Implicit word cues facilitate impaired naming performance: evidence from a case of anomia.

Word-finding difficulties observed in some patients with anomia have been attributed to an insufficient activation of phonology by semantics. There are, however, few direct tests of this hypothesis. This paper reports the case of FR, who presented with anomic aphasia following temporal lobe epilepsy and a cavernoma in the left superior temporal lobe. His anomic deficit was characterized by: (1) no apparent associated semantic impairment; (2) item consistency for accuracy and errors across different administrations; (3) accuracy strongly correlated with word frequency; and (4) a partial, albeit weak, knowledge of the gender of unnamed items. We conducted a naming experiment in which target pictures were implicitly primed by briefly presented masked words. Results showed that the prior presentation of the written target name improved accuracy. When compared with unprimed trials, the presence of the primes also increased phonological errors and decreased semantic errors. We argue that automatic phonological activation derived directly from the implicit written primes interacted with the remaining phonological input from the picture's semantic representation leading to increased accuracy and a change in the balance of error types.     

Cracking the Plaster Cast: Big Five Personality Change during Intensive Outpatient Counseling

This study attempted to evaluate the ability of an outpatient drug rehabilitation program to effect significant shifts on the five major dimensions of personality. A mostly African American sample of 82 men and 50 women entering a 6-week program were assessed at admission, and the 99 who completed were again measured at termination. Follow-up assessments were completed on 30 clients an average of 15 months later. Results indicated significant shifts on all five personality domains from pre- to posttreatment (mean Cohen's d = .38). Significant shifts on Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness were maintained over follow-up (mean Cohen's d = .28). These results suggest that personality change may be possible in the context of treatment.     

Contrasting Acquisition-Focused and Performance-Focused Models of Acquired Behavior

What is encoded during a learning experience? In a learning situation, a training (acquisition) phase is often followed by a test phase. Acquisition-focused models (most associative models) emphasize information processing that occurs during training and assume that only summary statistics (associative values) are retained to influence behavior during testing. Performance-focused models (a k a "computational" models) emphasize information processing that occurs at test and often assume fairly comprehensive memory of prior experiences. In this article, we contrast these two families of models. We note that neither family can claim unique support from the various learning phenomena commonly cited as favoring one or the other position. Within each family, there are highly diverse models that preclude blanket generalizations. However, the acquisition-focused view that subjects retain only summary statistics suggests unrealistically impoverished memories relative to the fairly veridical memories that clearly are formed. But this oversimplifying assumption of acquisition-focused associative theories is exactly what has made them superior to performance-focused models to date in stimulating research.     

Negative and positive cognition in depressed and nondepressed chronic-pain patients

Several studies have suggested that depressed pain patients evidence more cognitive distortion than nondepressed pain patients and healthy controls. Although these studies have generally supported notions relating cognitive distortion to depressive functioning, other aspects of dysfunctional cognition have not been assessed in the chronic-pain population. The present study examined negative and positive automatic thoughts and attributional style in depressed pain patients, nondepressed pain patients, and healthy controls. Depressed chronic-pain patients were found to exhibit significantly more negative automatic thoughts than nondepressed pain patients and healthy controls. Conversely, nondepressed chronic-pain patients reported significantly more positive automatic thoughts than did depressed patients and healthy controls. No significant differences were found for attributional style. These results suggest that different cognitive-behavioral interventions might be considered for depressed compared to nondepressed chronic-pain patients.