Social support versus companionship: effects on life stress, loneliness, and evaluations by others

In recent years, much interest has focused on delineating and contrasting specific functions of social relationships that contribute to psychological well-being. Five studies contrasted the roles of companionship and social support in buffering the effects of life stress, in influencing feelings of loneliness and social satisfaction, and in affecting others' judgments. Study 1 analyzed data from a community survey and found that companionship had a main effect on psychological well-being and a buffering effect on minor life stress, whereas social support had only a buffering effect on major life stress. Studies 2, 3, and 4 analyzed data from two college student samples and a different community survey to evaluate how companionship and social support contributed to relationship satisfaction and feelings of loneliness. The results of these studies indicated that companionship was the strongest predictor of these dimensions of social satisfaction. Study 5 used an experimental design to test the hypothesis that a deficit of companionship elicits more negative reactions from others than does a deficit of social support. This hypothesis received partial support. Considered together, the results of these studies suggest that companionship plays a more important and more varied role in sustaining emotional well-being than previous studies have acknowledged.     

Intellectual functioning and aggression

In a 22-year study, data were collected on aggressiveness and intellectual functioning in more than 600 subjects, their parents, and their children. Both aggression and intellectual functioning are reasonably stable in a subject's lifetime and perpetuate themselves across generations and within marriage pairs. Aggression in childhood was shown to interfere with the development of intellectual functioning and to be predictive of poorer intellectual achievement as an adult. Early IQ was related to early subject aggression but did not predict changes in aggression after age 8. On the other hand, differences between early IQ and intellectual achievement in middle adulthood were predictable from early aggressive behavior. A dual-process model was offered to explain the relation between intellectual functioning and aggressive behavior. We hypothesized that low intelligence makes the learning of aggressive responses more likely at an early age, and this aggressive behavior makes continued intellectual development more difficult.     

Left sidedness and sleep difficulty: the alinormal syndrome

Four indexes of laterality: handedness, footedness, eyedness, and earedness, were assessed in a sample of 1274 subjects. Left- and right-sided groups were compared on two aspects of self-reported sleep difficulty: trouble falling asleep and frequent night wakenings. The incidence of sleep difficulty was found to be elevated in the left-sided groups. The results are discussed in terms of a possible complex of behavioral deviations from the statistical norm, called the alinormal syndrome.     

Sex differences in spatial task performance of patients with and without unilateral cerebral lesions

Two visuospatial tasks, the WAIS Block Design and the Street Gestalt Completion Test, were administered to men and women with and without unilateral cerebral lesions. These two tasks represent different categories of visuospatial functions. The Street test is a visual-perceptual gestalt task, requiring the closure of fragmented pictures, whereas Block Design is an analytical, manipulospatial task requiring rotation of spatial coordinates. For the non-brain-damaged group, the men showed a nonsignificant trend toward better Block Design performance relative to the women, whereas there was no sex-related difference in Street performance. For the brain-damaged groups, patients with right hemisphere lesions performed significantly worse than patients with left hemisphere lesions on both the Street test and Block Design, indicating that both tasks were more sensitive to right hemisphere functioning. There was, however, a significant sex X side of lesion interaction on Block Design only, with the men showing a more asymmetrical pattern of scores. These results suggest that sex differences in functional lateralization may underlie sex differences in visuospatial ability, and that sex differences in functional lateralization may be present for only certain visuospatial processes.     

Accessibility of case and gender contrasts for agent--object assignment in Broca's aphasics and fluent anomics

Yugoslav agrammatic Broca's aphasics, fluent anomics, and control subjects were tested for comprehension of agent-object relations in a series of simple Serbo-Croatian sentences in the conversational past tense, consisting of two nouns and a transitive action verb. The availability of two closed class cues--case contrasts and gender contrasts--as well as the availability of an open class lexical cue--animacy contrasts--was varied across sentences. An analysis of subjects' agent-object assignments yielded the following results: Both Broca's aphasics and fluent anomics showed a selective impairment in sensitivity to closed class morphology, although anomics were considerably less impaired than Broca's aphasics. This finding was interpreted as evidence for a non-syndrome-dependent vulnerability of abilities to process closed class morphology for comprehension. In addition, the pattern of agent-object assignments for Broca's aphasics revealed that the degree to which they were able to access the two closed class cues depended on a convergence of the various cues to agent-object relations. In particular, a convergence of case and gender contrasts had an interactive effect on Broca's responses: Gender agreement cues were accessed only in the presence of convergent case contrasts. Conversely, sensitivity to case contrasts was dramatically heightened in the presence of convergent gender contrasts. These results were consistent with a view that the two cues function as intrasentential "primes" or "retrieval cues" for one another.     

Anomalous dominance in sibling stutterers: Evidence from CT scan asymmetries, dichotic listening, neuropsychological testing, and handedness

Two left-handed siblings with developmental stuttering are comprehensively described. The methods of study included speech and language evaluation, neurological and neuropsychological examinations, dichotic listening, auditory evoked responses, electroencephalogram, and CT scan asymmetry measurements. The data from each sibling showed evidence of anomalous cerebral dominance on many of the variables investigated. The CT scan measurements showed atypical asymmetries, especially in the occipital regions. These findings support the theory that stuttering may be related to anomalous cerebral dominance, both on functional as well as structural bases. Implications of anomalous dominance and the resultant effect of hemispheric rivalry on speech fluency are discussed.