The effects of attentional focus and partner arousal on sexual responding in functional and dysfunctional men

The effects of attentional-focus instructions (self vs partner focus) and level of partner arousal (high, low and ambiguous) on sexual responding, both objectively and subjectively measured, were examined with sexually-functional (N = 8) and sexually-dysfunctional (N = 8) men. These instructional sets were delivered just before the subjects viewed an erotic film depicting a heterosexual couple in which they identified with the male. When both groups were focusing on themselves rather than their partner, higher tumescence was observed when their partner was displaying low arousal. When the partner's level of arousal was ambiguous, highest tumescence was achieved during partner attentional focus. When the partner was displaying high sexual arousal, functional subjects reached highest levels of tumescence during partner focus, while dysfunctional subjects reached highest levels of tumescence during self focus. In fact, high partner arousal seemed to inhibit dysfunctional subjects' tumescence under partner focus. Examination of self-report of arousal data as measured by a subjective lever revealed interesting group differences. Results are discussed in light of possible maintaining factors in sexual dysfunction and their treatment implications.     

Flavor-illness aversions: potentiation of odor by taste is disrupted by application of novocaine into amygdala

Taste and odor have different properties in toxiphobic conditioning. When each is used alone, taste becomes aversive when followed by immediate or delayed poison, while odor becomes aversive only if followed by immediate poison. However, if odor and taste are presented as a compound and followed by delayed poison, then odor does become aversive when tested alone. It is as if taste has potentiated the odor signal. Several experiments assessed the role of the amygdala in this potentiation effect by anesthetizing the amygdala with 10% novocaine. Novocaine applied 30 min before presentation (Pre-CS) of an odor-taste compound disrupted the potentiated odor aversion but not the taste aversion. In contrast, novocaine applied 1 min after the compound odor-taste or 1 min prior to LiCl poison did not dissociate odor and taste aversions; both odor and taste aversions were facilitated. Novocaine applied 30 min before an odor alone also disrupted an odor aversion induced by immediate LiCl. But identical treatment did not disrupt odor avoidance conditioned by immediate foot-shock, suggesting that amygdala anesthesia does not simply produce anosmia. Pre-CS novocaine treatment also disrupted flavor neophobia prior to conditioning. The results suggest that novocaine applied to the amygdala disrupts the integration of odor with taste and illness during toxiphobic conditioning.     

Sexual activity and contraceptive use among low-income urban black adolescent females.

A modified form of Nathanson and Becker's (1983) Health Belief Model Questionnaire and other measures designed to assess cognitive processing were administered to low-income black adolescent female clients of an inner-city comprehensive health care clinic. The purpose of the study was to explore determinants of sexual activity and contraceptive use. Subjects were classified as not sexually active (n = 50), sexually active/noncontracepting (n = 20), or sexually active/contracepting (n = 72). Not sexually active subjects tended to be younger, more career motivated, to have a father at home, to be more influenced by family values, and to have more conservative attitudes regarding adolescent sexuality than did sexually active subjects. Sexually active/noncontracepting subjects tended to report fewer benefits and more barriers to the use of contraception. Level of cognitive processing did not differ among the three groups, but was at a lower-than-expected level for age. Finally, inconsistent contraceptive use was common to both sexually active groups.     

Similarity ratings and confusability of lipread consonants compared with similarity ratings of auditory and orthographic stimuli.

Similarity ratings of pairs of lipread consonants were obtained using a 5-point scale. Matrices were constructed showing mean similarity ratings and confusions among stimuli. Both the similarity and the confusion data provide normative data useful for researchers in many areas. Lipread data collected here are compared with similarity ratings of orthographically and auditorily presented consonants collected by Manning (1977). These comparisons provide information about how stimulus similarity both within and between presentation formats may affect information processing of the three types of stimuli. These data are of special interest to researchers studying the visual processing of speech and the effect of format of presentation on recall.     

Disintegrated experience: the dissociative disorders revisited

We present proposed changes to the dissociative disorders section of the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and review the concept of pathological and nonpathological dissociation, including empirical findings on the relations between trauma and dissociative phenomenology and between dissociation and hypnosis. The most important proposals include the creation of two new diagnostic entities, brief reactive dissociative disorder and transient dissociative disturbance, and the readoption of the criterion of amnesia for a multiple personality disorder diagnosis. We conclude that further work on dissociative processes will provide an important link between clinical and experimental approaches to human cognition, emotion, and personality.     

