Syntactic and semantic contributions to sentence comprehension in agrammatism

Five aphasic subjects, who demonstrated agrammatic speech, and eight control subjects were presented with a sentence-picture matching task in which the factors of syntactic complexity, semantic reversibility, and sentence plausibility were independently varied. A subset of the sentences was patterned after that presented by A. Caramazza and E. Zurif (1976, Brain and Language, 5, 572-583) who concluded that Broca's aphasics rely on semantic constraints instead of syntactic information for sentence comprehension. Our aphasic subjects showed the same pattern of performance on this subset of sentences. However, the results from the full set of sentence materials we tested show that the aphasic subjects could perform some sentence level syntactic analyses, even when syntactic information conflicted with semantic constraints. The aphasic subjects correctly interpreted most active and passive sentences. They failed, however, to assign thematic roles and adjectives in center-embedded relative sentences, and instead relied on nonsyntactic information. These results show that both semantic and syntactic information contributed to sentence comprehension in the aphasic subjects we tested, in contrast to previous claims that syntactic and semantic processes are completely dissociated in this population.     

SILENCING THE SELF AND DEPRESSION AMONG WOMEN

The purpose of this study was to assess the validity and provide normative data for the Silencing the Self Scale, a newly devised instrument for measuring cognitive schemas hypothesized to be related to depression in women. The study also tested the hypothesis that race would moderate the relationship between silencing the self and depression. The sample consisted of 80 women: 40 African Americans and 40 Caucasians. Controlling for income and socially desirable response bias, a significant relationship between silencing the self and depression was found only for Caucasian women. It was suggested that differing values and socialization practices may be responsible for the findings.     

Comparing the teaching interaction procedure to social stories for people with autism

This study compared social stories and the teaching interaction procedure to teach social skills to 6 children and adolescents with an autism spectrum disorder. Researchers taught 18 social skills with social stories and 18 social skills with the teaching interaction procedure within a parallel treatment design. The teaching interaction procedure resulted in mastery of all 18 skills across the 6 participants. Social stories, in the same amount of teaching sessions, resulted in mastery of 4 of the 18 social skills across the 6 participants. Participants also displayed more generalization of social skills taught with the teaching interaction procedure to known adults and peers.     

Laughter exaggerates happy and sad faces depending on visual context

Laughter is an auditory stimulus that powerfully conveys positive emotion. We investigated how laughter influenced the visual perception of facial expressions. We presented a sound clip of laughter simultaneously with a happy, a neutral, or a sad schematic face. The emotional face was briefly presented either alone or among a crowd of neutral faces. We used a matching method to determine how laughter influenced the perceived intensity of the happy, neutral, and sad expressions. For a single face, laughter increased the perceived intensity of a happy expression. Surprisingly, for a crowd of faces, laughter produced an opposite effect, increasing the perceived intensity of a sad expression in a crowd. A follow-up experiment revealed that this contrast effect may have occurred because laughter made the neutral distractor faces appear slightly happy, thereby making the deviant sad expression stand out in contrast. A control experiment ruled out semantic mediation of the laughter effects. Our demonstration of the strong context dependence of laughter effects on facial expression perception encourages a reexamination of the previously demonstrated effects of prosody, speech content, and mood on face perception, as they may be similarly context dependent.     

Religiosity and HIV-Related Drug Risk Behavior: A Multidimensional Assessment of Individuals from Communities with High Rates of Drug Use

We examined the relationship between religiosity and HIV-related drug risk behavior among individuals from communities with high rates of drug use who participated in the SHIELD (Self-Help in Eliminating Life-Threatening Disease) study. This analysis examined the dimensions of religious ideation, religious participation, and religious support separately to further understand the relationship with risk taking. Results indicate that greater religious participation appeared to be the dimension most closely associated with drug behaviors. Specifically, we found that those with greater religious participation are significantly less likely to report recent opiates or cocaine use; injection drug use; crack use; and needle, cotton or cooker sharing. Future work to understand the nature of these associations will assist in the development of interventions in communities with high rates of drug use.     

Moderators of the association between exercise identity and obligatory exercise among participants of an athletic event

Previous research has connected exercise identity with obligatory exercise, yet to date no empirical studies have identified moderator variables of this association. The current study included participants of an athletic event (full marathon, n = 582; half marathon, n = 1,106; shorter distance, n = 733) who completed questionnaires about exercise behaviors, obligatory exercise, and internalization of both the thin-ideal and athletic-ideal body shapes. General linear model analyses were conducted to examine the exercise identity–obligatory exercise relationship; moderator variables included gender, internalization of the thin-ideal body shape, and internalization of the athletic-ideal body shape. After controlling for the effects of body mass index, age, and distance group, the three-way interaction of exercise identity, gender, and internalization of the athletic-ideal body shape predicted obligatory exercise. Findings suggest that women who report high identification with exercise and high value on having an athletic physique may be vulnerable to obligatory exercise.     

A process-dissociation examination of the cognitive processes underlying unconscious thought

Conscious and unconscious thought have been previously found to differentially impact decision-making quality. However, little research has directly measured the processes underlying these modes of thinking. We propose that both thinking modes are characterized by rule-based and intuitive processing. In two experiments, we used the Process Dissociation Procedure to independently measure these cognitive processes. We tested three competing hypotheses: (a) conscious thinking evokes both increased rule-based and decreased intuitive processing compared to unconscious thinking; (b) conscious and unconscious thinking evoke similar levels of intuitive processing but conscious thinking enhances rule-based processing; and (c) conscious and unconscious thinking evoke similar levels of rule-based processing but unconscious thinking enhances intuitive processing. Experiment 1 used base-rate and law-of-large-numbers decision-making problems, whereas Experiment 2 used decision-making problems similar to the “apartment” problem that is often used in unconscious thought studies. In both experiments we found support for hypothesis (b).