Dealing with (bypassing) the difference

The author presents different psychoanalytic conceptualizations of gender difference. She reviews the controversy between Freud and Jones and discusses in detail the views put forward by Montrelay, a student of Lacan, who relates early linguistic development to gender-specific differences in closeness between the child and the "mother's body".     

Aspects of family-oriented diagnosis in compulsory legal family expert assessment

In forensic psychology, recommendations that courts request when granting one of the parents the right of child upbringing after a divorce pose a problem for the person who is required to give such expert judgment. The authors describe the difficult situation he faces when having to decide for and, at the same time, against one of the parents. A good knowledge of family psychology and pathopsychology is essential, and for drawing up the expertise and stating his reasons, the expert requires methodical resources. The authors describe four procedures of relational diagnosis and recommend the combined use of these in conjunction with methods that have been employed so far.     

The number of active sweat glands (PSI, palmar sweat index) in stress caused by blood donation

The number of active sweat glands (PSI), heart rate, systolic (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) were assessed every 2 minutes in 109 male blood donors. Three measurements were taken at the beginning (adaptation phase), three later but before blood donation (baseline), one during the venous puncture (phase 3), three thereafter but still during donation (phase 4), and four after removal of the cannula (phase 5). Analysis of variance yielded significant differences between phases; PSI and SBP behaved similarly, decreasing from adaptation to baseline, rising during puncture, and decreasing again thereafter. Mean within-subject correlations between variables were significantly above 0. Between-subjects correlations were significantly negative for PSI and DBP. This is best explained by the influence of age on both variables. Correlations of PSI values as determined by three raters had a mean of 0.90. The study shows that the PSI is a very sensitive indicator of stress that is easily accessible also in field studies.     

Stimulus repetition effects and the dimension-feature distinction in alternative targets

The negative repetition effect (NRE) refers to a poorer perception of the target in noise-same-as-target than in noise-alternative-target displays. Using the parenthesis as target and noise that are either identical or different in orientation, we tested predictions derived from a feature-specific inhibition model (Bjork & Murray, 1977) that explains the NRE as arising from inhibitory interactions among channels handling identical inputs. Contrary to our expectation of evidence for orientation-specific inhibition, a positive repetition effect (PRE) was observed. We also found a PRE for the dimension target sets whose stimuli differ only in orientation and an NRE for the feature target sets whose stimuli differ in the number of elements. Further experiments that systematically varied relationships between alternative targets indicate that these basic findings, termed the stimulus attributes effects, do not arise from pattern masking, perceptual strategies, or response bias.     

A kinematic analysis of anticipatory coarticulation in the speech of anterior aphasic subjects using electromagnetic articulography

An investigation was made into the extent and time course of anticipatory coarticulation in the speech of two normal and two anterior aphasic, German-speaking subjects. Both labial and velar coarticulation gestures were investigated. Subjects produced sentences containing target words contrasting in postconsonantal vowel rounding (e.g., [geli:ge]/[gely:gel]) and in nasality (e.g., [ti:de]/[ti:ne]). Speech kinematics were monitored by means of electromagnetic articulography. The data revealed that for correct productions, aphasic speakers' coarticulatory patterns were more highly variable than those of control subjects. These differences, however, were found chiefly for spatial displacement characteristics, while the temporal aspects of articulator movement necessary for anticipatory coarticulation appeared largely intact. Articulator mistiming did not appear to explain a small corpus of stop/nasal substitution errors produced by one of the aphasic speakers.     

