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Biomedical subjects

J Welkowitz

Publications and source records attributed to J Welkowitz.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Verbal pragmatics following unilateral stroke: emotional content and valence.

Verbal pragmatic aspects of discourse production were examined in 16 right brain-damaged (RBD), 16 left brain-damaged (LBD), and 16 normal control right-handed adults. The facilitation effect of emotional content, valence hypothesis, and relationship between pragmatics and emotion were evaluated. Participants produced monologues while recollecting emotional and nonemotional experiences. Transcribed monologues were rated for appropriateness on 6 pragmatic features: conciseness, lexical selection, quantity, relevancy, specificity, and topic maintenance. Overall, brain-damaged groups were rated as significantly less appropriate than normals. Consistent with the facilitation effect, emotional content enhanced pragmatic performance of LBD aphasic participants yet suppressed performance of RBD participants. Contrary to the valence hypothesis, RBD participants were more impaired for positive emotions and LBD participants for negative emotions. Pragmatic appropriateness was not strongly correlated with a measure of emotional intensity.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Psychometric aspects of verbal pragmatic ratings.

This study examined the psychometric aspects of a verbal pragmatic rating scale. The scale contained six pragmatic features (i.e., Conciseness, Lexical Selection, Quantity, Relevancy, Specificity, and Topic Maintenance) based on Grice's cooperative principles. Fifteen right brain-damaged (RBD), 15 left brain-damaged (LBD), and 16 healthy normal control (NC) right-handed adult participants produced narratives while recollecting emotional and nonemotional experiences. Naive raters evaluated each pragmatic feature for appropriateness on a 5-point Likert scale. When reliability was examined, the overall internal consistency of the pragmatic scale was extremely high (alpha =.96). Factor analysis was conducted to examine the theoretical relations among the six pragmatic features. Three meaningful factors involving discourse content, conceptual unity, and parsimony were identified. Findings are discussed in light of Grice's model and the construct validity of the scale.

Aged↗
PubMed1999

Lateralization of facial emotional expression in schizophrenic and depressed patients.

This study examined facial emotional expressions produced by schizophrenic (SZ), unipolar depressed (UD), and normal control (NC) righthanded adults. Hypotheses regarding right-hemisphere activation in UD and suppression in SZ were addressed, as well as hypotheses about emotion and laterality. Subjects were videotaped while posing positive, neutral, and negative facial expressions to verbal command and to visual imitation. Naive judges rated hemiface stimuli for intensity in original and mirror-reversed orientations. Overall, SZs produced expressions with diminished intensity relative to UDs and NCs. Across subject groups, expressions were more intense in the visual than the verbal condition. In general, approach expressions were produced with greater right-hemiface intensity, and withdrawal expressions with greater left-hemiface intensity. UDs showed more pronounced facial asymmetry than SZs or NCs. An unanticipated right-hemispace perceptual bias among the judges may reflect the analytical, detailed rating procedure used and the presumably greater reliance by the judges on left-than right-hemisphere strategies.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

The effects of age and gender on the perception of lexical emotion.

