Biomedical subjects
S Hendry
Publications and source records attributed to S Hendry.
Honest and faked responses on the Attitudes Toward Disabled Persons Scale--Form A.
This study was completed by Dr Speakman while he was Associated Professor and Chairman of the Department of Rehabilitation in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zimbabwe. At that time Andrew Tembo was a physical therapy student and Sarah Hendry was an occupational therapy student. In recent years there has been increased interest in the attitudes held towards disabled persons by physiotherapy students and physiotherapists. Research on this topic has been conducted in Canada, Australia, the USA, and South Africa. In every one of these studies the instrument used to measure attitudes was one of the three forms of the Attitudes Toward Disabled Persons Scales (ATDPS). A major shortcoming of self-report scales such as the ATDPS is that they can often be faked. If the scales contain "transparent" statements, that is, statements to which the socially desirable answer is obvious or seems obvious, the subjects may be tempted to fake their responses. It is therefore important to determine if a self-report scale can be faked. Of the five studies that have been undertaken to determine if the ATDPS are fakeable, four have indicated that they are not, while one has demonstrated that they are. As it seems that the ATDPS will continue to be the instrument of choice in the measurement of attitudes toward disabled persons by physiotherapy students and physiotherapists, it is important that this question be resolved.
Organization and plasticity of GABA neurons and receptors in monkey visual cortex.
The GABA neurons of monkey area 17 are a morphologically and chemically heterogeneous population of interneurons that are normally distributed most densely within the geniculocortical recipient zones of the visual cortex. In adult monkeys deprived of visual input from one eye, the levels of immunoreactivity for GABA and GAD within neurons of these geniculocortical zones is reduced. Similar changes are seen in the levels of proteins that make up the GABAA receptor sub-type. The effects of monocular deprivation on other substances suggest that specific types of GABA neurons, such as those in which the tachykinin neuropeptide family and parvalbumin coexist with GABA, are greatly influenced by changes in visual input. That some proteins remain normal within deprived-eye neurons and that other proteins are increased indicates the changes in the GABA cells of the cortex are not the result of a general reduction in protein synthesis. Comparisons of what is known about the morphological and synaptic features of GABA cells in area 17 and the characteristics of cells affected by monocular deprivation suggests that certain classes, such as the clutch cell, may be preferential targets of deprivation. Such a selective loss of certain GABA neurons would have broad implications for the possible physiological plasticity of cortical cells, for if ongoing studies determine that specific receptive field properties are affected by monocular deprivation in adults, the correlation of functional properties and classes of GABA cells would be possible.