Some aspects of language comprehension in anterior aphasia

The competency of language comprehension was evaluated in three groups: anterior aphasics, posterior aphasics, and normal control subjects. Test material was divided into two sentence groups (Fill in the Blank and True/False) emphasizing either (1) semantic, “real world,” identity words or (2) syntactic, relational words, and one paragraph interpretation task. Matching auditory and visual (written) presentations were given. The control subjects performed almost flawlessly but many errors were made by each aphasia group. Qualitative study revealed a marked difference in the comprehension problem of the two groups. The anterior aphasic group performed well on semantically weighted sentences but made errors on syntactically weighted material, regardless of mode of presentation. In contrast, the posterior aphasics made almost the same number of errors on both types of material, regardless of mode of presentation. These findings support the concept of defective language comprehension in anterior aphasia and further suggest that the defect centers on the syntactical structures which are also poorly handled in expressive output.     

Acquisition of phobias and anxiety response patterns in clinical patients

The ways in which phobic patients (N = 106; animal-, social- and claustrophobics) acquired their phobias were investigated in the present study. The results showed that a large majority (58%) of the patients attributed their phobias to conditioning experiences, while 17% recalled vicarious experiences, 10% instructions/information and 15% could not recall any specific onset circumstances. There was no clearcut relationship between the ways of acquisition and anxiety components (subjective, behavioral, physiological), nor did the conditioning and indirectly acquired phobias differ in severity. However, some interesting trends emerged in the data, showing that animal phobics who recalled conditioning experiences to a larger extent also responded physiologically. For patients with indirect onset experiences (for all three types of phobias) the reverse was true, i.e. they responded to a larger extent in a cognitive-subjective way, rather than with increased physiological arousal.     

Hyperlexia as a variant of developmental language disorder

Memory and associative reasoning skills of 10 hyperlexic children are examined. The results suggest superior visual and isolated auditory memory skills along with impaired associative language ability. The results are discussed in relation to various theories of hyperlexia.     

The determination of optimal exposure to phobic stimuli in flooding therapy

The present study compared the value of various criteria for determining exposure duration to phobic stimuli in flooding therapy. Results indicated that basing exposure termination on a return to resting ranges of HR was not effective in increasing approach behavior, whereas basing termination on observer's judgements was quite effective. Employing self-reported anxiety reduction as the termination criterion was no more effective than using either the HR criterion or a procedure that combined all three criteria (HR, self-report, and observer's judgements). Self-reported fear data showed similar trends with the HR criterion again failing to produce any greater benefits than control procedures. Nine-weeks follow-up indicated a persistence of the behavioral changes with some loss of the gains in subjective anxiety, and a reduction in the differences between groups.     

Auditory perception of speech and speech sounds in recent and recovered cases of aphasia

Auditory perception of speech and speech sounds was examined in three groups of patients with cerebral damage in the dominant hemisphere. Two groups consisted of brain-injured war veterans, one group of patients with high-frequency hearing loss and the other, a group of patients with a flat hearing loss. The third group consisted of patients with recent cerebral infarcts due to vascular occlusion of the middle cerebral and internal carotid artery. Word and phoneme discrimination as well as phoneme confusions in incorrect responses were analyzed from conventional speech audiometry tests with bisyllabic Finnish words fed close to the speech reception threshold of the patient. The results were compared with those of a control group with no cerebral disorders and normal hearing. The speech discrimination scores of veterans with high-frequency hearing loss and patients with recent cerebral infarcts were some 15–20% lower than those of controls or veterans with flat hearing loss. Speech sound feature discrimination, analyzed in terms of place of articulation and distinctive features, was distorted especially in cases of recent cerebral infarcts, whereas general information transmission of phonemes was more impaired in patients with high-frequency hearing loss.     

The interaction of locus of control expectancies and providing purpose on children's motivation

Children differing in locus of control orientation (internals, mediums, and externals' were administered an extended coding task following either a fictional rationale for the study (purpose incentive statement) or no purpose. As predicted, externals' performance under no purpose was significantly poorer and their rated interest in the task was significantly less favorable than those of internals. Also as predicted, these differences were nullified under the purpose incentive condition. The findings extend Lefcourt's (1967) suggestion that cue explication is important for externals to include external children, and support the position (Mischel, 1973; Rotter, 1975) that personality variables are increasingly important as a function of greater situational ambiguity. Implications of these findings for education and child-rearing are discussed.     

Les pratiques professionnelles au cœur de la crise dans la gestion de l’urgent : l’exemple de la crise du COVID-19

Our organisations have been severely shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic and the world of work has not been spared. Only essential activities continued in order to maintain a minimum level of functioning, just like in hospitals or in local authorities. During the first five months of the crisis in 2020 (from March to July), 34 interviews were conducted in these two public service entities in order to examine the management of urgent matters in the light of “activity” and at the heart of the crisis. The results show that while the emergency is mainly managed by an improvisation activity based on the intuition of the actors in the field, the crisis is managed by governance in a rational manner leading to the drafting of procedures after the event. This crisis situation pushed organisations to reconfigure themselves in an emergency, allowing the development of new professional practices. The strategies of damage control and proceduralization will be discussed. Perspectives are opened on the questions of training for these crisis situations against a background of developing presumption of ignorance.