U-shaped learning and frequency effects in a multi-layered perceptron: implications for child language acquisition

A three-layer back-propagation network is used to implement a pattern association task in which four types of mapping are learned. These mappings, which are considered analogous to those which characterize the relationship between the stem and past tense forms of English verbs, include arbitrary mappings, identity mappings, vowel changes, and additions of a suffix. The degree of correspondence between parallel distributed processing (PDP) models which learn mappings of this sort (e.g., Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986, 1987) and children's acquisition of inflectional morphology has recently been at issue in discussions of the applicability of PDP models to the study of human cognition and language (Pinker & Mehler, 1989; Bever, in press). In this paper, we explore the capacity of a network to learn these types of mappings, focusing on three major issues. First, we compare the performance of a single-layered perceptron similar to the one used by Rumelhart and McClelland with a multi-layered perceptron. The results suggest that it is unlikely that a single-layered perceptron is capable of finding an adequate solution to the problem of mapping stems and past tense forms in input configurations that are sufficiently analogous to English. Second, we explore the input conditions which determine learning in these networks. Several factors that characterize linguistic input are investigated: (a) the nature of the mapping performed by the network (arbitrary, suffixation, identity, and vowel change); (b) the competition effects that arise when the task demands simultaneous learning of distinct mapping types; (c) the role of the type and token frequency of verb stems; and (d) the influence of phonological subregularities in the irregular verbs. Each of these factors is shown to have selective consequences on both successful and erroneous performance in the network. Third, we outline several types of systems which could result in U-shaped acquisition, and discuss the ways in which learning in multi-layered networks can be seen to capture several characteristics of U-shaped learning in children. In general, these models provide information about the role of input in determining the kinds of errors that a network will produce, including the conditions under which rule-like behavior and U-shaped learning will and will not emerge. The results from all simulations are discussed in light of behavioral data on children's acquisition of the past tense and the validity of drawing conclusions about the acquisition of language from models of this sort.     

Manifestations, acquisition and diagnostic categories of dental fear in a self-referred population

This study aimed to clarify how manifestations and acquisition relate to diagnostic categories of dental fear in a population of self-referred dental fear patients, since diagnostic criteria specifically related to dental fear have not been validated. DSM III-R diagnostic criteria for phobias were used to compare with four existing dental fear diagnostic categories, referred to as the Seattle system. Subjects were 208 persons with dental fear who were telephone interviewed, of whom a subsample of 155 responded to a mailed Dental Anxiety Scale (DAS), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and a modified FSS-II Geer Fear Scale (GFS). Personal interviews and a Dental Beliefs Scale of perceived trust and social interaction with dentists were also used to evaluate a subsample of 80 patients selected by sex and high dental fear. Results showed that the majority of the 80 patients (66%), suffered from social embarrassment about their dental fear problem and their inability to do something about it. The largest cause of their fear (84%) was reported to be traumatic dental experiences, especially in childhood (70%). A minority of patients (16%) could not isolate traumatic experiences and had a history of general fearfulness or anxiety. Analysis of GFS data for the 155 subjects showed that fear of snakes and injuries were highest among women; heights and injections among men. Fear of blood was rarely reported. Spearman correlations between GFS individual items and DAS scores indicated functional independence between dental fear and common fears such as blood, injections and enclosures in most cases. Only in specific types of dental fear did these results support Rachman and Lopatka's contention that fears are thought to summate.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Visual palatability of food in patients with eating disorders and dieting women

The effects of 19 meals of different caloric content on slides on palatability and hypothetical duration of consumption were investigated in 7 patients with anorexia nervosa, 17 patients with bulimia nervosa at the beginning and after 8 weeks of hospital treatment. Nine healthy females served as controls. At the beginning of treatment, palatability of low caloric food was significantly higher and hypothetical duration of consumption of high caloric food was significantly longer in patients when compared to controls. After 8 weeks, in the patients palatability of low caloric food had decreased. Dislike for high caloric food remained stable in anorexics.