ILLUSTRATING FEMINIST THEORY

Feminist theory holds that many of the pathological behaviors observed in patients result from their position in the social hierarchy. The goals of the demonstration detailed in this article are to show the impact of current gender roles on the psychological well-being of women and men and to generate understanding and discussion of the problems that relative status can create in the therapeutic relationship. This teaching demonstration draws parallels between the Zimbardo (1971) prison experiment and the impact that assignment to low-and high-power roles can have on the psychological health of women and men. Students are asked to rate men and women on some of the diagnostic criteria that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) associates with Axis I and II diagnoses. The students watch a video of Zimbardo's prison study and then rate the prisoners and guards. This demonstration provides another explanation for gender patterns in psychopathology by demonstrating that psychologically healthy White males will develop different patterns of psychopathology depending on whether they are placed in a dominant or subordinate role. When placed in the subordinate role, they exhibit behaviors typically seen in women clients; when placed in a dominant role they exhibit behaviors commonly associated with male clients. This exercise demonstrates the unhealthy nature of the gender roles for both women and men.     

Word-finding abilities of three types of aphasic subjects

Word-finding difficulties are often observed among different types of aphasic patients. This investigation analyzed the word-finding abilities of 30 aphasic subjects (10 Broca's, 10 Wernicke's, and 10 anomic). Forty nouns counterbalanced according to word length and frequency of occurrence in English language usage were used as stimuli and presented through four modalities (oral expression, writing, auditory comprehension, and reading comprehension). It was expected that patterns of word finding abilities would help in the classification of the different types of aphasia. In addition, long words and less frequently occurring words in English language usage should prove more difficult in word-finding ability, regardless of modality. The results of this study found long words and less frequent words were more difficult for aphasic subjects. Among the modalities, long words were significantly harder than short words for the writing modality only. It was also found that semantic errors were the most common errors for all types of aphasic subjects. Broca's subjects produced significantly moreno response errors in oral expression; Wernicke's subjects produced significantly more semantic and phonemic errors in reading comprehension; and, Wernicke's subjects produced significantly more unrelated errors in both oral expression and reading comprehension. Clinical implications were also discussed.The present study was based on a doctoral dissertation completed at the City University of New York in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences by the first author under the direction of the second author. The authors wish to thank Dr. Louis J. Gerstman for his assistance with the statistical analysis of this research and Dr. Robert Goldfarb for all his helpful suggestions and editorial comments.     

Semantic facilitation and translation priming effects in Chinese-English bilinguals

In two experiments, semantic facilitation and translation priming effects in Chinese-English bilingual speakers were demonstrated with a lexical decision task. A 300-msec stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) was used between display of the prime and the target item. Experiment 1 showed that subjects' lexical decision responses were facilitated to a greater extent when primed by a translation equivalent than a semantically related between-language word. In Experiment 2, we found that pictorial, between-language, and within-language primes produced comparable effects of semantic facilitation. These results are in line with the hypothesis that lexical items in different languages and pictures are processed by means of an amodal conceptual system.