Sara S. Sparrow (1933–2010).

Sara S. Sparrow passed away in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 10, 2010. She spent her final days in characteristically good spirits with close friends and her husband, Dominic Cicchetti, by her side. Sara was born on May 9, 1933, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After graduating summa cum laude from Montclair State College in New Jersey in 1958, she began her career as a speech therapist in Orlando, Florida. She continued her studies at the University of Florida, receiving a master’s degree in speech pathology in 1962 and a doctoral degree in clinical psychology and clinical neuropsychology in 1968. Following completion of her doctorate, Sara became a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. Sara’s contributions to science were many, and she was directly responsible for substantially improving the quality of life of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families. Her major professional contribution was transforming the assessment of adaptive behavior with the development of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, the first life-span, norm-referenced measure of adaptive behavior. Sara’s contributions were recognized with numerous awards. Sara was a longstanding and active member of the American Psychological Association (APA) and was deeply invested in the mission and success of APA Division 33 (Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities). Sara was a leader not only in her formal roles and responsibilities but also as a formative social force; she and her husband Dom shared their gifts as connoisseurs of wine, food, and living well with their colleagues and trainees. Sara’s warmth and ability to create a festive environment ensured that her students had the opportunity to meet potential collaborators and to share life as well as work stories. She was a model for her students in her passion and careful investment in her work as well as in her zeal and enjoyment of life. Sara is deeply mourned by her husband, siblings, many friends, and the countless students and colleagues whom she has influenced. A memorial fund has been established at the Yale Child Study Center in her name. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Myrtle B. McGraw (1899–1988).

Myrtle Byram McGraw "...was born in the 19th century, lived in the 20th century, and thought in the 21st century." She was a woman who treated the infants and young children she worked with the same as she would her friends. She came to know her subjects well, and maintained enduring and intense relationships with some. She could become compassionately involved in the struggles of families and the problems of children growing up. Myrtle knew a great deal about transitional struggles, her work with babies serving often as her metaphor of what life, learning, and development are all about. McGraw passed away on McGraw September 8, 1988, in her 89th year. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lucy May Boring (1886–1996).

Notes the death of Lucy May Boring at the age 109. Her brief career as a psychologists is outlined, starting with her contribution, under the name Day, to the American Journal of Psychology in 1912. She gave up her career as a psychologist for family life. The role she has played in the career of her husband, Edwin G. Boring, is highlighted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Betty Horenstein Pickett (1926–2008).

Presents an obituary for Betty Horenstein Pickett who was best known for her long-term service in the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) as an administrator in both the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Described is her educational background as well as the positions she held and achievements throughout her career in government service. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reflections on receiving an award.

Reflecting on the events that culminated in her receiving the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychology as a Professional Practice, Canter, an independent practitioner, discusses the road she traveled to become a clinical psychologist and to become involved in professional organizational activities. She believes that this award was given to her because of her contributions to psychology over her lifetime as an effective and hardworking leader, mentor, and role model in her home state of Arizona and nationally. She addresses some of her ideas about effective leadership and mentoring in the American Psychological Association (APA), providing many examples from which she has learned. Canter also shares some thoughts about APA's position as a leader in the development and enforcement of professional ethics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

McGraw's Need for Denial.

Comments on the letter by M. McGraw ("Need for denial," American Psychologist, 1964, 19, 56), in which McGraw, best known for her developmental study of the twins Johnny and Jimmy, feels it necessary to disparage an early study (McGraw, 1931) of hers dealing with the comparative mental abilities of white and Negro infants. McGraw writes that Otto Klineberg told her recently that the present author had quoted her early and discredited (by her) study as evidence for innate racial differences. The present author states that this is only partly correct. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Obituary: Maud Merrill James (1888-1978).

Maud Merrill James died at her home on the Stanford University campus on January 15, 1978. She was 90, having been born at Owatonna, Minnesota, April 30, 1888. As a child she lived in an orphanage of which her father was director, and her life's work as a professional psychologist was with children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Jane Loevinger (1918-2008).

Jane Loevinger died unexpectedly on January 4, 2008. She was well-known for her work in psychometrics, her theory of ego development, and her widely used assessment instrument, the Washington University Sentence Completion Test. Among the first to focus on women as a demographic, Loevinger obtained funding from the National Institute of Mental Health. She developed measures of women's attitudes and formed a research group of her own that focused on the problems facing mothers and women in general. Loevinger was a perennial iconoclast and skeptic within her fields of interest. Despite her wry wit, or perhaps because of it, her opinions and contributions came to be greatly valued by her colleagues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evelyn Satinoff (1937-2008).

