Gestural impairment and gestural ability in aphasia: A review

Studies of gestural ability in aphasic subjects have found impairment of gestural expression and comprehension, with a close relationship between severity of aphasia and degree of gestural impairment. A few investigators have correlated gestural ability with specific language functions or subcategories of aphasia. Reading appears to correlate better with gestural recognition than does auditory comprehension. Despite the general findings of gestural impairment in aphasia, successes have been reported with gestural training including artificial language techniques, pantomime, Amerind, and American Sign Language. Future studies of gestural therapy in aphasia should examine specific language deficits in order to identify those aphasic individuals who can benefit from gestural training.     

Use of a statistical significance criterion in drawing inferences about hemispheric dominance for language function from dichotic listening data

A dichotic listening test (composed of VCV nonsense syllables) was administered to 31 right-handed subjects. A χ² statistical significance criterion was then applied to the resulting ear differences in subjects. Fifteen subjects had ear differences significant at the p < .10 levels. Of these, 14 had right-ear advantages, an incidence consistent with the incidence of left-hemisphere language dominance derived from neurological data. Incidence for the total group of 31 subjects, however, showed the overabundance of left-ear-superior protocols typical of studies that report ear-dominance scores with no statistical criterion.     

Effects of positive and negative adult-child interactions on children's task performance and task preferences

In individual sessions, an adult directed three boys to work on each of three different tasks. Within a given session the on-task behavior for one task was praised, the off-task behavior for another task was verbally reprimanded, and all behavior was ignored with the third task. Using a multielement baseline design, the manner in which the adult interacted with the children on a given task varied from day to day. Across 18 sessions, verbal reprimands produced the highest task rates, with praise producing only a slightly higher rate of responding than noninteraction. After each session the children were given the choice of which of the three tasks they wished to work on when the adult left the room for a few minutes. Tasks associated with verbal reprimands of off-task behavior were never chosen. The first and second choices were always the task associated with praise for on-task behavior or the task where the children were ignored. These preferences generalized to similar tasks.     

Comparison of social time-out and activity time-out procedures in suppressing ethanol self-administration in alcoholics

The experiments compared the potencies of three different contingent time-out procedures for suppressing drinking in alcoholics, and also compared two different experimental methodologies for conducting such studies. In a residential research ward setting fourteen volunteer chronic alcoholics were given daily access to 17 alcoholic drinks provided that a minimum of 40 min elapsed between receiving successive drinks. Each drink contained 1 oz 95-proof ethanol in orange juice. During the baseline condition subjects were free to drink with no behavioral restrictions. However during the time-out conditions, specific behavioral restrictions were imposed on the subjects for the 40-min period following receipt of each drink. The results showed that Social time-out suppressed drinking to 71 per cent of baseline conditions, while Activity time-out and the combined Social and Activity time-out suppressed intake to 36 and 24 per cent, respectively. The study also demonstrated that similar experimental results were obtained when subjects were continuously exposed to the experimental conditions for a number of consecutive days. or intermittently exposed to different conditions in a mixed order over successive days.     

Ear asymmetries on a selective attentional task

To ascertain whether there are ear-hemisphere asymmetries of selective attention, signal stimuli (tonal sequences) were presented monaurally with and without complex maskers (music and speech). The right ear-left hemisphere was more disrupted by language maskers; the left ear-right hemisphere was more disrupted by music maskers. These results suggest that there are hemispheric asymmetries of selective attention and that the ear hemisphere that usually processes a class of stimuli has greater difficulty filtering out those stimuli than does the nonspecialized hemisphere.     

Hemispheric asymmetries in human infants: Spectral analysis of flash and click evoked potentials

Evoked potentials of 16 human infants (mean age = 5.0 weeks, SD = 1.8 weeks) were recorded from the left and right, occipital and temporal areas. Spectral analysis showed a high amplitude, localized, coherent center of activity within the left temporal area for click stimuli, and a high amplitude, localized center of activity in the right occipital area for flash stimuli. It was proposed that the structured auditory information of the click and the unstructured visual information of the flash represented different degrees of familiarity to the subjects. With this hypothesis, left hemisphere involvement in stimulus processing would increase as the stimulus became more referrable to previous long- or short-term experience. Conversely, right hemisphere involvement would increase with unfamiliar stimuli which could not be readily associated with earlier data.     

The Unreal Child1

Unrepresented mental states lead to an impaired ability to feel emotions and trust in oneself, one’s history and in the world. The article explores the question of how representations of oneself and the relevant other, the mother, become possible in the course of therapy when dissociative processes previously made this impossible, and what role unconscious communication plays in the analytic realm. This question will be explored by examining the theories of André Green, Philip Bromberg, and Howard Levine.