Optimism and Revolt of the Oppressed: A Comparison of Two Polish Jewish Ghettos of World War II

One World War II Jewish ghetto that revolted, the Warsaw Ghetto, is compared to one that did not, the Lodz Ghetto, in order to examine the causes of violent resistance. This structured focused comparative method (George, 1979) illuminates problems with previous explanations for revolt and nonrevolt in Jewish ghettos and suggest psychological variables that might have led to or precluded organized violence. Specifically, it appears that these two ghettos differed in their perceptions about their future. The residents of the Warsaw Ghetto believed they had no hope of survival while residents of the Lodz Ghetto remained optimistic. These differing perceptions seem to have led to the different outcomes. Possible causes of these percetpions are also discussed.     

Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread

This paper describes some features of the behaviour of a severely disturbed adopted latency boy. Peter was born premature, suffered several early hospitalizations and surgical operations, and at 2 months of age was removed from his mother's care by Social Services for neglect and abandonment.
Although his subsequent development has been clouded by a series of losses and sudden changes of caregivers, Peter has maintained an unexpected desire to relate, showing considerable innate resilience. When feeling endangered, Peter had developed a defensive olfactive container using his bodily smell and farts to envelop himself in a protective cloud of familiarity against the dread of falling apart, and to hold his personality together.
In the paper Fordham's views of development and Anzieu's concept of psychic envelopes constitute the theoretical underpinning. Bion's concepts of beta- and alpha-elements are discussed in relation to Jung's views on symbolic development and psychological containment.     

Relations between baseline contingencies and equivalence probe performances

Following the emergence of two three-member equivalence classes (A1B1C1 and A2B2C2), 5 college students were exposed to one or more changes in the reinforcement contingencies controlling baseline conditional discriminations. AC relations were either reversed (i.e., C2 was reinforced and C1 punished when A1 was the sample; C1 was reinforced and C2 punished when A2 was the sample) or arranged randomly (i.e., C2 and C1 were reinforced and punished equally often in the presence of A1 and A2). In a third condition, the original AB and AC relations were reversed. Results showed that although baseline conditional discrimination performances were under the control of reinforcement contingencies, and performances on symmetry trials varied with baseline responding for 3 of 4 subjects when contingencies were reversed, performances on transitivity probes remained consistent with the initial equivalence class. These inconsistencies between probe and baseline performances were striking because conditional discriminations are thought to be the determinants of equivalence class performance. Similarly, the contrast between performances on symmetry and transitivity probes was of theoretical interest because equivalence classes are defined by congruent patterns of responding on probe trials.     

Short-component multiple schedules: effects of relative reinforcement duration

Pigeons were exposed to multiple variable-interval 2-min variable-interval 2-min schedules of food presentation in which relative duration of food presentation was manipulated. When components alternated every 5 sec and were scheduled on separate response keys, relative response rates closely matched relative reinforcement duration in three of four pigeons. On the other hand, relative response rates were insensitive to relative reinforcement duration when components scheduled on a single response key alternated every 5 sec, and when components scheduled on separate response keys alternated every 2 min. Thus, both rapid alternation and spatial separation of components were necessary to produce approximate matching of relative responding to relative reinforcement duration. This finding contrasts with previous findings that only rapid component alternation is necessary for matching when relative rate of reinforcement is manipulated.     

Object knowledge and the emergence of language

Infants' spontaneous play with objects was examined for evidence of developments in object knowledge in relation to the emergence of words and the single-word period in language development. Subjects were 7 girls and 7 boys, from different ethnic and economic backgrounds, who were studied longitudinally from 9 months to 26 months of age. Two types of displacements of objects in relation to one another were identified in the children's play: separations and constructions. The development of constructions was associated with the emergence of words, and constructions increased with age while separations decreased. The development of specific constructions, which account for knowledge of the particular properties of objects, was more strongly associated with a vocabulary spurt at the end of the single-word period than with chronological age. Despite the wide variation in the infants' ages when developments in language and play were reached, relations between achievements in the two domains were consistent among them, as confirmed with the Friedman test, p<.001. The results are discussed in terms of the cognitive developments required for play with objects and saying words.     

