Cerebral electrotherapeutic treatment of depressions.

30 female and 10 male depressive inpatients at a state hospital participated in 2 studies comparing electrosleep (cerebral electrotherapy) and placebo treatments. In both studies, differences between self-rated improvement associated with cerebral electrotherapy and placebo were not significant. It is concluded that clinical use of cerebral electrotherapy with hospitalized depressives should be tempered by the finding of the present and other studies that cerebral-electrotherapy-related improvement appears to be due in large part to positive expectation or placebo effects. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thematic sexual responses as related to sexual drive and guilt.

The Ss were 66 males. A special set of cards "with a built-in dimension of sexual relevance" was employed. A "direct relationship was found between sexual drive as measured by rate of orgasm, but not by deprivation, and sexual responses. Self-reported guilt and thematic sexual responses were significantly inversely related when deprivation was held constant. A significant interaction was found for deprivation by guilt, but not for rate by guilt, with thematic sexual responses… . Analysis of individual pictures indicated that pictures of relatively low sexual relevance best measured drive, and pictures of relatively high sexual relevance best measured guilt." From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4HJ69L. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A test of the censure-deficit model in schizophrenia, employing the Rodnick-Garmezy visual discrimination task.

This study tested hypotheses derived from the Garmezy and Rodnick censure-deficit theory of schizophrenia. There was no support for the theory with respect to (a) reported child-rearing practices and (b) reactions to cues depicting maternal and paternal dominance. The behavioral findings obtained irrespective of whether the censure was imbedded in the stimulus or combined with verbal censure by the experimenter. This and a series of other disconfirmatory studies are discussed in relation to the validity of the Garmezy and Rodnick formulations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A viscometric study of the interaction of polybutadienyllithium with N,N,N′,N′-tetramethylethylenediamine in benzene

Moderately concentrated solutions of polystyryllithium in benzene were prepared under high vacuum conditions in an Ubbelohde viscometer and the active chain ends were ‘capped’ with a few molecules of butadiene. The flow times of these solutions were determined before and after the addition of small aliquots of N,N,N′,N′-tetramethylethylenediamine (TMEDA) and finally following protonation of the carbanions with a trace of alcohol. The addition of the TMEDA caused a decrease in the viscosity that was slightly greater than that predicted on the basis that two molecules of TMEDA cause the disaggregation of a dimeric polybutadienyllithium associate.     

Productive use of failure in inductive proof

Proof by mathematical induction gives rise to various kinds of eureka steps, e.g., missing lemmata and generalization. Most inductive theorem provers rely upon user intervention in supplying the required eureka steps. In contrast, we present a novel theorem-proving architecture for supporting the automatic discovery of eureka steps. We build upon rippling, a search control heuristic designed for inductive reasoning. We show how the failure if rippling can be used in bridging gaps in the search for inductive proofs. The research reported in this paper was supported by EPSRC grant GR/J/80702 and ARC grant 438.     

Occlusions and binocular stereo

Binocular stereo is the process of obtaining depth information from a pair of cameras. In the past, stereo algorithms have had problems at occlusions and have tended to fail there (though sometimes post-processing has been added to mitigate the worst effects). We show that, on the contrary, occlusions can help stereo computation by providing cues for depth discontinuities.We describe a theory for stereo based on the Bayesian approach, using adaptive windows and a prior weak smoothness constraint, which incorporates occlusion. Our model assumes that a disparity discontinuity, along the epipolar line, in one eyealways corresponds to an occluded region in the other eye thus, leading to anocclusion constraint. This constraint restricts the space of possible disparity values, thereby simplifying the computations. An estimation of the disparity at occluded features is also discussed in light of psychophysical experiments. Using dynamic programming we can find the optimal solution to our system and the experimental results are good and support the assumptions made by the model.     

Pseudohomophone effects and models of word recognition.

Two experiments examined factors that influence processing of pseudohomophones (nonwords such as brane or joak, which sound like words) and nonpseudohomophones (such as brone or joap, which do not sound like words). In Experiment 1, pseudohomophones yielded faster naming latencies and slower lexical-decision latencies than did nonpseudohomophones, replicating results of R. S. McCann and D. Besner (1987) and R. S. McCann, D. Besner, and E. Davelaar (1988). The magnitude of effect was related to subjects' speed in lexical decision but not naming. In Experiment 2, both immediate and delayed naming conditions were used. There was again a significant pseudohomophone effect that did not change in magnitude across conditions. These results indicate that pseudohomophone effects in the lexical-decision and naming tasks have different bases. In lexical decision, they reflect the pseudohomophone's activation of phonological and semantic information associated with words. In naming, they reflect differences in ease of articulating familiar versus unfamiliar pronunciations. Implications of these results concerning models of word recognition are discussed… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)