Personality characteristics of individuals with chronic rheumatoid arthritis

MMPI profiles of 22 chronic arthritic patients were compared to 22 control pain (nonorganic) patients. While elevations were noted in the HS, D, and Hy scales for the rheumatoid patients, the over-all profiles differed from controls on the PA scale.     

Test theory without an answer key

A general model is presented for homogeneous, dichotomous items when the answer key is not known a priori. The model is structurally related to the two-class latent structure model with the roles of respondents and items interchanged. For very small sets of respondents, iterative maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters can be obtained by existing methods. For other situations, new estimation methods are developed and assessed with Monte Carlo data. The answer key can be accurately reconstructed with relatively small sets of respondents. The model is useful when a researcher wants to study objectively the knowledge possessed by members of a culturally coherent group that the researcher is not a member of.This research was supported by NSF Grant No. SES-8320173 to the authors. We gratefully acknowledge comments and suggestions from John Boyd, Tarow Indow, and Kathy Maher as well as the editor and several anonymous referees.     

Has the time come to rehabilitate Gestalt theory?

Summary The distinction is drawn between the metatheoretical commitments of Gestalt theory and their instantiations in explicit theory. It is argued that the metatheoretical commitments of Gestalt theory reflect important insights which might have served as the foundation of a theory of perception that avoids a number of the major difficulties associated with constructivism and the theory of direct perception. For this reason rehabilitation of the reputation of Gestalt theory is urged. In the concluding section certain similarities between the foundational premises of Gestalt theory and parallel distributed processing approaches are noted.The contents of this paper were presented initially at a symposium on perceptual theory in honor of Irvin Rock which convened in Washington, DC, on the occasion of the 1986 meetings of the American Psychological Association     

Learned helplessness in the cockroach (Periplaneta americana)

For 3 consecutive days cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) were exposed to either escapable, inescapable, or no shock in an escape task. Twenty-four hours later they were tested in a shuttlebox escape task. There were reliable differences between escapable and inescapable animals and between inescapable and control animals in both escape latencies and the number of failures to escape.     

Additivity, subadditivity, and the use of visual information: a reply to Massaro (1988)

Previously we (Bruno & Cutting, 1988) explored the perception of spatial relations among objects laid out in a computer-generated environment. In his commentary on our article, Massaro (1988) raised several issues. The most important is from his reanalysis, which indicated that--because of a subadditive trend in the results--additive and multiplicative strategies fit our data in Experiment 1 about equally well. In reply, we performed a different analysis. Results corroborate subadditivity--and hence multiplicative information combination--in Experiment 1 but provide no evidence for it in Experiments 2 and 3. On the whole, then, the results still support additivity more strongly than any other combination rule and thus support our notion of minimodularity.     

Fragile X speech phonology in Finnish

Fragile X syndrome is a recently discovered relatively common syndrome linked with an anomaly of the X chromosome and causing handicaps of cognitive development especially in males. In the present phonological analysis we will discuss the sound patterns of two Finnish fragile X speakers, a five (borderline intelligence)- and an eight (mildly mentally retarded)-year-old boy. The fragile X syndrome is not necessarily linked with any anomalies of speech organs. The subjects could produce all Finnish speech sounds in isolated test words. However, in the present samples of connected speech they exhibited general dysphonology. What is noteworthy is that their phonological error patterns resembled each other to a great extent. Among the common features were the tendencies to substitute and omit phonemes. As for vowels, our results showed about one-half of the errors to be omissions. Labiality and quantity oppositions were quite resistant to substitution. Most substitution errors of place of consonants occurred in dentals. As for the feature of manner, /r/ and /s/ were the phonemes most prone for substitution. A tendency toward spirantization or /h/ sation was common for both patients. The number of additions was clearly lower than has been reported for English-speaking developmentally dyspraxic children and also for Finnish Broca's aphasics. The speech problems of our patients seemed to indicate higher level motor encoding problems of linguistic information rather than peripheral articulatory deficits.     

Scopolamine interactions with D1 and D2 antagonists on radial-arm maze performance in rats

Recent evidence indicates that acetylcholine and dopamine play complementary roles in cognitive as well as motor functions. In our previous study, the dopamine receptor blocker, haloperidol, was found to attenuate the radial-arm maze choice accuracy deficit caused by the muscarinic acetylcholine receptor blocker, scopolamine. Haloperidol has activity in blocking both D1 and D2 dopamine receptor subtypes. The current study was conducted to determine whether this dopamine-acetylcholine interaction specifically involved D1 or D2 dopamine receptors. The D1 antagonist, SCH 23390, and the D2 antagonist, raclopride, were administered with a dose of scopolamine which caused choice accuracy deficits in the radial-arm maze. The scopolamine-induced deficit was reversed by SCH 23390, the D1 antagonist, indicating that D1 blockade alone is sufficient to reverse the amnestic effects of muscarinic blockade. There was no indication in this study that the D2 blocker, raclopride, had a similar effect. However, this does not mean that such an effect may not be present at other doses of raclopride or with other D2 antagonists. The present finding that D1 blockade counteracts scopolamine-induced cognitive dysfunction not only furthers the understanding of dopamine-acetylcholine relationships in cognitive function, it also suggests a promising direction for the development of treatments for cognitive dysfunction due to cholinergic loss.     

Some tests of the interactive-activation model for word identification

Summary The interactive-activation model postulates (a) that activation at the letter level leads automatically to activation at the word level, (b) that the word-superiority effect reflects reactivation of letters by the word they spell, and (c) that subjects identify words on the basis of information obtained from separate letter-position channels. In the first two experiments, we showed words in upper, lower, or mixed case: the word-superiority effect was reduced when words were presented in mixed-case letters, presumably because extra-letter information is lost with mixed-case presentation; i.e., postulate (c) is wrong. The third experiment showed that when the letters of a word are rotated 180° subjects can identify the letters without producing a word-superiority effect; i.e., one of postulates (a) and (b) is wrong. In Experiments 4 and 5, we trained subjects to name words presented in inverted letters; training was more effective when subjects could exploit bigram information in addition to letter-channel information; i.e., reading inverted text is based on extra-letter-feature information, not on a general skill in rotating letters. Taken together, our data deny three of the interactive-activation model's major postulates. We offer some suggestions for future versions of the model. Electronic mail: Userid: MEWHORTD; Nodeid: QUCDN; Domain: BITNET     

Insight-oriented group psychotherapy of latency-age children in an acute care setting

Traditional approaches to group therapy with latency-age children have stressed activity and nonverbal therapeutic interventions. These approaches originated in the 1940s with Slavson's activity aroup therapy. A review of the literature of the past 25 years reveals that many clinicians have increasingly employed verbal techniques with latencyage groups. Most such reports describe groups for latency-age out-patients. In this paper, a verbal, interpretive technique for group therapy with latency-age inpatients is described. Clinical vignettes are included to illustrate this technique. Our experience suggests that such a technique can become an integral part of the inpatient treatment program for the latency-age child.