Parent and child perceptions of Boszormenyi-Nagy's ethical dimensions of the parent-child relationship

The parent-child relationship plays an important role in Boszormenyi-Nagy's contextual therapy. This article presents the results of four interview studies of the opinions of parents and children about their ethical relationship.The children in these studies were five-to-seven-year-olds, 10-to-12 year olds and 15-year-olds. In one study only the mothers were interviewed, in the other three both parents participated. In all 73 children, 62 mothers, and 43 fathers were interviewed. The majority of parents and children agreed with most aspects of Nagy's theory about the parent-child relation, but there were some notable exceptions. Very few shared Nagy's ideas about entitlement. The age of the child had a clear effect on the opinions of the children on the dimensions of trust/reliability, loyalty and shifting of the balance with age of the child and on the opinions of the parents on the dimensions of childrens' rights, parents' rights, and balance of fairness. The sex of the interviewee had some effect: Mothers and fathers differ on the dimension of parents' rights and adolescent girls and boys differ on the dimensions of childrens' rights and parents' duties.     

Questions of scientific responsibility: the Baltimore case

A number of cases of questionable behavior in science have been extensively reported in the media during the last two or three years. What standards are upheld by the scientific community affect the community internally, and also affect its relations with society at large, including Congress. Here I wish to address questions of scientific responsibility, using the Baltimore case as a concrete instance where they came up. The first part containing historical background is necessary to provide readers with documentation so that they can have some factual bases on which to evaluate respective positions and my conclusions that follow -- based on further but more succinctly summarized documentation. I have reproduced many quotes because I firmly believe people are entitled to be represented by their own wording. Conversely, I hold people accountable for their official positions. Some of these are reproduced in footnotes, and some longer ones are reproduced in appendices. I also do not ask to be trusted. By providing numerous references, I hope that readers who find my documentation insufficient can follow up by looking up these references.... The article is in six parts: Part I. Historical Background. This part gives mostly a historical background of the early phases of the Baltimore case. Part II. The First Issue of Responsibility. This part presents a discussion of certain scientific responsibilities based on that background, specifically: the responsibility of answering questions about one's work, and the responsibility whether to submit to authority. Part III. The NIH Investigations. This part summarizes the two NIH investigations. Part IV. The Dingell Subcommittee. This part deals with the responsibilities of a Congressional Committee vis-à-vis science. Part V. Further Issues of Responsibility. This part goes into an open ended discussion of many issues of responsibility facing scientists, vis-à-vis themselves and vis-à-vis society at large, including Congress. The list is long, and readers can look at the section and paragraph headings to get an idea of their content. Part VI. Personal Credibility, a Shift at the Grass Roots, and Baltimore's Persistence.     

Auditory accessory effects on visual processing

A series of experiments on intersensory facilitation demonstrates that non-informative sound of low to moderate intensity (30/80 dB) facilitates the reaction to a visual stimulus. By manipulating the preprocessing and perceptual stages of the visual signals, it appears that auditory intensity reduces choice reaction time independently from the positive influence of the intensity and duration of the visual imperative signal, but interacts with the effect of stimulus degradation. Degraded stimuli take more profit of the sound than intact stimuli. Besides a short-term activation effect, originated by accessories of the auditory modality, on the motor adjustment stage (cf. Sanders 1983), the results suggest that the accessory influences the stage of feature extraction.     

Is the match/mismatch model based on a statistical artefact?

In the match/mismatch model, recently formulated by Rachman and coworkers, it is stated that incorrectly predicted aversive experiences are generally followed by an immediate adjustment of the predictions concerning aversiveness of the next experience. This model can be considered to reflect a psychological process of the formation of expectations. In the present article it is argued that a simple H0 model, assuming that predictions are completely randomly generated by the subject, may account for the same effects. This H0 model is used in a stringent test of empirical data to determine if there are any effects of the discrepancy between prediction and experience on next prediction that exceed the effects explained by the H0 model. Although the H0 model produces effects very similar to the empirically observed effects, there is clear support for the hypothesized influence of the discrepancy between prediction and experience. Therefore, the model appears to reflect 'real' psychological processes and not chance findings.     

