Towards a model of stress and human performance

An outline is presented of a model that aims to relate energetical and structural mechanisms of human information processing and to incorporate an interactionally defined stress notion in performance research. The first section summarizes objections to unidimensional notions of arousal and stress. It is concluded that further progress requires the analysis of joint cognitive-energetical processing structures. In the second section two current performance models - in terms of linear stages and resources - are briefly reviewed. Despite a number of problems and objections, it is decided to base the model upon linear stage notions of information processing. This is further elaborated in the third section. In accord with Pribram and McGuinness (1975) three energetical supply systems are proposed which are selectively related to specific cognitive processing mechanisms. Stress is defined as a state of imbalance in the energetical supply which is difficult to restore or to compensate. The final section is devoted to the discussion of some lines of evidence and to suggestions for future research.     

Conditioning functional enuresis: follow-up after retraining

Of 52 enuretics treated with bell-and-pad, 44 (84.6%) were initial successes. One year after training, 16 (30.8%) remained continually dry. Positive outcomes increased to 24 (46.2%) with the addition of successful retrainees and to 29 (55.8%), including 5 unretrained relapses who subsequently were found dry. Most clients reach initial success, but less than one third remain continually dry.

In retraining, over 84.2% (16/19) of the clients were again successful, but training time was shorter, and half relapsed a second time. Retraining is an appropriate and relatively easy approach for modifying relapse, at least for many enuretics. More rigorous assessment of retraining requires a balanced follow-up design and comparison with other approaches.     

FUNCTIONAL ASSESSMENT,CURRICULAR REVISION,AND SEVERE BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS

An adolescent female with multiple handicaps and a long history of severely disruptive behavior participated in a functional assessment linked directly to specific revisions in her school curriculum. During Phase 1, reversal designs were used to test hypotheses pertaining to antecedent and auricular influences on problem behavior. During Phase 2, a multiple baseline across afternoon and morning time periods demonstrated that the auricular revisions were effective in eliminating severely disruptive behavior and increasing on-task responding. Data also showed that inappropriate “psychotic” speech was reduced and appropriate social interactions were increased. Follow-up results showed that the changes were maintained throughout the school year. Questionnaire data provided social validation of the procedures and outcomes. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for functional assessment, individualized curricula, and positive programming for students with disabilities and serious behavior problems.     

FUNCTIONAL COMMUNICATION TRAINING TO REDUCE CHALLENGING BEHAVIOR: MAINTENANCE AND APPLICATION IN NEW SETTINGS

We evaluated the initial effectiveness, maintenance, and transferability of the results of functional communication training as an intervention for the challenging behaviors exhibited by 3 students. Assessment indicated that escape from academic demands was involved in the maintenance of the challenging behaviors. Social attention was also implicated as controlling the behavior of 1 student. The intervention involved teaching alternative assistance-seeking and attention-getting phrases to the students in an effort to replace challenging behavior with these verbal equivalents. Multiple baseline data collected across the 3 students indicated that not only did the intervention substantially reduce challenging behavior but also that these results transferred across new tasks, environments, and teachers, and were generally maintained from 18 to 24 months following the introduction of functional communication training. These results are discussed in light of recent efforts to develop effective interventions for severe challenging behavior and to understand the processes underlying transfer and maintenance of intervention effects.     

Cerebral lateralization in individuals diagnosed as autistic in early childhood

Early infantile autism was found to be associated with an atypical pattern of cerebral lateralization. Based on EEG measures of hemispheric activation during cognitive processing, it was found that 7 of the 10 autistic individuals tested showed a pattern of hemispheric specialization rarely seen in the normal population; namely, a “reversal” in lateralization reflective of a lack of left-hemisphere specialization for linguistic functions. Furthermore, the autistic individuals' pattern of cognitive strengths and weakness is suggestive of a selective impairment of the left cerebral hemisphere.     

A study of language functioning in Alzheimer patients

Language functioning in Alzheimer's disease is reviewed and the performance of 25 Alzheimer patients on a standard battery is reported. All these hospitalized patients were aphasic to some degree. As a group, they differed from normals on all language variables, and from stroke patients in terms of higher fluency and lower comprehension. Spontaneous speech showed high incidence of circumlocutions and semantic jargon, but no phonemic paraphasias or target approximations. Syllabic perseverations, shouting, inappropriate laughter, and mutism were late-appearing features. Transcortical Sensory, and Wernicke's aphasias were frequent, but Broca's and Transcortical Motor aphasias notably absent. Extent of language impairment correlated with current length of hospitalization but not age. Reading, writing, and performance scores except praxis, were lower than oral language scores. Findings were discussed in relation to previous results, methodology, and language organization in the brain.     

Mirror-reading in right- and left-handers

In mirror-reading, words are read from right to left and letters are read in a reverse right-to-left orientation. In one experiment we compared the ability of normal right- and left-handed subjects to mirror-read and found that the left-handers made fewer errors and could read mirror print more rapidly. In a second experiment we attempted to learn whether there is a hemifield superiority for reading mirror words and whether there are any differences between left- and right-handers in a hemifield. We found that although both right- and left-handers more rapidly detected mirror words projected to the left visual half-field, there were no differences between groups. However, in the right visual half-field, the performance of left-handers was superior to that of the right-handers. The results of the hemifield study suggest that left-handers may be superior at reading mirror words because they can more easily reverse their scanning pattern.     

Aphasics' selective deficits in appreciating grammatical agreements

This study attempted to dissociate in aphasic patients different aspects of grammatical capacity. Subjects were asked to evaluate sentences containing violations of agreements between pronouns and verbs. Agreements which are considered primarily structural in nature were violated (e.g., a surface object case like “them” placed in a surface subject sentential slot) while other violated agreements seemed to involve both structural and semantic information (e.g., lack of agreement between a pronoun and a verb in terms of the number of people performing the act). These violations were couched in one of three types of sentential frames which varied in terms of syntactic complexity (e.g., active declarative vs. passive syntactic voices). The results revealed that Broca's aphasics found agreement violations difficult to detect in complex syntactic frames. They were quite successful at detecting even violations of the largely structural “case” type of agreement, however, when couched in simpler syntactic frames. Fluent aphasics encountered more difficulty detecting violations of agreements involving both semantic and structural information than agreements which were primarily structural in nature, that is, regardless of the syntactic frame. These unique performance profiles suggest that Broca's aphasics may be agrammatic only with respect to certain aspects of a sentence's structure, and that fluent aphasics may also experience some selective—but different—grammatical deficits.