Complementarity in relationships of couples affected by HIV

Psychological interventions with patients with HIV infection may affect the stability of the patient's relationship with others. Two clinical cases are described to illustrate this. Both the impact of AIDS on patients and their relationships, and the impact of psychological interventions on the index patient and others, should always be considered when HIV-infected patients are referred to psychiatrists and other mental health care workers.     

Images of Resistance: A Qualitative Enquiry Into the Meanings of Personal Artwork for Women Living With Cancer

This study explored the meanings, inspirations, and subjective significance of personal artwork created as a leisure activity by women living with cancer. A convenience sample of 12 women aged 23–74 years participated in semistructured interviews. Participants were living in various stages of the cancer trajectory, and engaged in several forms of visual art-making. They submitted examples of their artwork by photograph and explored the meanings of this work in semistructured interviews. The study found that body imagery was extremely rare in participants' array of artwork, unlike the images typically created in art therapy. Few pieces expressed fears about cancer in symbolic terms. Participants described their selected artwork as offering sensuous pleasures, and confirming their ongoing capability, personal continuity, and social connectedness. Participants acknowledged ongoing loss and difficulties related to cancer. However, each piece of art offered a tangible record of resistance against the psychologically and socially disruptive effects of cancer, helping to maintain a familiar noncancer identity. The preinterview photography activity was helpful for empowering participants in the interview, and for stimulating detailed memories.     

New dimensions of abnormal illness behaviour derived from the Illness Behaviour Questionnaire

The primary aim was to explore the factor structure of the Illness Behaviour Questionnaire (IBQ) and the generalisability of the derived dimensions to both general community members and four chronic illness groups. A questionnaire was administered to 675 participants, comprising 344 from the community, 80 with asthma, 95 with diabetes, 79 with chronic pain and 77 with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Illness severity was calculated for all chronic illness participants (self-rated health for community members). Three IBQ scales were derived following an exploratory factor analysis for the whole sample: Affirmation of Illness (α = 0.71 (CFS)–0.79 (asthma, diabetes)), Concern for Health (α = 0.71 (asthma)–0.78 (pain)) and General Affective State (α = 0.70 (CFS)–0.80 (asthma)). Patterns of response across the five samples, and intercorrelations among the new scales and the original seven scales, were largely in accord with expectation. Long-standing criticisms of the IBQ were addressed by using systematic statistical principles to identify meaningful and psychometrically sound IBQ dimensions. The derived structure offers a more parsimonious account of possible illness responses, with the availability of a more concise yet informative index of abnormal illness behaviour having practical utility for researchers and clinicians alike.     

Word associations are formed incidentally during sentential semantic integration

Sentential context facilitates the incidental formation of word associations (e.g., Prior, A., & Bentin, S. (2003). Incidental formation of episodic associations: the importance of sentential context. Memory and Cognition, 31(2), 306-316). The present study explored the mechanism of this effect. In two experiments, unrelated word pairs were embedded in coherent or semantically anomalous sentences. Anomalous sentences included either a local or a global anomaly. During an incidental study phase, participants performed a sentence categorization task. The strength of the incidental associations formed between two nouns jointly appearing in a sentence was probed by gauging their influence on subsequent paired-associate learning and cued recall in Experiment 1, and by assessing their associative priming effect in a subsequent unexpected explicit recognition test for single words in Experiment 2. In both experiments, significant associative memory was found for noun pairs studied in coherent sentences but not for those appearing in anomalous sentences, regardless of anomaly type. In a sentence rating task, global anomalies yielded less plausible sentences than local anomalies, however both types of anomalies were equally detrimental to the sentence integration process. We suggest that sentence constituents are incidentally associated during sentence processing, particularly as a result of sentence integration and the consolidation of a mental model.     

Theory of Change Projects in MFT Programs

Taibbi (1996) suggests that therapists who have clear ideas of their personal models of therapy will be better therapists. This study attempted to learn more about how marriage and family therapy (MFT) programs use theory of change projects to assist students' development of their personal models. Questionnaires were sent to MFT master's, doctoral, and post-degree programs accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy. Nearly 60% of responding programs indicated that they do include theory of change projects in their programs. Data were analyzed for similarities and differences in both the contents and processes of the projects.     

Redundancy gain in the stop-signal paradigm: implications for the locus of coactivation in simple reaction time

The authors carried out 2 experiments designed to cast light on the locus of redundancy gain in simple visual reaction time by using a stop-signal paradigm. In Experiment 1, the authors found that single visual stimuli were more easily inhibited than double visual stimuli by an acoustic stop signal. This result is in keeping with the idea that redundancy gain occurs prior to the ballistic stage of the stop-signal task. In Experiment 2, the authors found that the response to an acoustic go signal was more easily inhibited by a double than by a single visual stop signal. This result provides conclusive evidence for a redundancy gain in the stop process--in a process that does not involve a motor response but rather its inhibition.     

Surface dyslexia

Two cases of surface dyslexia are described. In this disorder, irregular words such as broad or steak are less likely to be read aloud correctly than regularly-spelled words like breed or steam; and when irregular words are misread the incorrect response is often a regularisation (reading broad as "brode" and steak as "steek, for example). When reading comprehension was tested, homophones were often confused with each other: for example, soar was understood as an instrument for cutting, and route was understood as being part of a tree. Spelling was also impaired, with the majority of spelling errors being phonologically correct: for example, "search" was spelled surch. "Orthographic" errors in reading aloud (omitting, altering, adding or transposing letters) were also noted. These errors were not due to defects at elementary levels of visual processing.

One of our cases was a developmental dyslexic, and the other was an acquired dyslexic. The close similarity of their reading and spelling performance supports the view that surface dyslexia can cccur both as a developmental and as an acquired dyslexia.

A theoretical interpretation of surface dyslexia within the framework of the logogen model (including a grapheme-phoneme correspondence system for reading non-words) was offered: defects within the input logogen system, and in communication from that system to semantics, were postulated as responsible for most of the symptoms of surface dyslexia.