Temporal discrimination and a free-operant psychophysical procedure.

Pigeons were presented a series of keylight time periods (separated by blackouts) during which two response keys were lit, one by blue light and the other either by orange or green. Blue-key responses changed the color on the other key. Orange-key responses sometimes produced food during the first half of a time period; green-key responses sometimes produced food during the second half. In three experiments, the probability of a green-key response increased as a function of elapsed time. Experiment 1 compared performance when the duration of the keylight periods was varied across a wide range. Discrimination of performance was similar across the range of durations. Experiment 2 varied both relative reinforcement rate and the local reinforcement rate for orange-key and green-key responses. These manipulations produced changes in response bias but not discrimination sensitivity. Experiment 3 varied the local temporal placement of reinforcers within time periods and demonstrated that choice behavior was affected by differential reinforcement at different points during the time periods. The results were consistent with previous research on duration discrimination that used psychophysical trials procedures.     

Object decision test (BORB): normative data for the adult Quebec population and performance in Alzheimer’s disease and the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia

Object decision (OD) test is one subtest of the Birmingham Object Recognition Battery (BORB). It is useful for differential diagnosis among several neurodegenerative diseases. However, normative data provided with this battery count on very few subjects and do not control for the effect of age, which limits interpretability. The purpose of Study 1 was to provide normative data for the OD test of the BORB (version A—hard). The objectives of Study 2 were to establish the diagnostic validity of this task and predictive validity of the normative data in the case of the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD).Based on multiple linear regressions, equations to calculate Z-scores corrected for age were provided for 130 participants aged from 47 to 89 years. Performance of 20 healthy participants was compared to that of 14 individuals with svPPA and 18 with AD. After controlling for confounders, participants with svPPA had a lower total score than controls and AD participants. AD participants had a poorer performance than controls only when chimeric objects were considered. Among those with a deficit on the total score of the test, 94% (17/18, including 12 with svPPA) were correctly identified as having a pathological condition (svPPA or AD). This test could help refine differential diagnosis between svPPA and AD patients, especially before the deficits of episodic memory show up.     

Animacy in the adjunction of Spanish RCs to complex NPs

The present paper focuses on the role of animacy in the processing of relative clauses (RCs) after complex NPs. We follow research by the Desmet et al. team on Dutch in exploring the role of animacy in Spanish RCs. We present data from a corpus study and two self-paced experiments and we compare the three studies and the Dutch and Spanish results. Our main objective is to fill important gaps in past research on the processing of adjunction ties in Spanish and to offer a more detailed exploration of grain effects in exposure-based accounts. In particular, we have sought both to analyse the match between corpus studies and online processing in Spanish much more closely than it has been until now and to see whether animacy could revert the well-established tendency of Spanish RCs to attach high inside the complex noun phrase.     

Acquisition of arbitrary conditional discriminations by young normally developing children

Three experiments investigated conditions designed to facilitate acquisition of arbitrary conditional discriminations in 3- to 6-year-old normally developing children. In Experiment 1, 6 subjects failed to master the arbitrary match-to-sample task under conditions of differential reinforcement alone, but 7 subjects did so when instructions or instructions and sample naming were added. In Experiment 2, sample naming introduced in a blocked-trial arrangement resulted in acquisition, but only when the sample name was a nonsense syllable provided by the experimenter (5 of 7 subjects) and not when the sample name was generated by the subject (0 of 5 subjects). Experiment 3 demonstrated the effectiveness of a training sequence involving thematically related stimuli as an intermediate step facilitating the transition from identity to novel arbitrary relations. The difficulties in mastering arbitrary conditional discriminations shown here imply that further analyses with young children will be particularly important in efforts to investigate the development of theoretically important stimulus relations.