Ideal-self Responding on the MMPI

The MMPI was administered to 29 college students under standard and ideal-self instructions in order to determine whether or not there is agreement as to what constitutes favorable adjustment. A profile analysis of the ideal-self responses yielding an intraclass correlation of .62 (p < .001). This result substantiates previous studies suggesting that an identifiable profile exists. Items changed between the self and ideal administrations were analyzed for their social favorability, interpretive ambiguity, obviousness, and scale membership. The first three factors were found to significantly influence responding under the ideal-self set. Implications of such item changes and of ideal-self profile were discussed.     

Parkinson’s disease disrupts both automatic and controlled processing of action verbs

The problem of how word meaning is processed in the brain has been a topic of intense investigation in cognitive neuroscience. While considerable correlational evidence exists for the involvement of sensory-motor systems in conceptual processing, it is still unclear whether they play a causal role. We investigated this issue by comparing the performance of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) with that of age-matched controls when processing action and abstract verbs. To examine the effects of task demands, we used tasks in which semantic demands were either implicit (lexical decision and priming) or explicit (semantic similarity judgment). In both tasks, PD patients’ performance was selectively impaired for action verbs (relative to controls), indicating that the motor system plays a more central role in the processing of action verbs than in the processing of abstract verbs. These results argue for a causal role of sensory-motor systems in semantic processing.