Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to W Vingiano.
The 1991 paper by Persinger and Makarec, while posing some interesting theoretical and speculative questions, misstates the magnitude of the effect size in the validation of the Hemisphericity Questionnaire and draws some unwarranted conclusions. This article briefly reviews the issues involved.
The "pseudoneglect" phenomenon initially described by Bowers and Heilman (1980) was examined in the context of a cancellation task. Normal subjects were administered cancellation tasks under a high arousal condition with target and foils which were intended to activate left hemisphere (verbal) processes or right hemisphere (spatial) processes. Significant right lateralized inattention was present on the spatial stimuli. The verbal stimuli failed to produce significant lateralized inattention, although it produced moderate left inattention among right-handed males. The results are consistent with literature identifying the right hemisphere as dominant for attention.
Hemisphericity was originally defined with regard to cognitive processes only. This paper describes a brief personality questionnaire derived from work on personality changes in temporal lobe epilepsy as a method of demonstrating the existence of hemisphericity as a personality characteristic. A factor analysis of the Personal Inventory (Bear & Fedio, 1977) in a normal sample suggests the existence of a right and a left hemisphere component to the personality traits tapped by the scale. Three separate validity studies of a questionnaire developed from the factor analysis, utilizing cognitive, affective and general personality measures provide confirmation. Left hemisphericity types are characterized as possessing greater control over their impulses, experiencing less generalized tension, being more trusting and imaginative and viewing themselves in a positive light. Right hemisphericity types are characterized as possessing less control over their impulses, being tense, suspicious, shy and pragmatic and viewing themselves in a negative light.
Mechanisms underlying hemispace biases for free-field judgments of emotional intensity in chimeric faces were explored. The Levy et al. chimeric faces task (1983b) was examined in relationship to relevant neuropsychological measures (emotional, imaginal, ocular). Forty-four normal adults were administered a test battery including measures of chimeric face perception, lateral eye movements to nonemotional and emotional instructions, image generation, and ocular dominance ("eyedness"). Overall, subjects showed a significant left-sided bias for judging chimeric faces and for producing lateral eye movements to emotional instructions. Asymmetries for chimeric face perception were significantly correlated with asymmetries for the location of self-generated images in space. When task modalities were examined, there was a specific relationship between chimeric face perception and tactile processing on the other neuropsychological measures.
Lateral eye movements (LEMs) in response to emotional and nonemotional instructions were examined. For the emotional task, a new procedure is utilized which requires subjects to generate emotional images of positive and negative valence in auditory, visual and tactile modalities. Forty-four normal adult males and females (22 right-handers, 22 left-handers) participated in the experiment. Overall, subjects looked significantly more to the left than to the right in response to emotional instructions, suggesting greater right hemisphere involvement in the generation of emotional images. The same subjects showed no directional bias in response to nonemotional instructions. Although gender, handedness and familial sinistrality did not mediate the direction of eye movements, ocular dominance had an effect. For left-handed subjects, the direction of eye movements to nonemotional instructions was consistent with eyedness, e.g., right-eyed subjects produced right-sided LEMs, and left-eyed subjects produced left-sided LEMs.
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The courts' assumption that patients' refusals of treatment are based on autonomous decision making was evaluated by examining the opinions of 24 involuntarily medicated patients about their treatment. At discharge 17 patients felt that their treatment refusal had been correctly overridden by staff and that they should be treated against their will again if necessary. Patients who persistently disapproved of the decision to override their treatment refusal were highly grandiose, engaged in denial of psychotic proportions, and responded poorly to treatment. The results suggest that, for most patients, the decision to refuse psychotropic medication is a manifestation of the patient's illness and does not reflect autonomous functioning or consistent beliefs about mental illness or its treatment. Consequently treatment refusal should be considered primarily a psychotherapeutic issue and, in most cases, should be subject to clinical rather than judicial review.
This report describes the development of a clinical instrument that is intended to assess general inpatient psychopathology among patients who cannot communicate directly with the clinician, either due to a language barrier or other problems with verbal communication. Reliability and validity of the instrument indicate that it can serve a useful purpose as a self-rating scale that obviates the need for extensive verbal communication. The scale also appears to be sensitive to changes in symptom intensity over time.
Involuntary hospitalization of the elderly has been the focus of controversy. In many jurisdictions, commitment criteria are stringently and narrowly defined, require a showing of "dangerousness," and are difficult to apply toward securing proper treatment for the elderly. In other areas, broader criteria apply, but some authors argue that such criteria are inappropriately used with the elderly and leave them vulnerable to the abuse of unnecessary institutionalization. The authors examined 274 consecutive admissions aged 55 years and over, comparing voluntary and involuntary patients. Patients admitted involuntarily were significantly more likely to have organic mental disorders, be violent before admission, and be disoriented, withdrawn, and apathetic. Voluntary patients were significantly more likely to have major mood disorders. Patients who lived with others were more likely to be committed than those living alone. The authors discuss these findings with attention to the appropriateness of broader commitment standards and the more stringent dangerousness criteria as they apply to the geriatric population.