reported in 1987. In contrast, both younger control participants and participants who were focused on accuracy tended to remember the past more negatively than originally reported.