Perception of dynamic acoustic patterns by an individual with unilateral verbal auditory agnosia

Previous studies have found that subjects diagnosed with verbal auditory agnosia (VAA) from bilateral brain lesions may experience difficulties at the prephonemic level of acoustic processing. In this case study, we administered a series of speech and nonspeech discrimination tests to an individual with unilateral VAA as a result of left-temporal-lobe damage. The results indicated that the subject's ability to perceive steady-state acoustic stimuli was relatively intact but his ability to perceive dynamic stimuli was drastically reduced. We conclude that this particular aspect of acoustic processing may be a major contributing factor that disables speech perception in subjects with unilateral VAA.     

Mean response times, variability, and skew in the responding of ADHD children: a response time distributional approach

Response time (RT) distributions from three fixed foreperiod conditions (2, 4, and 8 s) in a warned four-choice RT task were obtained for a group of boys with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, combined type (ADHD; n = 17) and for two groups of normal control boys (age-matched, n = 18, and younger-aged, n = 10). Quantitative measures of distributional shape were derived by fitting the ex-Gaussian distributional model to the individual RT data. Statistical results indicate that the ADHD distributions differ from the age-matched control distributions with respect to the size of the tail (larger for the ADHD boys), but differ from the younger control distributions with respect to the location of the leading edge (slower for the younger control boys). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) results reveal that the ex-Gaussian exponential component is highly diagnostic of the ADHD boys.     

Responses to nervous breakdowns in America over a 40-year period. Mental health policy implications

The 1957 and 1976 Americans View Their Mental Health surveys from the Institute of Social Research were partially replicated in the 1996 General Social Survey (GSS) to examine the policy implications of people's responses to feeling an impending nervous breakdown. Questions about problems in modern living were added to the GSS to provide a profile of the public's view of mental health problems. Results were compared for 1957, 1976, and 1996. In 1957, 19% of respondents had experienced an impending nervous breakdown; in 1996, 26% had had this experience. Between 1957 and 1996, participants increased their use of informal social supports, decreased their use of physicians, and increased their use of nonmedical mental health professionals. These findings support policies that strengthen informal support seeking and access to effective psychosocial treatments rather than current mental health reimbursement practices, which emphasize the role of primary care physicians.     

Practicing school psychology. A turn-of-the-century perspective

Contemporary school psychology is more than an extrapolation of its early circumstances. However, several aspects remain intact despite changes in child classification, technology and instrumentation, regulation, and professionalization of the field. A snapshot is presented of school psychology practice during its origin period at the turn of the 20th century.     

Performance on a mirror-drawing task by non-right-handers

Left-, mixed-, and right-handed (each n = 10, N = 30) adolescent boys who were classified on the basis of a hand preference inventory performed a mirror-drawing task with a bilateral transfer of a skill paradigm. Participants' hand preference and the magnitude of bilateral transfer of skill were assessed in terms of errors committed and time taken to complete the mirror-drawing task. Mixed-handed participants exhibited significantly less habit interference for mirror drawing, and they performed the task significantly faster than the left-handers did; the group difference was not significant for the frequency of errors committed. These groups did not differ in terms of the magnitude of bilateral transfer of skill; the trend, however, showed that the transfer of skill was minimum in mixed-handers. These findings extend the theory that mixed-handed participants' inability to transfer motor skill from one hand to the other could be attributable to their lack of a clear pattern of lateralization. Their ability to perform well either at initial or later trials may be a function of less interference from their normal motor habits.     

A sampling approach to biases in conditional probability judgments: beyond base rate neglect and statistical format

Conditional probability judgments of rare events are often inflated. Early accounts assumed a general deficit in using statistical base rates. More recent approaches predict improvement when problems are presented in frequency format or refer to natural categories. The present theory focuses on sampling processes. Experiment 1 showed that a seeming advantage of frequency over probability formats is due to a confounded factor, the need to mentally transform stimulus samples. An information search paradigm was used in Experiment 2. When sampling by the predictor, the probability to be estimated, p(criterion/predictor), was conserved in the samples and judgments were quite accurate. However, when sampling by the criterion, the low base-rate event was strongly overrepresented, accounting for the entire bias. Judgments were quite sensitive to the sampled data, but failed to take sampling constraints into account, as shown in Experiments 3 and 4.     

Family perception of interpersonal behavior as a predictor in eating disorders: a prospective, six-year followup study

This study assessed family perception patterns of interpersonal behavior in families with a daughter diagnosed with an eating disorder 6 years after treatment that used a prospective design. Family perception patterns of patients found to have a poor outcome at followup (n = 15) were compared with patients with a good outcome (n = 23), as well as a control group (n = 36). Using the system of multiple level observation of groups (SYMLOG), all 238 family members evaluated themselves and each other. The index patients with a poor outcome perceived themselves as friendlier and more positive than they were perceived by their families. In comparison to parents of daughters with a good outcome and the control group, parents of daughters in the poor outcome group perceived themselves to be less friendly than their partners perceived them to be. A rigid polarization of the perception of the index patient by family members and a discrepancy in this perception between the index patient and the rest of the family were found to be indicative of a poor prognosis. Implications for treatment based on family perception patterns of interpersonal behavior are discussed.     

The role of mediators in memory retrieval as a function of practice: controlled mediation to direct access

The role of prior knowledge in retrieval of Spanish-English vocabulary pairs learned using keyword mediators was examined in 4 experiments. Retrieval was tested immediately after learning and after 1-week and 1-month no-practice intervals (Experiment 1), after moderate retrieval practice (Experiment 2), and after extended retrieval practice (Experiments 3 and 4). Using accuracy, latency, and verbal report data, a detailed account of memory retrieval processes was developed. Initial retrieval is an explicit mediation process that involves retrieving keyword mediators into working memory and using them as retrieval cues to access the English equivalents of the Spanish words. After extended vocabulary retrieval practice, this sequential mediation process qualitatively changed to a direct retrieval process in which the English equivalent was accessed in a single working memory step. However, direct retrieval was still influenced by a covert mediation process.     

Students' state motivation and instructors' use of verbally aggressive messages

This study examined the relationship between college students' (107 men, 123 women) state motivation and their instructors' perceived use of 10 verbally aggressive messages, e.g., attacks on competence, character, background, and physical appearance; malediction, teasing, ridicule, threats, swearing, or nonverbal symbols. Significant negative correlations were obtained between students' state motivation and instructors' use of seven verbally aggressive messages: attacks on competence, character, or background, malediction, ridicule, threats, and nonverbal symbols. These findings suggest that these types of verbally aggressive messages are related to students' state motivation whereas attacks on physical appearance, teasing, and swearing by the instructor are not related to students' state motivation.