Menopause: Salient Issues for Counselors

Counselors are in ideal positions to help change attitudes toward viewing menopause as a time of positive change, rather than a time of psychological distress. Following definitions and a review of historical, sociological, psychological, and attitudinal factors that account for negative responses associated with menopause, recommendations for counselor interventions are proposed.     

Response to commentaries on “A neurobiological model for near-death experiences”

This work has received financial support from FONDECYT (Project 1111-88). The authors also acknowledge the helpful comments of Dr. Bruce Cassels.     

The social phobia and anxiety inventory: Construct validity

The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) is a new instrument composed of social phobia and agoraphobia subscales. The latter scale is used to detect social anxiety that may result from agoraphobia. The SPAI's construct validity was assessed through several procedures. First, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to validate the existence of the two subscales. Second, exploratory factor analyses examined the underlying structure of the social phobia subscale. Third, a Q factor procedure determined if different anxiety diagnostic groups could be differentiated by their SPAI response pattern. The results confirmed the utility of the two SPAI subscales and identified a number of dimensions contained within the social phobia subscale which differed depending upon the specific subject sample. In addition, the complaints of social phobies appeared more homogeneous than those of an agoraphobic comparison group. The results are discussed in terms of construct validity and the sensitivity of the SPAI to various dimensions of social phobia fears.This study was supported in part by NIMH Grants 41852, 30915, 18269, and 16884.     

Our Personal and Professional Lives: Learning Positive Connotation and Circular Questioning

The work of the Center for the Study of the Family in Milan has had wide influence. We describe its influence on us--the positive connotation of many car journeys, our self-training, and changes in how we view, and function in, our personal and professional lives.     

Mental representation from the bottom up

Commonsense psychology and cognitive science both regularly assume the existence of representational states. I propose a naturalistic theory of representation sufficient to meet the pretheoretical constraints of a folk theory of representation, constraints including the capacities for accuracy and inaccuracy, selectivity of proper objects of representation, perspective, articulation, and efficacy or content-determined functionality. The proposed model states that a representing device is a device which changes state when information is received over multiple information channels originating at a single source. The changed state of a representing device is a representation. The unitary information source which would give rise to the information impinging on the representing device, and hence, give rise to the representation, is the content of the representation. The model meets the pretheoretic constraints, and also conforms to available neurobiological data for two invertebrate species.     

Effects of neonatal forebrain noradrenaline depletion on recovery from brain damage: performance on a spatial navigation task as a function of age of surgery and postsurgical housing

The experiments examined the contributions of forebrain noradrenaline and environmental enrichment to recovery of place navigation ability in rats after hemidecortication in infancy or adulthood. Noradrenaline depletion did not affect recovery from neonatal hemidecortication, although the early hemidecortications did allow sparing of function relative to adult operates. Noradrenaline depletion also failed to attenuate the positive effects of enriched housing on otherwise normal rats. Noradrenaline depletion did retard recovery of adult hemidecorticate rats housed in standard laboratory cages, but it did not retard recovery of adult hemidecorticate rats housed in enriched environments. The results suggest that noradrenaline is importantly involved in enhancing recovery from brain damage when other sources of compensation (e.g., neonatal injury, enriched environment) are absent.     

Monocular-contingent and binocular-contingent aftereffects

Alternate monocular and binocular exposure to complementary stimulation can yield opposite but coexisting aftereffects that are contingent on whether the test display is viewed with one eye or two eyes. The motion aftereffect was studied by adapting each eye separately to a contracting spiral and both eyes together to an expanding spiral. The stationary test spiral subsequently appeared to be expanding when viewed monocularly, but to be contracting when it was seen with both eyes open. With respect to the McCollough effect, after monocular exposure to red-vertical and green-horizontal gratings and binocular exposure to red-horizontal and green-vertical gratings, the appearance of the color of the test gratings when viewed with one eye was different from that when viewed with both eyes. Opposite, coexisting aftereffects induced by complementary stimulation can be interpreted as evidence that there are unique binocular aspects to visual function.