The relationship between underpredicted pain and escape

Escape and avoidance that are disproportional to the danger of the pertinent stimulus are important clinical problems that are often related to inaccurate (catastrophic) expectations. One possible source of such expectations is a prior, underestimated aversive experience. In the present experiment the hypotheses that underestimated pain leads to escape and that it leads to avoidance were tested. In order to control for the effect of the intensity of the pain stimulus, a control group that received 20 pain stimuli of high intensity was formed. Subjects in the experimental condition received 17 pain stimuli of low intensity and 3 of (unexpectedly) high intensity (experimentally induced underprediction). Underprediction of the high intensity stimulus was significantly related to escape, but not to avoidance. The results suggest that the way in which avoidance was operationalized accounts for this. The strong support of the hypothesized relationship between underpredicted pain and escape is an important finding, however.     

FACIAL EXPRESSION AND SPEECH: NEUROANATOMICAL CONSIDERATIONS

This paper discusses the neuroanatomy and pathology of facial expression and findings on the neuroanatomical connections between expressions of the face and speech. The facial musculature is briefly dealt with in terms of its innervation by the facial nerve and its relationship to the soft palate at the peripheral system level. After considering the facial nuclei, the supranuclear innervation of volitional and emotional facial expression is reviewed. Then supranuclear relations between facial movements and some speech organs are considered. Finally, attention is paid to aspects of facial paralysis stemming from peripheral and central origins.     

Bilingual language processing after a lesion in the left thalamic and temporal regions. A case report with early childhood onset.

This case study concerns an 18-year-old bilingual girl who suffered a radiation lesion in the left (dominant) thalamic and temporal region when she was 4 years old. Language and memory assessment revealed deficits in auditory short-term memory, auditory word comprehension, nonword repetition, syntactic processing, word fluency, and confrontation naming tasks. Both languages (English and Dutch) were found to be affected in a similar manner, despite the fact that one language (English) was acquired before and the other (Dutch) after the period of lesion onset. Most of the deficits appear to be related to verbal (short-term) memory dysfunction. Several hypotheses of subcortical involvement in memory processes are discussed with reference to existing theories in this area.     

Discriminative properties of morphine that modulate associations between tastes and lithium chloride

Wistar rats learned to withhold consumption of a target solution when morphine preceded presentation of the target solution and lithium chloride (LiCl) and to consume the same target solution when saline preceded the presentation of the solution. After this serial feature discrimination training, morphine did not block the formation of a Pavlovian association between saccharin and LiCl but did suppress consumption of familiar tap water. After Pavlovian conditioning, morphine blocked the formation of an association between saccharin and LiCl but did not suppress consumption of a familiar tap water solution. The roles of morphine and saline can be interchanged. It appears that the morphine discriminative stimulus is calling up a representation of neither the conditioned stimulus nor the unconditional stimulus alone, but rather a modified representation of some aspect of their association.     

Time courses in visual-information processing: Some theoretical considerations

Summary In the literature two different views with regard to the time course of activation of recognition units —hypothetical entities that represent identity information —are proposed. Both views are derived from a restricted set of phenomena in visual perception. The first view gets its intuitions from phenomena such as those summarized by Bloch's law; these phenomena show integration or summation of activation over time. This grow-and-grow view assumes that recognition units accumulate activation gradually over times The second view finds its inspiration in phenomena such as Mach-bands and simultaneous contrast; these phenomena show inhibition or steady-state suppression over time. This grow-and-shrink view assumes that the activation levels increase fast initially and then start to decrease.The perception literature strongly suggests that it may be light intensity that determines whether mainly integration (and phenomena such as Bloch's law) or inhibition (and phenomena such as Mach-bands) is obtained. So it is also likely that both information-processing views apply only to a limited range of intensity conditions; the grow-and-grow view to conditions of low-flight intensities, and the grow-and-shrink view to conditions of intermediate-and high-light intensities.It is argued that, to arrive at a complete view, a visual phenomenon that applies to the complete range of light intensities should be taken as a background for generating hypotheses about time courses in visual-information processing. The Broca-Sulzer effect is such a phenomenon. Starting from this phenomenon a simple, synthesizing, information-processing model is derived that is compatible with both the grow-and-grow view and the grow-andshrink view. It is shown that, besides the relevant temporal properties, this model also produces the appropriate spatial properties.     

Indeterminacy of the isomorphism heuristic

Summary We are less prone today than in Köhler's time to believe in a unified science. The Gestalt program could therefore safely abandon the psychophysical isomorphism heuristic if it wished to. Indeterminacy of the heuristic might be a reason for doing so. The determination of the components involved in the isomorphism of the visual field as well as the electrocortical events would have to occur simultaneously. In the Gestalt program, however, components are determined by their position in the whole. They can therefore not be compared in different contexts, so no independent test of a candidate heuristic is possible.