Interactional group therapy for anorexic and bulimic women.

Describes interactional group therapy for anorexic and bulimic women, as it was used for 12 groups (with 4–8 Ss each) conducted over 4.5 yrs. Bulimics and anorexics were combined because it is believed that the 2 types of eating-disordered patients have much that they can learn from each other. Group themes particularly relevant to eating-disordered women are discussed, including confidentiality, sexuality, commonalities between the 2 types, and transference. Stages in the evolution of the group and strategies for facilitating group process are reviewed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Negative outcome in psychotherapy and what to do about it.

Reviews the book, Negative outcome in psychotherapy and what to do about it edited by Daniel T. Mays and Cyril M. Franks (1985). Negative outcome in psychotherapy is a topic of great importance to the field. The treatment of this topic by Mays and Franks is a comprehensive and ambitious one. Their goals, as outlined in the Introduction, are to 1) generate a definition of negative outcome, 2) bring some preliminary closure to the negative outcome debate, 3) identify contributing variables and 4) offer suggestions for research and treatment application. They proceed to do this through an edited volume, consisting of 14 chapters, which fall into six sections and an Appendix. Of the goals that the editors set for themselves in the Introduction, the most important one, to this reviewer's mind, was not even mentioned--that is, the development of a theoretical framework from which future research can develop. It is this synthesis that makes the book particularly valuable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Factors influencing cortisol and behavioral responses to maternal separation in guinea pigs.

Infant guinea pigs recently were found to respond to brief maternal separation with an increase in plasma cortisol (COR) levels. The present experiments were conducted to further characterize this response and compare it with the COR separation response previously observed in primates. In Exp 1, separation of guinea pig pups from their mothers did not elevate the plasma COR levels of the pups at either 30 or 180 min when they remained alone in their home cages during the separation. Exp 2 showed that COR levels of pups placed alone in a novel cage were greater at 30, 90, and 180 min than were those of pups placed in the cages together with their mothers. In contrast, the separated pups vocalized more than did pups tested with their mothers during the initial 30 min only. In Exp 3, pups raised on inanimate surrogates responded less intensely to rearing-figure separation in terms of COR and vocalizations than did mother-reared controls. Results indicate differences (response to home cage separation) and similarities (dissociation of COR and vocalization responses, effect of surrogate separation) in the separation responses of guinea pig and primate infants. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word associations in old age: Evidence for consistency in semantic encoding during adulthood.

Word associations of 80 young (aged 17–33 yrs) and 80 older (aged 62–87 yrs) adults were compared for 113 stimulus words. Results indicate that the proportion of paradigmatic responses varied with the grammatical class of the stimulus word and with the vocabulary level of the S, but not with age. The same proportion of young and older Ss gave the most common responses. Although older Ss had a greater number of unique responses, this seemed to reflect age differences in vocabulary level, as vocabulary but not age was a good predictor. Within-S variability was also comparable across age, as on a retest young and older Ss gave the same proportion of responses that were identical to those on the original test. Both age groups were more likely to repeat common than uncommon responses on the retest. It is concluded that this, together with analyses of response latency, suggests equivalent use of strategic processes across age. The results indicate that semantic structure and semantic encoding in adults are related to verbal ability, but not to age. (49 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differential effects of aging and Alzheimer's disease on conceptual implicit and explicit memory.

The effects of aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) on conceptual explicit and implicit memory were examined. Three groups of participants patients with AD; age-matched, older control participants; and younger control participants made deep (semantic) or shallow (nonsemantic) judgments about low-dominant category exemplars. Explicit memory was measured by category cued recall and implicit memory was measured by priming on a category-exemplar generation task. Younger participants had enhanced cued recall and priming following deep, relative to shallow, encoding; this indicated that both memory measures were conceptually driven. Aging reduced explicit, but not implicit, test performance, and it did not reduce conceptually driven processes for either test. In contrast, AD reduced explicit and implicit test performance, and it impaired conceptually driven memory processes for both tests. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Shuttle-box memory facilitation by posttraining intracranial self-stimulation: Differential effects in rats with high and low basic conditioning levels.

