Whole words and decoding for short-term learning: comparisons on a "talking-computer" system.

Low-and average-ability readers in first and second grade studied a list of 36 words using a "talking-computer" system. The system highlighted and simultaneously pronounced orthographic units in the words when the children touched the words with a light pen. During two training sessions, the computer presented four groups of 9 words each, one group as whole words, one in syllabic units, one in subsyllabic units, and one as single grapheme-phoneme units. All children learned the least words with single grapheme-phoneme units, having had the greatest difficulty blending the units into words during training. The other presentation units did not differ significantly from each other for most students on post-testing. However, the low first-grade readers learned fewer words segmented and presented by subsyllables than by syllable or word units, but only for multisyllabic words. Monosyllabic words were blended and learned as easily with onset-rime segmentation as with whole word units, for all children.     

Psychosocial risk factors, natural immunity, and cancer progression: Implications for intervention

One of the more important and emerging fields in which psychologists collaborate with other disciplines is psychoimmunology. Centuries of clinical anecdote and decades of psychosomatic hypotheses have gained credibility in the eyes of the medical establishment—and many patients—by the systematic investigation of mechanisms potentially explaining how events intrapsychic and interpersonal could affect physical disease processes. The central nervous system is connected with the immune system by both neuronal and endocrinological pathways. The immune system has been found to mediate the organism’s response to aberrations of its own normal functions, as well as to invading organisms from without. AIDS, arthritis, asthma, lupus, and herpes are some of the illnesses in which research is demonstrating important relationships among psychosocial and immunological factors and disease course. In this article, we first discuss the immunological apparatus in order to provide a base for subsequent discussions of the effects of stress on immune function. Then we discuss malignant diseases and current evidence that disease course is related to both psychosocial stressors and immune function. We next discuss a model of these interactions, and finally we talk about interventions incorporating psychosocial factors aimed at influencing immune status and, thus, disease course.     

Beyond the Apophatic Circle: Rethinking the Debate Between Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida

This study offers a new perspective on the much-discussed debate between French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion and postructuralist theorist Jacques Derrida on the question of ‘negative theology’ and the Christian mystical tradition. It argues that Marion's critique of Derrida betrays a fundamental misunderstanding, specifically, that it fails to recognise that Derrida is not interested in negative theology qua theology, but rather as a discursive practice with certain resources for the performative ‘unsaying’ of logocentric systems. It continues to show that Derrida's principal object is not the God of apophatic theology, but the broader, juridico-political implications of all ‘transcendental signifieds’. Finally, it suggests that Marion's oversight of these facts in his defence of the apophatic tradition unwittingly legitimates Derrida's critique, to the extent that it insulates the Christian tradition from external criticism, and thereby limits the responsiveness of that tradition to the demands of justice.     

Adult age comparisons in the processing of event frequency information

The usual superiority in frequency-of-occurrence judgments of younger vs. older subjects was hypothesized to result from greater strategic encoding of the materials conveying frequency information. A subject-paced, visual search task was designed to control nontarget word encoding. Relative frequency judgments for the nontarget word pairs were equally accurate for younger and older subjects, and performance of both groups was above chance. Results suggest that strategic cover-task encoding can induce age differences in incidental frequency processing. Consistent with a nonoptimal as opposed to an optimal view, automatic processes require only minimal capacity for above-chance performance, but additional strategic resources can increase performance. When such additional resources are used more by younger than by older subjects, the former are better in frequency performance.     

Subsyllabic units in computerized reading instruction: onset-rime vs. postvowel segmentation

Previous studies suggest that adults and children divide spoken syllables into subsyllabic onset-rime units more readily than into any other kind of subsyllabic unit. We asked whether this same onset-rime segmentation might also be beneficial in teaching children to read. That is, can children learn more words segmented at the onset-rime boundary (e.g., CL-AP, D-ISH) than words segmented after the vowel (CLA-P, DI-SH)? In three experiments, first-grade students studied single words presented by a computer connected to a high-quality speech synthesizer. Experiment 1 used words of four letters but only three phonemes apiece (e.g., WHIP, DISH). In some of these words the onset-rime segmentation corresponded to the initial bigram (e.g., WH-IP); in some it did not (e.g., D-ISH). Experiments 2 and 3 used words of four letters and four phonemes (e.g., CLAP, CORN). In all three experiments, onset-rime segmentation proved more helpful than postvowel segmentation in short-term learning of the words.     

Personality disorder correspondence between the million behavioral health inventory (MBHI) and the minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI)

The MBHI and MMPI personality disorder scales were analyzed for convergent and discriminant validity. Correlational data demonstrated that six of the eight scales were significantly related, while the remaining two scales approached significance. Further analyses of these data, however, demonstrated that none of the scales correlated significantly better with its convergent scale compared to nonconvergent scales. The MBHI classified significantly more of the sample as personality disordered (93%) compared to the MMPI personality disorder scales (17%). Furthermore, the MBHI tended to describe the sample as falling within the Anxious cluster of personality disorders, whereas the MMPI described them within the Dramatic cluster. Single scale codetype correspondence was found to be 15%, while two-point concordance was 12.5%, indicating very low congruence between personality style codetypes. These two measures do not appear to be measuring the same personality style constructs.     

Diagnosing posttraumatic stress disorder with the MMPI clinical scales: A review of the literature

A review of the literature resulted in 21 published studies that reported mean MMPI profile patterns for PTSD patients. Of these, six (29%) reported that the mean 8-2 profile pattern significantly differentiated PTSD patients from non-PTSD patients. The majority of studies found additional PTSD profile patterns reflecting nearly all of the MMPI clinical scales. The data indicate some common group profile patterns for inpatient veterans, prisoner's of war, and inpatient veteran substance abusers. The results also support the hypothesis that there is a continuum from inpatient to outpatient and veteran to civilian populations that corresponds with both symptom and stressor severity. It is concluded that although there is some typicality in similar populations, clinicians should expect heterogeneous MMPI profiles from PTSD patients representing a diversity of clinical symptoms and styles.