Suicide as a resolution of separation-individuation among adolescent girls

The purpose of this study was to discover if there is a relationship between suicidal adolescent girls and borderline phenomena, and to examine separation anxiety in suicidal girls. Hansburg's Separation Anxiety Test and Gunderson's Diagnostic Interview for Borderline Disorder were administered to 40 adolescent girls. Only those girls that had attempted suicide were included in this study. The findings of this research suggested that adolescent suicide is a borderline phenomena that has its roots in the early separation-individuation phase of development, resulting in separation anxiety. The adolescent girl gets relief from the abandonment depression and feelings of separateness by using suicide as a vehicle for regression to a symbiotic state where she earlier had experienced safety.     

Information and preference in partial orders: A bimatrix representation

This paper presents a bimatrix structure for examining ordinal partial rankings. A set of axioms is given similar to those of Kemeny and Snell (1962) and Bogart (1973), which uniquely determines the distance between any pair of such rankings. Thel ¹ norm is shown to satisfy this set of axioms, and to be equivalent to the Kemeny and Snell distance on their subspace of weak orderings. Consensus formation is discussed.This research was supported by a NSERC grant A8966.     

Perception of the visual vertical: Utricular and somatosensory contributions

Summary The subjective visual vertical (SV) has been investigated in centrifugation experiments in order to test the hypothesis, that changes in the SV are proportional to changes in the shear force acting on the utricles. The results deviate from those predicted from the shear hypothesis. This deviation can be accounted for by assuming that the SV is determined by the average of utricular and somaesthetic inputs.Thanks are due to A. Stein for performing some of the experiments of series d and e. N.J. Wade was supported by a Forschungsstipendium from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Renate Alton skillfully assisted with the drawings.     

Book reviews

Johnson-Laird, P. N. and Wason, P. C. (Eds). Thinking: Readings in Cognitiwe Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1977. Pp. xii+615. ISBN 0 521 21756 3. £17.50. (Also paperback ISBN 0 521 29267 0. £5.95.)

Marks, L. E. The Unity of the Senses. Interrelations among the Modalities. London: Academic Press. 1978. Pp. 289. ISBN 0 12 472960 6. £11.35.

Callaway, E., Tueting, P. and Koslow, S. H. (Eds). Event-Related Brain Potentials in Man. New York: Academic Press. 1978. Pp. ix+630. ISBN 0 12 155150 4. £22.00.

Clifford, B. R. and Bull, R. The Psychology of Person Identification. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1978. Pp. 254. ISBN 0 7100 8867 1. £7.95.

Albert, M. A. and Obler, L. K. The Bilingual Brain. New York: Academic Press. 1978. Pp. 302. ISBN 0 12 048750 0. £12.65.

Welch, R. B. Perceptual Modification: Adapting to Altered Sensory Environments. London: Academic Press. 1978. Pp. 346. ISBN 0 12 741850 4. £15.90.

Wales, R. J. and Walker, E. (Eds). New Approaches to Language Mechanisms. Amsterdam: North-Holland. 1976. Pp. 296. ISBN 0 7204 0523 8. $19.75.

Lomax, E. M. R. Science and Patterns of Child Care. San Francisco: Freeman. 1978. Pp. 247. ISBN 0 7167 0296 7. Hardback £5.50; paperback £3.70.

Armington, J. C., Krauskopf, J. and Wooten, B. R. (Eds). Visual Psychophysics and Physiology New York: Academic Press 1978 Pp 488 ISBN 0 12 062260 0. $29.50.

Williams, M. Brain Damage, Behaviour and the Mind. Chichester: Wiley. 1979. Pp. 187. ISBN 0 471 99704 8. £8.50.     

Divergent thinking in Alzheimer's and frontotemporal dementia

Twenty-three patients with mild dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) or frontotemporal type (DFT) and age- and education-matched control subjects were administered tests of complex fluency involving divergent thinking and tests of letter, category, and figural fluency. The tests of complex fluency discriminated the dementia patients from control subjects more strongly than did the other fluency tests. The results suggest that divergent thinking as assessed by complex fluency tests is a cognitive domain that is impaired early in the course of dementia. The sensitivity of complex fluency tests compared to that of letter, category, and figural fluency tests may be related to greater demands for conceptualization in relating stimulus attributes to function and greater demands for flexible thinking during self-directed search processes.     

