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.     

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.     

Work site group meetings and the effectiveness of a televised smoking cessation intervention

At the work site, smoking accounts for increased health care expenses and worker absenteeism due to smoking-related illness and reduced productivity and lost wages. Developing comprehensive and accessible smoking cessation programs at the work site is an important objective for health care professionals. In this study, employees of 43 corporations participated in a televised smoking cessation program accompanied by self-help manuals. The media component involved presenting a smoking cessation program on a network television affiliate station during the 4:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. news for 20 days. Employees at half the corporations also had access to semiweekly self-help group meetings. Adding self-help support groups to a program involving self-help manuals and the media reports was found to significantly increase abstinence and its maintenance over time. The implications of using the media, self-help groups, and work site locations in large-scale community-based interventions are discussed.     

Teacher ratings of children's problem and competence behaviors: Normative and parametric characteristics

Teacher-rated adjustment differences among young elementary school children from (a) a recent sample and a 1974 cohort, and (b) urban/suburban, male/female, and grade-level subgroups were examined. A problem behavior checklist (Classroom Adjustment Rating Scale) and a school competence measure (Health Resources Inventory) for 974 children from 5 urban and 5 suburban schools were completed by 101 first- to fourth-grade teachers. Children from the more current cohort were rated as significantly more maladjusted than those from the earlier sample on 8 of 10 adjustment variables. In the recent sample, girls and suburban children evidenced a greater number of school competencies and fewer problem behaviors than boys and urban children, respectively. The implications of these findings for the future use of the teacher rating scales are discussed.     

Gay women,men, and families in rural settings: Toward the development of helping communities

The urban biases of empirical research on gay men, women, and families have resulted in minimal knowledge about gay people in rural settings. The diversity of lives of rural gay women and men and the variety of patterns of meeting the challenges of rural living are described. Processes of help-seeking and help-giving are discussed and the need for a helping community of family, friends, and caring others is affirmed. Collaboration between rural gay people and rural community psychologists is suggested to promote the development of helping communities for gay people and thereby initiate a process of change in rural settings.     

The peculiar successes of community psychology: Service delivery to ethnic minorities and the poor

The 20-year history of community psychology is considered with respect to activities on behalf of ethnic minority participation in psychotherapy, increasing cultural diversity, and to a considerably lesser extent, enhancing community systems. A discrepancy was found between community psychology in principle and community psychology in practice. For the future, community psychologists are advised to identify and seek to strengthen (a) indigenous resources for solving personal and community problems; and (b) pathways of help seeking followed by community members. Community psychology is encouraged to reclaim and enact more vigorously its own legacy. To do otherwise, it is argued, forfeits development of potentially significant research and practice and risks continued ambivalence and dissatisfaction despite worthwhile contribution--suffering the peculiar successes of community psychology.     

Processing of lexical ambiguities in aphasia

Wernicke's and Broca's aphasics performed a lexical decision task wherein they had to decide whether the third word of an auditorily presented triplet series of words was "real" or not. The first and third words of each triplet were related to one, both, or neither meaning of the second word which was semantically ambiguous. The performance pattern of the Wernicke's aphasics was similar to that of normals. They showed selective access to different meanings of the ambiguous words, as demonstrated by the fact that the context provided by the first word affected semantic facilitation on the third word. In contrast, Broca's aphasics showed no semantic facilitation in any priming condition. These results are consistent with previous findings, suggesting that semantic representations may be largely spared in Wernicke's aphasics. The failure of the Broca's aphasics to demonstrate facilitation is consistent with the view that they have a processing deficit in automatically accessing the lexical representation of words.