The role of neuropsychology in the assessment and treatment of persons with epilepsy.

Several areas of current interest in the neuropsychology of epilepsy are briefly reviewed in this article. These include variables pertaining to seizures, seizure history, antiepileptic drugs, and methods of neuropsychological evaluation. It is apparent that epilepsy is a multifaceted area: Psychologists not only can be of great assistance to patients with this condition, but may also learn a great deal from this complex disorder.     

THE FATHER,THE FATHER FUNCTION,THE FATHER PRINCIPLE: SOME CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYTIC DEVELOPMENTS

The author discusses Freud's thinking on the role of the father, as well as that of later French theoreticians. To illustrate his remarks, he draws on the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1912–1987), a Brazilian poet whose work often dealt with themes of the father, the family, and his own paternal relationship. The author also discusses the psychic formation of the father principle and how this may be evident in the clinical analytic setting, even when the analyst's approach privileges field theory, intersubjectivity, or other concepts emphasizing the relationship between analyst and patient.     

Depressive Cognition: A Test of Depressive Realism Versus Negativity Using General Knowledge Questions

This research is an examination of whether cognition in depressed individuals incorporates a realistic view of the world or a general tendency toward negativity. Participants provided two types of probability judgments of the likelihood that they correctly answered general knowledge questions: the probability that they correctly answered each of the individual questions and an aggregate judgment, after completing the questionnaire, of the percentage of all the questions they thought they had correctly answered. These tasks generally elicit overconfidence and accuracy in nondepressives. In accord with theories of both depressive realism and general negativity, in their item-by-item assessments of their answers to the individual questions, depressed participants demonstrated less overconfidence than nondepressed participants. In accord with the theory of general negativity but not with the theory of depressive realism, however, depressed participants demonstrated underconfidence in their aggregate judgments. The implications of these findings on theories of depressive cognition are discussed.     

Incidence and doubtful significance of nonstandard orientations in reproduction of the key from the Aphasia Screening Test

Nonstandard key orientations (reversed, vertical, diagonal, indeterminant) were studied for 138 normal control subjects and in 1,235 patients obtained from three sources. Keys in nonstandard orientations were slightly but not significantly more frequent in the patient groups. The vast majority of nonstandard keys were reversed. Comparisons with persons having normal key orientations on biodata, neuropsychological, intellectual, and personality variables gave negative results. Retesting a portion of the sample showed that the tendency to reproduce the key in irregular orientations was consistent over time in only about half the cases. In contrast to occasional reports in the literature, it appears that nonstandard orientations in the drawing of the key in the Aphasia Screening Test are infrequent, somewhat inconsistent in appearance, and likely of little or no demonstrable clinical significance.     

Preventing Contagion With Avian Influenza: Disease Salience,Attitudes Toward Foreigners,and Avoidance Beliefs1

Building on an evolutionary approach to out‐group avoidance, this study showed relations between perceived disease salience and beliefs in the efficacy of avoiding foreigners as protective measures in the context of a real‐life pandemic risk; i.e., avian influenza. People for whom avian influenza was salient and who held unfavorable attitudes toward foreigners were more likely to believe that avoiding contact with foreigners protects against infection. This finding suggests that individual differences in social attitudes moderate evolved mechanisms relating threat of disease to out‐group avoidance.     

Psychodynamic assessment of changes in children with autism under psychoanalytic treatment

In this article the authors report insights into autism developed through their extensive experience of psychoanalytic therapy with children with autism. The fi rst stages of body psychic development are seriously disrupted by this pathology, resulting in primitive anxieties of falling and of being liquefi ed. These anxieties are connected to the fragile development of body ego and of its related spatiotemporal organisation. The changes in children observed by the authors during the therapeutic process lead them to offer a psychodynamic assessment tool, which revolves principally around the development of body ego. After the initial state of 'severe autism', the authors describe three stages: the stage of 'recovery of the skin' (Bick); the established 'symbiotic phase', subdivided into 'vertical then horizontal splitting of the body ego'; and fi nally the stage of 'individuation'. First, the authors describe the principal psychoanalytic approaches to autism and refl ect on the links possible with nonpsychoanalytic work.     

Depressive cognition: a test of depressive realism versus negativity using general knowledge questions

This research is an examination of whether cognition in depressed individuals incorporates a realistic view of the world or a general tendency toward negativity. Participants provided two types of probability judgments of the likelihood that they correctly answered general knowledge questions: the probability that they correctly answered each of the individual questions and an aggregate judgment, after completing the questionnaire, of the percentage of all the questions they thought they had correctly answered. These tasks generally elicit overconfidence and accuracy in nondepressives. In accord with theories of both depressive realism and general negativity, in their item-by-item assessments of their answers to the individual questions, depressed participants demonstrated less overconfidence than nondepressed participants. In accord with the theory of general negativity but not with the theory of depressive realism, however, depressed participants demonstrated underconfidence in their aggregate judgments. The implications of these findings on theories of depressive cognition are discussed.