Effects of belief and logic on syllogistic reasoning: Eye-movement evidence for selective processing models

Studies of syllogistic reasoning have demonstrated a nonlogical tendency for people to endorse more believable conclusions than unbelievable ones. This belief bias effect is more dominant on invalid syllogisms than valid ones, giving rise to a logic by belief interaction. We report an experiment in which participants' eye movements were recorded in order to provide insights into the nature and time course of the reasoning processes associated with manipulations of conclusion validity and believability. Our main dependent measure was people's inspection times for syllogistic premises, and we tested predictions deriving from three contemporary mental-models accounts of the logic by belief interaction. Results supported recent "selective processing" theories of belief bias (e.g., Evans, 2000; Klauer, Musch, & Naumer, 2000), which assume that the believability of a conclusion biases model construction processes, rather than biasing the search for falsifying models (e.g., Oakhill & Johnson-Laird, 1985) or a response stage of reasoning arising from subjective uncertainty (e.g., Quayle & Ball, 2000). We conclude by suggesting that the eye-movement analyses in reasoning research may provide a useful adjunct to other process-tracing techniques such as verbal protocol analysis.     

The mediating effects of misinterpretation of intrusive thoughts on obsessive-compulsive symptoms

Perfectionism and inflated responsibility have both been identified as risk factors for the development and maintenance of obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms. The aim of the present study was to test whether the relationships between these two variables and OC symptoms are mediated by the misinterpretation of intrusive thoughts (MIT). Three hundred and three university students completed the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, the Maudsley Obsessional Compulsive Inventory, the Responsibility Attitude Scale, and the Responsibility Interpretations Questionnaire. MIT was found to partially mediate the relationship between responsibility attitudes and OC symptoms. MIT also partially mediated the relationship between concern over mistakes and OC symptoms, even after controlling for responsibility attitudes. Both concern over mistakes and responsibility attitudes were significant predictors of MIT and OC symptoms, but responsibility was the stronger predictor when all of the variables were included in the model. Clinical implications for the treatment of OCD are discussed.     

The lost direction in binocular vision: the neglected signs posted by Wells, Towne, and LeConte

Studies of vision have informed theories first in philosophy and then in psychology. Over the centuries, an increasing number of phenomena have been enlisted to refute or reinforce particular theories. Nowhere has this been more evident than in binocular vision. How we see a single world with two eyes is one of the oldest and most consistently studied topics in vision research. It has been discussed at least since the time of Aristotle and it has been examined experimentally since the second century, when Ptolemy defined lines of visual correspondence for the two eyes. Prior to Wheatstone's invention of the stereoscope in the 1830s, binocular vision had been studied in terms of visual directions. The stereoscope established distance (or depth) as well as direction as dimensions of binocular vision. Subsequently, depth rather than direction has been the principal concern of students of vision, and texts in English devoted to analyses of direction rather than depth have been neglected. We examine the experiments on binocular visual direction conducted by Wells before Wheatstone, and by Towne and LeConte after him, and discuss the reasons for their neglect.     

Culture-based perceptions of academic achievement among low-income elementary students

This study examined the influence of culture on students' perceptions of academic success. Students read scenarios depicting hypothetical classmates achieving success through the cultural themes of individualism, competition, communalism, or verve. Students reported their social endorsement for the hypothetical classmates. A 2x4 repeated measures analysis, examining the effects of cultural group and cultural theme on students' endorsement, revealed an interaction between the two variables. African American students were significantly more accepting of communal and vervistic high-achieving peers than European American students. European American students endorsed individualistic and competitive high achievers significantly more than African American students. These and other findings suggest that the value students attach to academic success should not be understood in the absence of cultural considerations.