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the perception of lexical/verbal emotion across the adult life span. Secondary goals were to examine the contribution of gender and valence (i.e., pleasantness/unpleasantness) to the processing of lexical emotional stimuli. Participants were 28 young (ages 20-39), 28 middle-aged (ages 40-59), and 28 older (ages 60-85) right-handed adults; there were 14 men and 14 women in each age group. Age groups were comparable on demographic and cognitive variables. Participants made accuracy judgments and intensity ratings of emotional (both positive and negative) and nonemotional stimuli from lexical perception tasks from the New York Emotion Battery (Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992). Accuracy and intensity measures were not significantly correlated. When age was examined, older participants perceived emotional and nonemotional lexical stimuli with significantly less accuracy than did younger and middle-aged participants. On the other hand, older participants evaluated the nonemotional lexical stimuli as significantly more intense than younger participants. When gender was examined, lexical stimuli were processed more accurately by female than male participants. Further, emotional stimuli were rated more intense by female participants. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Emotional versus nonemotional lexical perception in patients with right and left brain damage.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined lexical emotional perception in patients with unilateral brain damage. BACKGROUND: Hypotheses pertaining to laterality and emotion were tested. More specifically, we were interested in whether the right hemisphere is dominant for verbally-presented emotion. In addition, we examined whether emotional content improves the performance of patients with left brain damage (LBD) and language deficits. METHOD: Subjects were 11 patients with right brain damage (RBD), 10 patients with LBD, and 15 normal control adults. The subject groups did not differ significantly on demographic or basic cognitive variables; the patient groups were similar on neurologic variables. Parallel emotional experimental and nonemotional control tasks included word identification (or recognition), sentence identification, and word discrimination. There were eight emotional categories (e.g., happiness) and eight nonemotional categories (e.g., vision). RESULTS: A significant interaction among Group, Condition, and Task revealed that patients with RBD were significantly impaired relative to patients with LBD and normals within the emotional condition, particularly for the identification tasks. Furthermore, the performance of patients with LBD and language deficits was improved by emotional content for the sentence identification task. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that the right hemisphere has a unique contribution in the identification of lexical emotional stimuli. Implications for rehabilitation of patients with LBD and language deficits and patients with RBD by means of emotion-based strategies are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Right hemisphere emotional perception: evidence across multiple channels.

Emotional perception was examined in stroke patients across 3 communication channels: facial, prosodic, and lexical. Hemispheric specialization for emotion was tested via right-hemisphere (RH) and valence hypotheses, and relationships among channels were determined. Participants were 11 right-brain-damaged (RBD), 10 left-brain-damaged (LBD), and 15 demographically matched normal control (NC) adults. Experimental measures, with analogous psychometric properties, were identification and discrimination tasks, including a range of positive and negative emotions. Nonemotional control tasks were used for each channel. For identification, RBDs were significantly impaired relative to LBDs and NCs across channels and valences, supporting the RH hypothesis. No group differences emerged for discrimination. Findings were not influenced by demographic, clinical, or control variables. Correlations among the channels were more prominent for normal than for brain-damaged groups.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Social functioning and facial emotional expression in neurological and psychiatric disorders.

This study examined the relationship between facial expression and social functioning in schizophrenic, depressed, right-brain-damaged, Parkinson's disease, and normal adult participants. Raters evaluated general intensity and amount of positive and negative facial emotion while participants were producing monologues regarding pleasant and unpleasant experiences. Social functioning items were derived from three standardized inventories. Overall, patient groups displayed more negative and less positive emotion than normals, and the schizophrenic and right-brain-damaged groups showed less intense expressions than normals. Correlational analyses suggested that the more intense the facial expressions, the better the social functioning, and that the more negative emotion displayed, the poorer the social functioning.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1996

Hemispheric specialization for discourse reports of emotional experiences: relationships to demographic, neurological, and perceptual variables.

This study examined hemispheric specialization for discourse reports of emotional and nonemotional experience in 16 right-brain-damaged (RBD), 16 left-brain-damaged (LBD), and 16 demographically-matched normal control (NC) right-handed adults. Patient groups did not differ on etiology, months post-CVA onset, and intrahemispheric lesion location. Subjects were requested to produce monologues about positive and negative emotional and nonemotional experiences. The lexical content of written transcriptions of these monologues was later rated for "emotionality" by naive judges. Overall, RBDs described experiences with less emotional intensity than did NCs and LBDs, providing support for right hemisphere involvement in lexical emotion. Although the RBDs in the current study demonstrated similar patterns of deficits in a prior study [9] on tasks involving lexical emotional perception, there were no significant relationships between the current measures of emotional expression and the previous measures of emotional perception. Finally, the expression and the perception data were examined with respect to intrahemispheric factors. Among the brain-damaged subjects, subcortical structures were more involved in reports of emotional experience, and cortical structures were more involved in the perception of emotion.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1994

A new pictorial instrument for child and adolescent psychiatry: a pilot study.

