New phenomenon of abnormal auditory perception associated with emotional and head trauma: pathological confirmation by SPECT scan

We report the case of an immigrant who suffered from death threats and head trauma while a prisoner of war in Kuwait. Two months later, he began to hear conversations that had taken place previously. These perceptions occurred spontaneously or were induced by the patient's effortful concentration. The single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) scan performed during this abnormal perceptual experience indicated an increase in regional cerebral blood flow in the left temporal lobe and in the brainstem.     

Fictive motion as cognitive simulation

Sentences such as The road runs through the valley and The mountain range goes from Canada to Mexico include a motion verb but express no explicit motion or state change. It is argued that these sentences involve fictive motion, an implicit type of motion. But do people trying to understand these sentences mentally simulate motion? This question was addressed in four experiments. In each, participants read a story about travel—for instance, fast versus slow, short versus long distance, and easy versus difficult terrain—and then made a timed decision about a fictive motion sentence. Overall, latencies were shorter after they had read about fast travel, short distances, and easy terrains. Critically, the effect did not arise with nonfictive motion target sentences (e.g., The road is in the valley), as was demonstrated in three control studies. The results suggest that the processing of fictive motion includes mental simulation.     

Gender-typical responses to sexual and emotional infidelity as a function of mortality salience induced self-esteem striving

The authors propose that gender-differentiated patterns of jealousy in response to sexual and emotional infidelity are engendered by the differential impact of each event on self-esteem for men and women. Study 1 demonstrated that men derive relatively more self-esteem from their sex lives, whereas women's self-esteem is more contingent on romantic commitment. Based on terror management theory, it is predicted that if gender-differentiated responses to infidelity are motivated by gender-specific contingencies for self-esteem, they should be intensified following reminders of mortality. In Study 2, mortality salience (MS) increased distress in response to sexual infidelity for men and emotional infidelity for women. Study 3 demonstrated that following MS, men who place high value on sex in romantic relationships exhibited greater distress in response to sexual infidelity, but low-ex-value men's distress was attenuated. The authors discuss the implications for evolutionary and self-esteem-based accounts of jealousy as well as possible integration of these perspectives.     

Selective attention, inhibition for repeated events and hemispheric specialization

When two visual events appear consecutively in the same spatial location, our response to the second event is slower than to the first. This inhibition for repeated events may reflect a bias toward sampling novel locations, a bias useful for exploring visual space. It has been shown that the left hemisphere is more specialized in selective attentional processes than the right one. The aim of the present experiment was to test if this hemispheric specialization for selective attention may also affect the inhibition for repeated events. For this purpose, we asked 11 normal subjects to perform an identity-based discrimination task in which the target to be detected could appear alone or surrounded by flanking letters, in the left or in the right visual field. Results show that inhibition for repeated events is present only when selective attention is required and when the task is performed in the right specialized visual field.     

Decision-bound theory and the influence of familiarity

In this article, we derive a nonparametric prediction from decision-bound theory (DBT). The crucial aspect that is tested is whether or not familiarity of a stimulus affects response time in categorization. We show that, for our design, DBT, extended with some reasonable and testable assumptions, predicts no familiarity effect. Our prediction is nonparametric in that, rather than fit a specific instantiation of general DBT, we posit only some general assumptions of this theory and derive the prediction from these assumptions. It is found that familiarity did have a strong impact on response time for at least half of our participants. We suggest that DBT is in itself incomplete and should be extended to account for the full range of available data.     

Principles of forensic mental health assessment: implications for neuropsychological assessment in forensic contexts

Forensic mental health assessment (FMHA) is a form of evaluation performed by a mental health professional to provide relevant clinical and scientific data to a legal decision maker or the litigants involved in civil or criminal proceedings. Such FMHA evaluations can be further specialized when the clinical and scientific data are primarily neuropsychological. This paper provides an adaptation of 29 recently derived principles of FMHA (Heilbrun, 2001) that have been described in two forms: general guidelines for application in FMHA, and guidelines for application to neuropsychological assessment in forensic contexts. Each principle is described, and the general guideline is compared with the highly specialized neuropsychological guideline. In this way, the applicability of such FMHA principles to forensic neuropsychological assessment is described.     

Screening for principal versus comorbid conditions in psychiatric outpatients with the Psychiatric Diagnostic Screening Questionnaire

In examining the performance of screening scales, a distinction should be made between principal and additional diagnoses. The Psychiatric Diagnostic Screening Questionnaire (PDSQ) is a brief, psychometrically strong self-report scale designed to screen for the most common Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed; DSM-IV) Axis I disorders encountered in outpatient mental health settings. In the present report, the authors compared the performance of the PDSQ in identifying principal and comorbid disorders. Seven hundred ninety-nine psychiatric outpatients completed the PDSQ and were interviewed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV. The sensitivity and negative predictive values of the PDSQ subscales were similar for principal and additional diagnoses.     

Animal ethical evaluation: an observational study of Canadian IACUCs

Three Canadian institutional animal care and use committees were observed over a 1-year period to investigate animal ethical evaluation. While each protocol was evaluated, the observer collected information about the final decision, the type of protocol (research vs. teaching), and the category of invasiveness. The observer also wrote down verbatim all verbal interventions, which were coded according to the following categories: scientific, technical, politics, human analog, reduction, refinement, and replacement. The data revealed that only 16% of the comments were devoted to the 3 explicit ethical categories (i.e., reduction, refinement, and replacement) and that most of the comments were technical. However, the analysis revealed that ethical concerns were implicit in both scientific and technical language, or some of the scientific and technical comments had an impact on the ethical treatment of animals. The results are discussed in relation to previous nonobservational research that identified potential pitfalls and bias in animal ethical evaluation.     

Comparing performance of pupils with high spatial-low numerical and high numerical-low spatial scores on a standardized mathematics test in the United Kingdom

Questions from a national mathematics test taken by over a 1,000 12- and 13-yr.-olds in the United Kingdom were perused for heavily loaded spatial and numerical items. Pupils' answers to the two types of item were examined, and those who answered well in one of the categories but poorly in the other were selected to form two groups, those high in spatial thinking but low in numerical thinking and those high in numerical thinking but low in spatial thinking to assess whether the approaches to solve the item used by each group were different. The two groups did indeed utilize different thinking strategies to solve the questions. For example, questions involving angle and volume, items thought to require a high spatial facility, were answered correctly by the predominantly numerical thinkers as often as by the predominantly spatial thinkers. This would indicate that one of the samples, i.e., numerical thinkers, used a different strategy than the other, i.e., spatial thinkers. This was verified by examination of students' work in the test booklets and personal interviews of them. Also, the same proportion of boys in each group was recorded, but a higher percentage of girls was recorded in the spatial group than in the numerical. This reflected the large number of boys who scored high on the spatial measures also doing moderately well on the numerical items and so, being moved out of the solely spatial group. Since the tests used by mathematics educators to assess learning are so heavily laden with linguistic/analytical rather than holistic/spatial types of questions, pupils high in spatial but low in numerical thinking face a severe handicap in schools.