Emotional range and value orientation: toward a cognitive view of emotionality

This study focused on emotional range--a personality variable introduced to the study of emotion. It is argued that individual differences in emotional responsiveness need to be described and analyzed not only in terms of emotional intensity but also in terms of emotional range. What are some of the factors that influence an individual's range of emotional experiences? Do cognitive factors play a significant role? Questions such as these were central to the present investigation. In accordance with recent cognitive formulations of emotion, we hypothesized that individual differences on the emotional range variable would be associated with differences in value orientations. Lending support to this proposition, the results revealed a pattern of emotional range--value associations that challenge the prevailing view of emotionality as intimately linked with primitivism and impulsivity. At the same time, the findings strongly suggest that emotionality cannot be understood as divorced from a person's mental life. Implications of the findings for the development of a cognitively oriented approach to the study of individual differences in emotional dispositions are discussed.     

Nonspeech and speech processing skills in patients with aphasia and apraxia of speech

Nonspeech and speech auditory processing skills as well as internal speech processing skills were assessed among four patients with acquired "pure" apraxia of speech, 10 with acquired aphasia, 10 with aphasia plus apraxia of speech, and 11 neurologically normal adults. Fourteen tasks were administered and performances on 68 variables were examined using both nonparametric and parametric analyses controlling for the effects of advancing age and associated hearing loss. In all cases, the "pure" apractic patients performed as normal subjects. Few differences were noted among the performances of the aphasic and aphasic-apractic subjects. Results led to three major conclusions: (1) apraxia of speech is a disorder distinct from aphasia; (2) aphasic individuals, despite locus of lesion, demonstrate disabilities for processing nonspeech and speech materials presented auditorily and for analytically evaluating speech evoked internally; and (3) aphasic individuals demonstrating similar severity levels of language impairment show similar performance patterns for these types of processing tasks, despite locus of lesion or coexistence of apraxia of speech.     

The effects of talker familiarity on spoken word identification in younger and older listeners

The present study was designed to examine age differences in the ability to use voice information acquired intentionally (Experiment 1) or incidentally (Experiment 2) as an aid to spoken word identification. Following both implicit and explicit voice learning, participants were asked to identify novel words spoken either by familiar talkers (ones they had been exposed to in the training phase) or by 4 unfamiliar voices. In both experiments, explicit memory for talkers' voices was significantly lower in older than in young listeners. Despite this age-related decline in voice recognition, however, older adults exhibited equivalent, and in some cases greater, benefit than young listeners from having words spoken by familiar talkers. Implications of the findings for age-related changes in explicit versus implicit memory systems are discussed.     

Auditory habituation in young and older adults: the verbal transformation effect

In 3 experiments, auditory massed repetition was used to examine age-related differences in habituation by means of the verbal transformation paradigm. Participants heard 10 words (5 high frequency and 5 low frequency), each presented 180 times, and they reported perceived changes in the repeated words (verbal transformations). In these experiments, older adults reported fewer illusory percepts than young adults. Older adults' loss of auditory acuity and slowing of processing, stimulus degradation (in young adults), and instructions biasing the report of these illusory percepts did not account for the fewer illusory percepts reported by the older adults. These findings suggest that older adults' reduced susceptibility to habituation arises from centrally located declines in the transmission of information within the word-recognition pathway. The discussion focuses on the implications that these age-related declines may have on word identification during on-line speech perception.     

The Development and Evolution of Person‐Centered Expressive Art Therapy: A Conversation With Natalie Rogers

Many counselors are unaware that Natalie Rogers, daughter of Carl Rogers, has extended her father's work into the creative and expressive arts. This article includes a verbatim conversation with Natalie Rogers as she reflects on her childhood and her professional work. Person‐centered expressive art therapy is an alternative to traditional verbal counseling approaches and may be especially helpful for clients stuck in linear, rigid, and analytic ways of thinking and experiencing the world.     

Implicit Learning of Affective Responses in Dementia Patients: A Face-Emotion-Association Paradigm

ABSTRACT

Young and older adults performed verbal and spatial storage-only and storage-plus-processing working memory tasks while performing a secondary finger tapping task, and the effects on both the maximum capacity (measured as the longest series correct) and the reliability (measured as the proportion of items correct) of working memory were assessed. Tapping tended to produce greater disruption of working memory tasks that place greater demands on executive processes (i.e., storage-plus-processing tasks compared to storage-only span tasks). Moreover, tapping produced domain-general interference, disrupting both verbal and spatial working memory, providing further support for the idea that tapping interferes with the executive component of the working memory system, rather than domain-specific maintenance processes. Nevertheless, tapping generally produced equivalent interference effects in young and older adults. Taken together, these findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that age-related declines in working memory are primarily attributable to a deficit in the executive component.