A pictorial instrument was developed to assess psychopathology in children aged 6 to 16 years. Symptom pictures (n = 137) representing DSM-III-R criteria were organized into seven diagnostic subscales. Clarity of the pictures was assessed in 31 normal children. Fifty-one psychiatric inpatient children completed the instrument using a 6-point visual analogue scale. Sensitivity to change was assessed in 15 children. The subscales' internal consistencies (Cronbach's alpha) ranged from 0.54 to 0.86. A canonical discriminant analysis among four diagnostic groups achieved a Wilks' lambda of 0.67 (p = 0.02). This instrument may be a valuable adjunct to psychiatric interviews in children.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1993

Mapping schizophrenic negative symptoms onto measures of the patient's speech: set correlational analysis.

We describe a system designed to assess the speech behaviors that inform clinicians about their patients' negative symptoms. Measures are formed into scales to reflect the patient's Pausing, Speech Rate, and Dyadic Interaction with the interviewer. Using set correlation, we examined the associations between the acoustic scales and the clinician's ratings of Flat Affect, Alogia, and Asociality. Over half of the multivariance in the clinical scales was accounted for by the acoustic scales. Unique isomorphisms between the acoustic and rating scales were found for: Dyadic Interaction with Flat Affect; Pause Production with Alogia; and Rate with Asociality.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Perception of facial emotion in schizophrenic and right brain-damaged patients.

Deficits in the perception of facial emotion have been demonstrated in patients with right-sided brain damage (RBD) and schizophrenia (SZ). Furthermore, recent speculations have implicated right-hemisphere dysfunction in Type II schizophrenics, especially those with a preponderance of "negative symptoms" and flat affect. The performance of SZ, RBD, and normal control subjects was compared on measures assessing facial emotional perception. Both identification and discrimination paradigms were used, with positive/pleasant and negative/unpleasant emotions. To examine the effects of visuospatial and facial processing on facial emotion tasks, the Visual Matrices Test and the Benton Facial Recognition Test were administered. On both facial emotion tests, SZ and RBD patients were significantly impaired relative to normal subjects, but not different from each other. The SZ and RBD patients were also impaired on the matrices and facial recognition tests. When the effects of the matrices and neutral face recognition tests were statistically controlled, significant group differences remained for the identification task but not for the discrimination task. Thus, methodologies are presented for the neuropsychological study of facial emotional perception, and some support is provided for the notion that negative-symptom schizophrenia is associated with right hemisphere dysfunction.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Right hemisphere specialization for the identification of emotional words and sentences: evidence from stroke patients.

This study examines the contribution of the lexical/verbal channel to emotional processing in 16 right brain-damaged (RBD), 16 left brain-damaged (LBD) and 16 normal control (NC) right-handed adults. Emotional lexical perception tasks were developed; analogous nonemotional tasks were created to control for cognitive and linguistic factors. The three subject groups were matched for gender, age and education. The brain-damaged groups were similar with respect to cerebrovascular etiology, months post-onset, sensory-motor status and lesion location. Parallel emotional and nonemotional tasks included word identification, sentence identification and word discrimination. For both word tasks, RBDs were significantly more impaired than LBDs and NCs in the emotional condition. For all three tasks, RBDs showed a significantly greater performance discrepancy between emotional and nonemotional conditions than did LBDs or NCs. Results were not affected by the valence (i.e. positive/negative) of the stimuli. These findings suggest a dominant role for the right hemisphere in the perception of lexically-based emotional stimuli.

Aged↗
PubMed1990

Conversational time patterns and mutual influence in parent-child interactions: a time series approach.

