Verbal and nonverbal maternal controls in hearing mother-deaf child interaction

Investigators of mother-child relations have concluded that mothers of deaf children are more controlling than mothers of hearing children. Excessive maternal control has been linked to inoptimal developmental outcomes, such as child dependence, social immaturity, and submissiveness. In the present study, the verbal and nonverbal controls employed by mothers of deaf preschoolers (3.00–6.75 years) versus mothers of hearing preschoolers (3.00–6.42 years) were evaluated. Subjects were 14 hearing mother-deaf child dyads and 14 hearing mother-hearing child dyads. Each dyad was observed during a 15-minute free-play period and during a 7-minute teaching period. Dependent measures were submitted to appropriate 2 (hearing status) by 2 (task) analysis of variance for repeated measures, followed by post hoc comparisons. The results indicated that the mothers of deaf children: (a) used higher rates of nonverbal controls than the mothers of hearing children, especially during the free-play period; and (b) employed higher rates of verbal controls than the mothers of hearing children during the free-play period, but not during the teaching period. In addition, the interaction tasks exerted differential effects on the two groups of mother-child dyads.     

A Psychometric Evaluation of the Approach and Avoidance of Alcohol Questionnaire (AAAQ) in Alcohol Dependent Outpatients

The Approach and Avoidance of Alcohol Questionnaire (AAAQ; McEvoy et al. in Addiction 99:482–497, 2004) was administered to a clinical sample of 138 alcohol dependent men and women. An exploratory factor analysis was used to determine the AAAQ factor structure and a confirmatory analysis run on a second administration of the AAAQ. Convergent validity was examined by conducting an alcohol cue reactivity test and by administering the Timeline Follow-Back (TLFB), a retrospective calendar method for assessing alcohol consumption, and several measures of alcohol-related problems. The factor analysis supported a two-factor solution representing approach and avoidance dimensions. Regressions predicting measures of alcohol cue reactivity, alcohol consumption, and other alcohol-related constructs with the AAAQ provide support for its convergent validity. The results suggest that alcohol craving may be viewed as a multi-dimensional construct that includes both approach and avoidance inclinations which may vary depending on the population under examination.

Repetition deficits, list context, and word-class interactions in the RSVP of words in sentences.

We report a failure to find a repetition deficit in recall following the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of words within sentences, using adjectives rather than nouns as the critical items. In a series of experiments that ruled out participant and procedural differences as the source of the failure, both word class and list context were found to moderate the repetition deficit, but grammatical necessity did not. The presence in the list of sentences in which the repeated adjectives were separated by more than three words (i.e., more than 400 ms in RSVP) not only eliminated the repetition deficit for the recall of those sentences but also for the recall of sentences in which the repeated adjectives were separated by three or fewer words (i.e., less than 400 ms in RSVP). However, although substantially reduced, a repetition deficit with noun-based materials was still found in this list context. Matching the adjective-based sentences with the noun-based sentences in sentence length and position of the critical items revealed that the moderating effect of word-class on the repetition deficit was mediated by the biases in sentence structure that using different word classes tend to induce.     

Freud's "bad conscience": The case of Nietzsche's Genealogy

This article develops the argument that Friedrich Nietzsche influenced several aspects of Freud's later writings by illustrating, in particular, the impact of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals on Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. The theoretical and conceptual schemes represented in Freud's Discontents are found to bear a remarkable similarity to Nietzsche's Genealogy on a number of highly specific points. It is suggested that "DAS ES," "Uber-ich," and "bad conscience," concepts central to Freud's moral theory of mind, are at least partly derived from Nietzsche. Moreover, Freud's phylogenetic theory of guilt is based upon premises found in Nietzsche, as are specific details relating to ideas on human prehistory and the ancestral family. Based on this evidence, a re-examination of the moral and social dimensions of Freud's "structural" model may be in order.     