The effects of intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS) on retention (after 24 hr, 7, 15, or 60 days) of a massed 2-way active avoidance task were studied in independent groups of rats. All groups showed a higher performance on the retention session than on the acquisition one. In the control subjects. the higher retention performances were observed in the 7- and 15-day groups. However, the ICSS treatment facilitated the 24-hr retention compared with its control group, allowing the treated subjects to achieve the same level of performance on the 24-hr retention session than that achieved by the control rats at the 7-day retention test. In the 24-hr groups, the facilitatory ICSS effect was stronger in the subjects with a low level of conditioning and weaker in those with a high level. Results suggest that posttraining ICSS accelerates memory consolidation and equalizes the performance of poor and good learners. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Impairment in shifting attention in autistic and cerebellar patients.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and autopsy evidence of early maldevelopment of cerebellar vermis and hemispheres in autism raises the question of how cerebellar maldevelopment contributes to the cognitive and social deficits characteristic of autism. Compared with 18 normal controls, 8 autistic patients (mean age 13.9 yrs) and 6 patients (mean age 8.6 yrs) with acquired cerebellar lesions were similarly impaired in a task requiring rapid and accurate shifts of attention between auditory and visual stimuli. Neurophysiologic and behavioral evidence rules out motor dysfunction as the cause of this deficit. These findings are consistent with the proposal that in autism cerebellar maldevelopment may contribute to an inability to execute rapid attention shifts, which in turn undermines social and cognitive development. Findings support the proposal that the human cerebellum is involved in the coordination of rapid attention shifts in a fashion analogous to its role in the coordination of movement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automation in urinalysis: evaluation of three urine test strip analysers

A clinical laboratory evaluation was conducted on the Clinitek Auto 2000, the Super Aution Analyzer and the Urotron RL9 for the determination of glucose, protein, pH, blood, ketone-bodies and bilirubin.Precision of the systems was tested using three commercial control urine materials, and reported as the percentage of times the instrument repeats a certain value. Good repeatability was obtained with all the instruments.Accuracy of the systems was evaluated by comparison with quantitative procedures, and to check agreement between methods yielding semi-quantitative and quantitative results, ranges of acceptability were defined, based on the criteria reported in a previous paper [2]. It was then found that 87.5 to 98.9% of results from the Urotron RL9 and the Clinitek Auto 2000 were acceptable. With the Super Aution Analyzer the level of agreement was apparently lower because of the higher number of concentration steps used by this instrument.     

Correspondence between neuropsychological and functional ratings of perceptual neglect.

Examined perceptual neglect in 59 stroke patients (mean age 61.9 yrs) as described by neuropsychological assessment (NP) and by occupational therapists' (OT) functional assessment. Results indicate that NP and OT raters agreed on the presence of neglect in the majority (73–80%) of cases, depending on the scale definitons used. In the remaining cases, most discrepancies existed between ratings of no vs mild neglect. At times, neuropsychological assessment both over- and underestimated the degree of neglect cited by OT raters as functional perceptual impairment due to sources of possible error or bias. The need for and value of efforts to describe the neuropsychological impairments associated with observed functional deficits are highlighted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The issue of negative evidence: Adult responses to children's language errors.

This study was designed to assess one of the major assumptions of current language learning theories: Adults ignore children's speech errors. We observed both parents (n?=?16) and nonparent adults (n?=?13) conversing with children and examined the conversations for evidence of adults' differential responding to the children's syntactic, phonological, and semantic errors. Results indicated that adults were more likely to repeat verbatim a well-formed sentence than an ill-formed sentence. In contrast, adults were more likely to repeat with changes, or request clarification of, a sentence containing syntactic or phonological errors than well-formed sentences. Adults also more frequently used the correct syntactic or phonological form in the immediately subsequent sentence if the child's preceding sentence contained only one syntactic or phonological error rather than multiple errors. Overall, the results indicate that all adults tend to respond differentially to children's language mistakes, with parents showing greater sensitivity than adults who are not parents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)