Mutual influencing processes are assumed to be the basic building blocks in establishing parent-child bonding and in influencing cognitive and language behavior. A study by Jasnow and Feldstein (1986) revealed that, within the temporal domain of speech, preverbal (9-month-old) infants and their mothers exhibit a pattern of mutual influence (attunement) in their average durations of switching pauses. The general purpose of this research was to extend those findings to children with higher verbal functioning. In addition, parent and child genders, nature of the interaction, and specific aspects of parents' personalities, expressiveness, and instrumentality were considered. Each parent interacted with their 4- or 5-year-old son or daughter in each of two conversations--unstructured (social conversation) and structured (task activity). Conversations were processed by an automated computer system yielding objective measure of turns, vocalizations, pauses, and switching-pause durations. To examine interspeaker influence of attunement of temporal speech patterns, "influence coefficients" were computer for each speaker on a "turn-by-turn" basis using time series regression. Analysis of these coefficients revealed that: (1) Mutual influence is most evident with switching-pause duration. (2) Structure in the conversation (as defined by the task or parental instrumentality) seems to facilitate attunement for vocalization and switching pause duration. (3) Attunement with girls seems to occur equally well with both parents, while boys exhibit a style of temporal patterning influence which suggests greater identification with the father. (4) Expressiveness seems to facilitate attunement to the child's switching-pause duration.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Lateralization for the expression and perception of facial emotion as a function of age.

In order to test the hypothesis of right hemisphere changes with age, this study examined lateralization for facial emotion in young, middle-aged, and older women (N = 90). For expression, subjects were photographed while posing positive and negative emotions. Composite photographs were created and rated for intensity. For perception, subjects were required to make intensity judgements about emotional chimeric faces. Overall, subjects demonstrated significant left-sided facial asymmetry for expression and significant left hemispace biases for perception. The findings for facial expression were not influenced by emotional valence or resting face asymmetries. There were no changes in lateralization as a function of age for either expression or perception. Taken together, these findings lend support to the notion that the right hemisphere mediates emotional processing across the adult life span.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Application of Piagetian measures of cognition in severe Alzheimer's disease.

Conventional psychometric measures uniformly yield zero or near zero scores (i.e., "bottom-out") as patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) progress to the more severe stages of the illness. Consequently, there are no psychometric measures which objectively assess the mental abilities of AD patients with very severe cognitive impairment. We explored the hypothesis that mental function in AD patients with very severe cognitive impairment can be effectively assessed using test measures developed to assess the earliest stage of cognitive development as proposed by Piaget. We also investigated the relationship between decline on these experimental cognitive measures and progressive functional disability in patients with severe cognitive impairment. The results indicate that modified instruments derived from measures developed to assess Piaget's sensorimotor stage of cognitive development provide useful information about the cognitive abilities of very severely impaired AD patients. These modified instruments provide a measure of cognition in these extremely impaired patients that has acceptable validity and demonstrable reliability.

Aged↗
PubMed1989

A preliminary comparison of flat affect schizophrenics and brain-damaged patients on measures of affective processing.

Flat affect is a major component of schizophrenia and is often also seen in neurological disorders. A preliminary set of comparisons were conducted to delineate neuropsychological mechanisms underlying flat affect in schizophrenia, and new measures are described for the assessment of affective deficits in clinical populations. Subjects were schizophrenic with flat affect (SZs), right brain-damaged (RBD), Parkinson's Disease (PDs), and normal control (NC) right-handed adults. Subjects were administered affective measures of expression and perception in both facial and vocal channels. For both perceptual and expressive tasks the SZs performed significantly less accurately than the NCs and the PDs but did not differ from the RBDs. This was the case for both face and voice. This finding lends support to the speculation that right hemisphere mechanisms, especially cortical ones, may be compromised among schizophrenics with flat affect.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Toward greater understanding of depression in deaf individuals.

We compared the prevalence of depressive symptoms among deaf and hearing college students and examined the relationships among depressive symptoms, personality characteristics, and perceived parental attitudes and behaviors in these two groups. Measures were revised to meet the language needs of the deaf subjects. Mild levels of depressive symptoms were more prevalent in the deaf than in the hearing students, but more severe depression was not. In both groups, depressive symptoms were associated with perceptions of lower maternal care and higher maternal over-protection. Deaf and hearing subjects did not differ on these perceived maternal characteristics. Depressive symptoms were associated with socially dependent personality characteristics in the hearing sample only. We discuss the implications of the findings for the role of personality development in depression in deaf individuals.

Adolescent↗