Thermal sensitivity in Tourette syndrome: preliminary report

The effects of heat on tic symptoms were studied in a sample of 78 adults with Tourette syndrome. 62 men and 16 women completed a survey concerning the type, onset, and course of their tics. 10 adult male subjects also participated in a thermal challenge during which ambient temperature was raised from 22 degrees C to 35 degrees C following a control period. Of the 78, 24% or 19 reported increased tics upon exposure to heat. Compared to the remaining 59 subjects, there were no differences in sex distribution, current age, or overall course of illness. In the thermal challenge, there was general increase in tics that was correlated with sweat rate (r = .55, p = .001). This effect was prominent in 5 of 10 subjects (rs = .29 to .63). There were no mean differences in current age, age of onset, or current severity of symptoms between the five subjects of each group. Tic symptoms in a subgroup of patients with Tourette syndrome may be sensitive to heat. Abnormal heat regulation is not a likely explanation for the observed increase in tics. The increase may be due to normal heat-loss mechanisms through dopaminergic pathways.     

Sport psychology service delivery: staying ethical while keeping loose

Although the parent discipline of sport psychology is psychology, the delivery of sport psychology services has its main roots in physical education and sports science (motor learning and control, skill acquisition). Thus, sport psychologists may look more like coaches than they look like clinicians or counselors. In this article, the authors trace the evolution of sport psychology services and contrast the temporal, spatial, and delivery issues of applied sport psychology with more mainstream counseling and clinical psychology. The looser boundaries of sport psychologist practice have both benefits and dangers, and the authors offer some examples to professional psychologists who are thinking of expanding their delivery of service to athletes and coaches.     

Reading homographs: orthographic, phonologic, and semantic dynamics

Reading processes were compared across 3 word types: homographs (separate pronunciations and meanings, such as lead), homonyms (singular pronunciations but separate meanings, such as spring), and control words (e.g., clock). In Experiment 1, naming reaction times were significantly slower to homographs than to all other words. Experiments 2 and 3 used an association judgment task, with referent words related to the dominant or subordinate meanings of homonyms and homographs. In Experiment 2, homonyms and homographs were presented 1st, followed by disambiguating associates. In Experiment 3, presentation order was reversed. For homographs, performance costs always occurred for subordinate meanings. For homonyms, these costs vanished when context was provided by the preceding associates. The data underscore the priority of phonologic information in word meaning access and suggest that low- and high-level constraints combine to shape word perception.     

The Development of Person–Vocation Fit: A Longitudinal Study Among Young Employees

This two-phase panel study examines the development of the congruence between vocational interests and perceived skill requirements. Participants were 492 Dutch men and women between 18 and 26 years old, with a paid job in both phases. Three hypotheses inspired by the theory of work adjustment (Dawis and Lofquist 1984) and congruence theory (Holland 1992) were tested, using a composite index of fit proposed by Cronbach and Gleser (1953). The first hypothesis proposing that participants experiencing incongruence between their vocational interests and their perceived skill requirements are dissatisfied with their job was supported. The hypothesis that incongruence has a positive relationship with job change and a negative relationship with tenure was not confirmed. The expectation that the congruence between vocational interests and perceived skill requirements increases over time was confirmed. Furthermore, exploring determinants of change in vocational interests and perceived skill requirements, it was found that change in these domains was predicted by different variables, educational level being the only common factor. It is concluded that this study supports the longitudinal propositions of prevailing work-related person-environment fit theories.     

Training requirements and retention characteristics of serial list organization by macaque monkeys

This work evaluated the prospect that organizational accounts of the retention of list information by monkeys might be an artifact of familiarity with conditional relationships. Seven sophisticated macaques were trained on four five-item lists. Each acquisition selectively excluded one of the internal conditional pairs of the typical four-problem sequence (AB,BC,CD,DE) that defines a five-item serially ordered list. Then, all possible novel pairings and the trained pairs appeared together in a test. After this, the previously omitted pair was trained and animals were retested. On all tasks, initial tests revealed little organization and much intersubject variability of characteristic choice strategies, but subsequent inclusion of all four conditional pairs always yielded organized serial choice. On both the four-problem tests and in a later retention, errors were directly related to interitem distance between the objects paired on test trials. These results helped to specify the conditions required for demonstration of non-human primate analogs of transitivity, and showed that even sophisticated monkeys organize information in retention only if they know all interitem relationships. Received: 7 October 1998 / Accepted after revision: 10 October 1999     

Connectionist and diffusion models of reaction time.

Two connectionist frameworks, GRAIN (J. L. McClelland, 1993) and brain-state-in-a-box (J. A. Anderson, 1991), and R. Ratcliff's (1978) diffusion model were evaluated using data from a signal detection task. Dependent variables included response probabilities, reaction times for correct and error responses, and shapes of reaction-time distributions. The diffusion model accounted for all aspects of the data, including error reaction times that had previously been a problem for all response-time models. The connectionist models accounted for many aspects of the data adequately, but each failed to a greater or lesser degree in important ways except for one model that was similar to the diffusion model. The findings advance the development of the diffusion model and show that the long tradition of reaction-time research and theory is a fertile domain for development and testing of connectionist assumptions about how decisions are generated over time.     

Milestones in the development of infant numeracy

This article deals with the development of numeracy among young children of the four to seven year age group. The research investigation described had two aims: to see how early numeracy develops in children of different ages; and to see whether there are fixed points which might serve as milestones in the development of infant numeracy. The results of this investigation involving 96 children indicate a strong development of numeracy skills during this period. With reference to the literature, it is also shown that certain items of a test previously developed for this purpose may be taken as core items that do indeed represent milestones in the development of infant numeracy.