With the death of Evelyn Satinoff, psychology has lost not only a preeminent researcher and teacher but also a real character. As a professor and pioneer in the field of thermoregulation, she could be intimidating; as a friend, she was warm and loving. Evelyn was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 25, 1937. She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1958 and received a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. She then remained there, first as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow and then as a research associate. Much of her early research focused on the neural control of behavioral thermoregulation. More than anyone she is credited with demonstrating that behavioral thermoregulation can be as important in maintaining body temperature as are physiological mechanisms. Evelyn was active in several professional organizations, particularly APA Division 6 (now Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology). She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2006 and after a valiant fight, she lost the battle, dying in her beloved Manhattan on January 29, 2008. Love her or hate her, Evelyn was unforgettable, and the world is poorer for her passing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The functional anatomy of a hysterical paralysis

The concept of a conversion disorder (such as hysterical paralysis) has always been controversial (Ron, M.A. (1996). Somatization and conversion disorders. In: B.S. Fogel, R.B. Schiffer & S.M. Rao (Eds.), Neuropsychiatry. Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore, MD). Although the diagnosis is recognised by current psychiatric taxonomies, many physicians still regard such disorders either as feigned or as failure to find the responsible organic cause for the patient's symptoms. We report a woman with left sided paralysis (and without somatosensory loss) in whom no organic disease or structural lesion could be found. By contrast, psychological trauma was associated with the onset and recurrent exacerbation of her hemiparalysis. We recorded brain activity when the patient prepared to move and tried to move her paralysed (left) leg and when she prepared to move and did move her good (right) leg. Preparing to move or moving her good leg, and also preparing to move her paralysed leg, activated motor and/or premotor areas previously described with movement preparation and execution. The attempt to move the paralysed leg failed to activate right primary motor cortex. Instead, the right orbito-frontal and right anterior cingulate cortex were significantly activated. We suggest that these two areas inhibit prefrontal (willed) effects on the right primary motor cortex when the patient tries to move her left leg.     

Love and sex in 45 minutes: Transference love as self- and mutual regulation.

Patients who express intense, erotic attraction to their analysts pose special treatment challenges that may not respond well to the analyst's interpretive efforts. A detailed case presentation is offered, describing one such patient, who demanded that her analyst convey his interest in her concretely, insisting that he offer her gifts, tell her he loved her, and even engage her sexually. It is argued that such concrete conveyances reflect, in part, the patient's attempt to self- and mutually regulate intense, affect-laden experience. The wish that the analyst demonstrate love for the patient expressed in modulated form her history of deeply painful and frustrated longings, as well as her hope for a different outcome within the treatment relationship. Finally, their spontaneous, shared playfulness evolved into a form of ongoing relatedness that provided the patient significant understanding and acceptance while providing the analyst an appropriate means of responding to the patient's erotic demands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Helene Deutsch: A psychoanalyst's life.

Reviews the book, Helene Deutsch: A psychoanalyst's life by Paul Roazen (see record 1992-97543-000). In this biography of over 391 pages, Paul Roazen describes the life of Helene Deutsch, seen by many historians of psychology as one of Freud's best-known and favourite students and a major contributor to psychoanalysis in her own right. Each of the three sections in the book concentrates on a major episode and station in her life: Poland, Vienna, and finally Massachusetts. Roazen carefully describes Helene's family background, her circle of friends, her romance with Felix Deutsch, and of course her relationship with Freud. The book reads much like a shortened psychoanalysis of Helene Deutsch herself. A good biography should not only describe an individual's contribution to a profession, but also this contribution should become understandable as an outgrowth of the cultural heritage, the Zeitgeist, and the unique life history of the individual. Roazen has clearly succeeded in doing that. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Weaving together dream, image and relationship: Moving from anger, to fear, to love.

Discussed a case study of play and dream work. After a very difficult couple session, a female client used image play and dream work during a follow-up individual session. There, she was able to take responsibility for the harshness of her verbal communication style with her husband and the destructive belief system that guided her marital interactions. By sharing the client's exploratory and self-reflective play process, the therapist demonstrated how the play stimulated the client's innate capacity to examine her destructive approach to marital relationship, allowed her to uncover her actual (new) needs in the relationship, facilitated her capacity to claim anger, judgment, and "monstrous cobra self', and supported her in finding more helpful interactive patterns. As she faced herself in the mirror of her play, she not only found her shadow (problem), but activated her own inner wisdom and knowing, which offered her viable solutions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contemporary opinions about Mary Walker: a shy pioneer of therapeutic neurology