Inquiry into intentional systems I: Issues in ecological physics

Summary The role of intention in guiding the behavior of goal-directed systems is a problem that continues to challenge behavioral science. While it is generally agreed that intentional systems must be consistent with the laws of physics, there are many obvious differences between inanimate, physical systems and sentient, intentional systems. This suggests that there must be constraints over and above those of physics that govern goal-directed behavior. In this paper it is suggested that generic properties of self-organizing mechanisms may play a central role in the origin and evolution of intentional constraints. The properties of self-organizing systems are first introduced in the context of simple physical systems and then extended to a complex (biological) system. Whereas behavior of an inanimate physical system is lawfully determined by force fields, behavior of an animate biological system is lawfully specified by information fields. Biological systems are distinguished from simple physical systems in terms of their ubiquitous use of information fields as special (biological and psychological, social, etc.) boundary conditions on classical laws. Unlike classical constraints (boundary conditions), informational constraints can vary with time and state of the system. Because of the nonstationarity of the boundary conditions, the dynamic of the system can follow a complex trajectory that is organized by a set of spatially and temporally distributed equilibrium points or regions. It is suggested that this equilibrium set and the laws that govern its transformation define a minimal requirement for an intentional system. One of the benefits of such an approach is that it suggests a realist account for the origin of semantic predicates, thereby providing a basis for the development of a theory of symbolic dynamics. Therefore, the principles of self-organization provide a comprehensive basis for investigating intentional systems by suggesting how it is that intentions arise, and by providing a lawful basis for intentional behavior that reveals how organisms become and remain lawfully informed in the pursuit of their goals.     

Chicks Injected with Antisera to either S-100α or S-100β Protein Develop Amnesia for a Passive Avoidance Task

The cellular expression of S-100β protein is upregulated in Alzheimer's disease and in Down's syndrome, and this protein has been implicated in memory-related processes in laboratory animals. However, the possibility that the α subunit of S-100 is also involved in memory has not yet been examined. In the present study, day-old black Australorp white Leghorn cockerel chicks (Gallus domesticus) received injections of monoclonal antisera to S-100α (1:50) or S-100β (1:500) into each hemisphere immediately after training on a one-trial passive avoidance task. The chicks displayed significantly lower retention levels than control birds that had been injected with antisera to carbonic anhydrase, or with saline (p< .01). S-100α antisera had an amnestic effect when injected between 0 and 20 min after training, with memory deficits occurring from 30 min postlearning, at the point of transition between the A and the B phases of the Gibbs-Ng intermediate memory stage. By contrast, the S-100β antisera needed to be injected either 5 min before or immediately after training and produced amnesia 10 min earlier, at the start of the A phase of the intermediate memory stage. We conclude that the two subunits of the S-100 protein are required at different points in the sequence of events leading to the consolidation of passive avoidance memory.     

Encoding, repetition, and the mirror effect in recognition memory: Symmetry in motion

Attention/likelihood theory has been used to explain the mirror effect in recognition memory. The theory also predicts that any manipulation that affects the recognition of old items will also affect recognition of the new items—more specifically, that all the underlying distributions will move and that they will move symmetrically on the decision axis. In five experiments, we tested this prediction. The first two experiments used encoding tasks during study to change recognition performance for high- and low-frequency words. The results show symmetrical dispersion of the underlying distributions. The final three experiments used repetition to increase recognition performance. Repetition produced a symmetrical pattern of movement that was different from that produced by encoding task. This pattern is, however, also covered by attention/likelihood theory. A further extension of the theory was used to predict response times.     

Compensation for Jaw Fixation by Aphasic Patients

The ability to compensate for fixation of the jaw by a bite block was investigated in 6 nonfluent aphasics, 6 fluent aphasics, and 10 normal control subjects. Acoustic analyses of the vowels [i u a æ] and fricatives [s s] revealed substantial but incomplete compensation for the perturbation in all three subject groups. Perceptual identification scores and quality ratings by naive and phonetically trained listeners indicated poorer identification of the high vowels [i u] under compensatory conditions relative to normal production. Of particular interest was the fact that all three groups of subjects exhibited similar patterns of results. The findings suggest that any deficit in speech motor programming demonstrated by the nonfluent aphasic patients did not affect compensatory abilities. Results are discussed with respect to normal speech adaptation skills and the nature of articulatory breakdown in nonfluent aphasia.