Turning a deaf ear to fear: impaired recognition of vocal affect in psychopathic individuals

The processing of emotional expressions is fundamental for normal socialization and interaction. Reduced responsiveness to the expressions of sadness and fear has been implicated in the development of psychopathy (R. J. R. Blair, 1995). The current study investigates the ability of adult psychopathic individuals to process vocal affect. Psychopathic and nonpsychopathic adults, defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 1991), were presented with neutral words spoken with intonations conveying happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, and fear and were asked to identify the emotion of the speaker on the basis of prosody. The results indicated that psychopathic inmates were particularly impaired in the recognition of fearful vocal affect. These results are interpreted with reference to the low-fear and violence inhibition mechanism models of psychopathy.     

Toward a Model-Based Approach to the Clinical Assessment of Personality Psychopathology

Recent years have witnessed tremendous growth in the scope and sophistication of statistical methods available to explore the latent structure of psychopathology, involving continuous, discrete, and hybrid latent variables. The availability of such methods has fostered optimism that they can facilitate movement from classification primarily crafted through expert consensus to classification derived from empirically based models of psychopathological variation. The explication of diagnostic constructs with empirically supported structures can then facilitate the development of assessment tools that appropriately characterize these constructs. Our goal in this article is to illustrate how new statistical methods can inform conceptualization of personality psychopathology and therefore its assessment. We use magical thinking as an example, because both theory and earlier empirical work suggested the possibility of discrete aspects to the latent structure of personality psychopathology, particularly forms of psychopathology involving distortions of reality testing, yet other data suggest that personality psychopathology is generally continuous in nature. We directly compared the fit of a variety of latent variable models to magical thinking data from a sample enriched with clinically significant variation in psychotic symptomatology for explanatory purposes. Findings generally suggested a continuous latent variable model best represented magical thinking, but results varied somewhat depending on different indexes of model fit. We discuss the implications of the findings for classification and applied personality assessment. We also highlight some limitations of this type of approach that are illustrated by these data, including the importance of substantive interpretation, in addition to use of model fit indexes, when evaluating competing structural models.     

Differential effects of fixed- and variable-time feedback on production rates of elementary school children

The performance of 26 third-grade students who worked on individual weekly academic tasks was compared under fixed- and variable-time "home reports". During fixed-time home reports, each student was given a report to take home on Friday that indicated the quantity of work the student had completed that week, contained comments concerning the quality of the work, and had a space for parental remarks and signature. The same report was given during the variable-time reports, except that seven to nine students were randomly selected each day to receive a home report. During variable-time reporting, students completed more assignments and completed assignments on a greater percentage of available workdays than during fixed-time reporting. The teachers' preference for the variable-time reporting was one additional advantage for the variable system.     

Distance and fusion in Robinson Jeffers' “the purse-seine” and other poems

Distance and fusion are fundamental ideas in Bowenian thinking, especially as expressed in the dynamic of distancing and pursuing. In this paper I have used these ideas as a means to briefly examine a short selection of Robinson Jeffers' poetry, which provides us with a literary example of these concepts in action.My thanks to M. K. Lane and the anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this article for their many suggestions, especially to the reviewer who helped me better distinguish between distance and fusion, and intimacy and autonomy.     

Sensory and motor impairment in the nerve compression block

Recently nerve compression block as a method of investigating movement control without kinaesthetic feedback has been questioned on the grounds that motor impairment (as measured by nerve conduction parameters) is a confounding factor. In order to clarify the relationship between sensory and motor function, behavioural data was obtained on both at systematic time intervals throughout the duration of the block. The findings indicated that significant decrements in tapping measures occurred somewhat earlier in the time course of the block than decreases in kinaesthetic discrimination. Also, contrary to assumption, the majority of subjects ceased to perform prior to total kinaesthetic loss. The data suggest that motor impairment is a “crucial” issue (Laszlo, 1966) in the use of this technique, and provide further behavioural support for the neurological findings of Kelso, Stelmach and Wanamaker (1974).