OBJECTIVE: To contribute to a better understanding of a poorly appreciated pioneer of therapeutic neurology, Mary Broadfoot Walker, MD. BACKGROUND: At a time when the treatment of myasthenia gravis (MG) was "a source of discouragement to the patient and a cause of nightmare for the physician," Mary Walker demonstrated that temporary relief of myasthenic symptoms could be produced by subcutaneous injection of physostigmine or neostigmine (Prostigmin; Roche, Basel, Switzerland). She also pioneered the concept of a circulating factor as the etiology of myasthenia and was the first to report hypokalemia in familial periodic paralysis. Throughout her career she was dependent on her salaried jobs as a medical officer in several large London hospitals and was thus forced to turn down an offer of an honorary staff position with research beds. DESIGN/METHODS: Previously unpublished material written by persons who lived at the same time as Mary Walker is incorporated with the published record into an account of Mary Walker's accomplishments as assessed by her contemporaries. RESULTS: 1) Although Mary Walker's 1934 report on physostigmine for MG was ignored by most of those in clinical medicine at the time, those responsible for the financing of British medical research vainly hoped that it could be used as an example of the practical outcome of basic research. 2) Her 1935 demonstration of the beneficial effect of neostigmine (Prostigmin) was greeted with general skepticism because of the rapidity with which the patient's symptoms of myasthenic weakness improved, but she was soon vindicated by published confirmatory reports from several contemporaries. 3) Her 1938 demonstrations of what came to be known as "the Mary Walker effect" may have helped her reputation because subsequent published opinions of her contributions were generally favorable, although some people continue to disparage her even today. CONCLUSION: Mary Walker, with her brief case reports and her frequent demonstrations, not only offered symptomatic treatment for MG that has stood the test of time, but also provided the most convincing evidence at the time that the neuromuscular junction was the focus of the disease.     

Experimenting with experience: A psychotherapeutic case study.

Applied personal construct theory to a 24-yr-old Australian female who was anxiety-ridden to demonstrate some of its advantages as a therapeutic tool. The limited choices available to the client (because of her oversimplified and confused ways of viewing her world) are described, together with her related anxiety, shame, fear, and depression. Implications for the selection and training of therapists are explored. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud versus Adler on dreams.

Comments on the article by L. T. Benjamin, Jr. and D. N. Dixon (see record 83-32709) that describes Freud's attempt to help an American girl named Mary Fields by interpreting her dream in which there was some conflict between Fields and her parents regarding the man with whom she was involved. For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious mind, and they represented a disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish. The authors discuss the Adlerian perspective on dreams which states that the purpose of dreams is to support the lifestyle against the demands of logic or common sense, and sees dreams as an attempt to make a bridge between an individual's lifestyle and present problems. From an Adlerian perspective, Field's dream had a connection with her problem, which was her anxiety over her attraction to and desire to see her friend, and also the possible negative outcome of this dilemma. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-knowledge of an amnesic patient: Toward a neuropsychology of personality and social psychology.

Presents the case of W. J., an 18-yr old female who, as a result of a head injury, temporarily lost access to her episodic memory. W. J. was asked both during her amnesia and following its resolution to make trait judgments about herself. Because her responses when she could access episodic memories were consistent with her responses when she could not, the authors conclude that the loss of episodic memory did not greatly affect the availability of her trait self-knowledge. The authors discuss how neuropsychological evidence can contribute to theorizing about personality and social processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychologist-legislator: Reflection on the first year in office.

As a Massachusetts State Representative, the author describes how being a psychologist affected her campaign and 1st year in office. Her history of past and current political interests in women, education, labor, and human services has contributed to her legislative and political agenda. This article reports how the Massachusetts Psychological Association played a significant role in her campaign and how mental health issues have been her top priority. Serving as a state legislator has integrated her 2 passions: political activism and psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rehousing periadolescent male guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) apart from their mothers for 24 hours increases maternally directed sexual behavior and plasma testosterone.

Periadolescent male guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) housed continuously with their mother displayed little or no sexual behavior when they were tested with her in a novel environment. However, if males were rehoused without their mother for 24 hr before testing, they frequently directed courtship and sexual behavior toward her. This effect occurred whether the mother was isolated or not during the rehousing period. In addition, rehousing without the mother produced a significant rise in the plasma testosterone levels of the males. It appears that continuous housing with the mother inhibits sexual and courtship behavior directed toward her, as well as gonadal activity, in periadolescent male guinea pigs. These effects may serve to prevent inbreeding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)