Calvin P. Garbin

Cognitive abnormalities in schizophrenic patients and schizotypal college students.

Twenty schizotypal college students, identified by the MMPI-168, were compared with 127 institutionalized or postinstitutional psychiatric patients with chronic schizophrenia, 140 normal control subjects, and 19 students with nonschizotypal MMPI elevations. The comparison measures were indices of cognition derived from COGLAB, a multiparadigmatic cognitive test battery. COGLAB includes measures of preattentional, attentional, conceptual, and psychomotor performance. As expected, the patients were deficient on all but one of the measures. The nonschizotypic elevation group was not different from the normal control group. Schizotypal subjects were found to have deficits in three areas of information processing: preattentional processing, response biasing, and concept attainment and manipulation. However, their performance was just as good as and less variable than that of normal subjects on psychomotor and attentional tasks. The results do not support the hypothesis that schizotypy is characterized by pervasive cognitive deficits which are simply less severe than those of other psychiatric groups. Rather, there are discrete deficits in specific areas and possibly compensatory abnormalities associated with primary deficits. The results are further discussed with regard to the hypothesis that schizotypy shares a common neurophysiological and/or developmental substrate with more severe psychiatric disorders.

A Confirmatory Factoring of the Self-Consciousness Scale

Fenigstein, Scheier, and Buss (1975) developed a three subscale inventory designed to measure self-consciousness. Burnkrant and Page (1984) used confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate the scale and concluded that five items did not belong to their assigned scales and that one of the original subscales really measured two separable traits. Burnkrant and Pages conclusions may simply reflect incidental properties of the item statistics and could weaken the scale if adopted. Fenigstein et al.s representation fits the data quite well in its original form. However, items on their social anxiety scale also tend to evoke relatively large variability over subjects and items on their public self-consciousness scale tend to evoke relatively little variability. In other words, items on their subscales differ nearly as much statistically as they do substantively.

Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse: An Analysis of Coping Mechanisms Used for Stressful Childhood Memories and Current Stressors

Coping mechanisms used to deal with stressful childhood memories and current stressors were assessed for 196 women in each of 4 groups: no abuse history, sexual abuse history, physical abuse history, and both sexual and physical abuse history. Current psychological adjustment was also examined. Discriminant function analyses revealed a variety of significant differences between the groups in use of strategies for coping with memories of abuse or another childhood stressor. There was no relationship between childhood history of abuse and the manner in which women coped with a current stressor. Women with an abuse history reported significantly poorer adult adjustment than did nonabused women, and different coping strategies were predictive of adjustment for abused and nonabused women.

Creativity and Perception

Informal thought about the nature of mental operations important to creative human behavior suggests that perceptual processes are of considerable importance. The ability to “see relationships among elements” is an attribution commonly made toward authors of major scientific discoveries or of noteworthy artistic achievements. For example, Shepard (1978, 1981) documented self-reports from several creative scientists and authors that strongly emphasize the role of visual imagery and the manipulation of visual codes in the creative process.

Visual and haptic perception of three-dimensional solid forms

Subjects sorted 24 solid forms into groups on the basis of perceived similarity of shape, and rated each on a series of physical attributes under either visual or haptic conditions. Multidimensional scaling analyses within each condition produced highly similar two-dimensional solutions. Both first dimensions were related to size judgments, and both second dimensions were related to shape judgments. Correlations between haptic and visual attribute ratings were high, and the between-attribute correlational structures within each condition were also very similar. The findings are discussed in terms of Gibson’s notion of partial perceptual invariances.

Visual-touch perceptual equivalence for shape information in children and adults

Although there has been substantial developmental research which has compared shape information processing performance under visual and touch conditions, there has been little work that bears on the shape attributes that are routinely employed, or on the similarity between shape attributes employed by adults and those employed by children. The present research was carried out to investigate the visual-touch perceptual equivalence of young children, using multidimensional scaling techniques, and to compare the visual and touch perceptual structures of this age group with those of adults. The results provide evidence for adult-like perceptions of shape among 6-year-olds, in terms of both the patterns of interstimulus similarities and the shape attributes attended to by children using each modality. In addition, it was found that children have somewhat more visual-touch perceptual equivalence than adults do.

Behavioral effects of pergolide mesylate on food intake and body weight

In a crossover design experiment, pergolide mesylate significantly suppressed food intake and body weight in spayed female rats. Inhibition of food intake by a constant dose of pergolide progressively diminished with repeated administrations. Pergolide continued to suppress body weight with no indications of tolerance. When pergolide was discontinued, body weight increased sufficiently to compensate for the loss and failure to gain during drug treatment. A second experiment investigated the observation that animals injected first with vehicle showed greater anorexia when subsequently injected with pergolide than did animals injected first with pergolide. In addition, tolerance was further assessed by administering on two occasions a higher dose of pergolide. Following chronic pergolide treatment, this dose was insufficient to reinstate anorexia; however, after a period of abstinence, this dose produced anorexia comparable to that observed at the beginning of pergolide treatment. Due to pergolide mesylates action as a postsynaptic dopamine agonist, a dopaminergic neural system is implicated in pergolide induced anorexia.

What makes the Mueller a liar: A multiple-cue approach

Subjects made magnitude estimations of fins-in and fins-out Mueller Lyer stimuli. Shaft length, fin length, and fin angle were within-subjects variables, and the sitmuli could be either conventional solid drawings or dot forms, a between-subjects variable. The parametric effects of these variables were similar to results previously obtained. However, principal emphasis was given to lens model and related multivariate analyses of the subjects’ judgments. These analyses suggested that no single “critical” cue seemed to account for the illusion. Rather, various sets of cues could be formulated to simulate the subjects’ judgmental behavior equivalently. In addition, field-independent subjects showed better knowledge of the cue structure than field-dependent subjects. In the main, subjects in this experiment performed like subjects have in tasks not involving visual illusions with multiple sources of information varying in their relevance.

A Confirmatory Factoring of the California Psychological Inventory

Two matrices of intercorrelations among the scales of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) were subjected to oblique multiple group factor analysis. In contrast to previous studies, this approach allows a direct test of the factor structure implicit in its standard use. We found this structure to provide a satisfactory representation of the data as long as one realizes that the resulting six factors are correlated and contain one dependency and that Scales Wb and Cm fulfill their postulated roles somewhat more poorly than the remaining scales.

Cross-gender perceptions of facial attributes and their relation to attractiveness: Do we see them differently than they see us?

Examination of perceptions of human facial attributes revealed that individual attributes are similarly perceived by males and females. However, patterns of attribute interrelationships differ as a function of gender of the face. Undergraduate students (N=280) rated pictures of 40 male or female Caucasians on 12 physical attributes (e.g., nose size, face width) and overall attractiveness. The four sets of attribute ratings (defined by rater gender and picture gender) were submitted to principal components analyses, and five-factor solutions were found for each condition (accounting for about 76% of the variance). Comparisons of the four component solutions using confirmatory factor procedures revealed that male and female raters share one factor structure when rating photographs of female faces and another factor structure when rating photographs of male faces. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the patterns of attribute interrelationships were not “perceptual units” in the perception of attractiveness, and that different “rules” are used to assess the attractiveness of male and female stimuli faces. The importance of these results for models of facial attractiveness and interfacial similarity judgments are discussed.