Altruism and aggression: the heritability of individual differences

Five questionnaires measuring altruistic and aggressive tendencies were completed by 573 adult twin pairs of both sexes from the University of London Institute of Psychiatry Volunteer Twin Register. The questionnaires measured altruism, empathy, nurturance, aggressiveness, and assertiveness. The intraclass correlations for the five scales, respectively, were .53, .54, .49, .40, and .52 for 296 monozygotic pairs, and .25, .20, .14, .04, and .20 for 179 same-sex dizygotic pairs, resulting in broad heritability estimates of 56%, 68%, 70%, 72%, and 64%. Additional analyses, using maximum-likelihood model-fitting, revealed approximately 50% of the variance on each scale to be associated with genetic effects, virtually 0% with the twins' common environment, and the remaining 50% with each twins' specific environment and/or error associated with the test. Correcting for the unreliability in the tests raised the maximum-likelihood heritabilities to approximately 60%. Age and sex differences were also found: altruism increased over the age span from 19 to 60, whereas aggressiveness decreased, and, at each age, women had higher scores than men on altruism and lower scores on aggressiveness.     

Visual dominance in the cross-modal kinesthetic to kinesthetic plus visual feedback condition

In previous studies subjects who have learned a positioning response with kinesthetic feedback tended to make greater errors when visual feedback was provided during later trials. These subjects have always performed with both kinesthetic and visual feedback available. This study determined whether subjects with only visual feedback would produce errors similar to those who received kinesthetic plus visual feedback. Blindfolded subjects learned to move a handle to a criterion location with knowledge of results following each trial. Subjects then were assigned to one of three experimental groups, with only kinesthetic feedback, with kinesthetic plus visual feedback, or with only visual feedback. Subjects had 9 trials without knowledge of results in these feedback conditions. When visual feedback was available, subjects tended to make longer response errors. This finding replicates previous studies. Also, the similarity of performances from the conditions with visual feedback indicated the dominance of visual information in the condition with kinesthetic plus visual feedback.     

Influence of age, sex, etiology, and hearing loss on balance performance by deaf children

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of age, sex, etiology, and degree of hearing loss on the static and dynamic balance performance of hearing impaired children and youth (N = 132), ages 3 to 14 yr. The subjects were individually assessed on Items 2 and 7 of Subtest 2 of the Short Form of the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency. As expected, performance on both tasks improved with chronological age. In comparing the performance of subjects by etiology, only one significant difference emerged; those with genetic deafness were superior on static balance to those whose deafness was idiopathic. However, the mean scores for the genetic group were superior for both balance tasks. The sex of the child as well as extent of hearing loss did not affect performance in either task.     

Relationship between specific disfluency variables and dichotic listening in stutterers

86 stutterers' disfluency patterns were examined in relation to their laterality preferences. Results suggest that young stutterers are a heterogeneous group and that specific disfluency variables were not related to ear preferences on a dichotic consonant-vowel listening task.     

6 years of electroconvulsive therapy with dexamethasone

The author reports on an improvement in ECT in which Dexamethasone is used to prevent cerebral edema. This improved technique has been used for 823 EC treatment since 1979. Since then, no post-paroxysmal passage syndromes have been observed in gerontopsychiatric patients even in cases where ECT is applied relatively frequently.     

Book Reviews

The Psychological Record -     

Effect of EMG-biofeedback training in reduction of muscle tension for individuals displaying type A behavior patterns

This study investigated the effect of EMG biofeedback training in reducing muscle tension among subjects who displayed Type A behavior. 22 Type A college students (19 to 22 yr. old) were randomly assigned to either a biofeedback group or a control group. After 6 wk. of training, Type A subjects showed a significant reduction in muscle tension for both resting and aroused states; however, the reduction of muscle tension did not result in reduction of Type A behavior patterns.     

Effect of directed attention on cerebral asymmetries in stuttering adults

9 stutterers and 9 nonstutterers were administered a dichotic digits test under conditions of free recall and directed attention. Analysis indicated right-ear preference for both groups and no differences between the free recall and directed listening conditions. Results are discussed in relation to previous studies in which dichotic digit-stimuli were presented to stutterers.