Changes in Academic Performance in the Junior High School

This study was designed to determine the relationships between changes in academic performance and intellective and non-intellective factors. Seventh grade students attending five junior high schools, who had attended selected elementary schools, were tested with the Personal Values Inventory (PVI), a test of academic motivation, shortly after the first seventh-grade marking period. School marks at that marking period and those received the previous year were procured from a self-report included in the PVI. All students had taken the California Achievement Test Battery and Mental Maturity Test as well as the Scholastic Testing Service Work-Study Skills Test in the sixth grade. Factor analysis identified four factors in both boys and girls: intelligence-achievement, academic motivation, academic plans, and youth-culture involvement. While intelligence was found to be mainly unrelated to the criterion, the non-intellective factors, especially academic motivation, bore significant relationships to the changed performance.     

Does the right hemisphere take over after damage to Broca's area? the Barlow case of 1877 and its history

In 1877 Thomas Barlow, a London physician, published a remarkable case of functional recovery of speech following brain damage. It involved a 10-year-old boy who had lost his speech, regained it, and lost it again before he died from a disorder that affected his heart and produced embolisms that subsequently affected other organs, including his brain. Examination of the boy's brain revealed two focal regions of softening; one that affected Broca's area and the left facial-motor area, and another, which occurred weeks later, in the homologous regions of the right hemisphere. Although Barlow was most concerned with motor deficits, others at the turn of the century began to cite this case as strong evidence that the corresponding region of the right hemisphere can take over speech functions for Broca's area on the left. Whether this case really provides good support for functional takeover or vicariation theory is critically evaluated in the light of contemporary research, including PET scan studies involving damage to Broca's speech region.     

Does Gustave Dax deserve to be forgotten? The temporal lobe theory and other contributions of an overlooked figure in the history of language and cerebral dominance.

Gustave Dax played an important role in the early history of cerebral dominance for language. He not only sent the 1836 memoir of Marc Dax, his deceased father, to Paris in 1863, but saw to it that this important document was published before Paul Broca's own article on cerebral dominance appeared later in 1865. In addition, he supported his father's contention that the left hemisphere is special for speech with 140 additional clinical cases. Gustave Dax's own unique contribution, however, has been almost completely overlooked. Although his theory lacked specificity, he preceded Meynert, Schmidt, and Wernicke in suggesting that the left temporal lobe may be especially important for speech.     

Using item response theory to understand comorbidity among anxiety and unipolar mood disorders

The authors hypothesized that anxiety and unipolar mood disorders are often comorbid because each disorder indicates a broad, higher order factor. In a clinical subsample of the nationally representative National Comorbidity Survey participants (N = 251), a one-factor model fit the correlations among 7 dichotomous anxiety and unipolar mood diagnoses. Following the lead provided by literature on the structure of emotional and behavioral problems in children, we labeled this factor internalizing. Item response theory was used to explore how each diagnosis mapped onto the internalizing factor. The test information function derived from the 7 diagnoses suggested that they measure primarily the higher end of the factor. In addition, very high scores on internalizing (meeting criteria for 6-7 disorders) were associated with increased social costs, a phenomenon not well captured by the "comorbidity" concept. The results underscore the need to develop clinical assessment instruments that span the full range of the internalizing factor and measure both the shared and distinctive features of anxiety and unipolar mood disorders in a graded, continuous fashion.     

Benjamin Franklin and shock-induced amnesia

Shock-induced amnesia received considerable attention after Cerletti popularized electroconvulsive shock therapy in the late 1930s. Yet, often overlooked is the fact that Benjamin Franklin recognized that passing electricity through the head could affect memory for the traumatic event. Franklin described his findings on himself and others in several letters from the mid-1700s, 2 of which were published in his lifetime. What he observed was confirmed in 1783 by physician Jan Ingenhousz, who was one of his correspondents. Although Ingenhousz had lost his memory for his electrical accident and was confused immediately afterward, he felt strangely elated and unusually sharp the next morning. Hence, he called for clinical trials with patients with melancholia who were not responding to more conventional therapies. After Franklin received Ingenhousz's letter, he also called for clinical trials. Neither man, however, tied the possible new cure for melancholia to the memory loss--nor did the operators that began to treat some patients with melancholia successfully with cranial shocks. Only much later would the amnesia be thought to be associated with the cure.