Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses
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ItemNeuropsychological and computed tomography findings in two subgroups of schizophrenia( 1986)The group of disorders collectively referred to as schizophrenia, have traditionally been conceptualized as functional psychoses in which primary cognitive functions are unimpaired. Despite this, a proportion of schizophrenic patients have long been known to perform poorly on tests of cognitive function and some proceed to an end state resembling organic dementia. The application of CT scans in the last decade to the schizophrenic population, has revealed that some schizophrenic patients have abnormal brain morphology. Changes in brain morphology have also been correlated with cognitive impairment and defect (negative) symptoms. On the basis of these findings two subgroups of schizophrenia have been proposed. Type I schizophrenia is hypothesized to be characterized by normal brain morphology, normal cognition and florid (positive) symptoms. Type II schizophrenia is hypothesized to be characterized by abnormal brain morphology, impaired cognition and predominantly defect (negative) symptoms. Despite the heuristic value of this hypothesis, research was impeded by the lack of valid techniques for the measurement of positive and negative symptoms. Recent reports have provided such measurement scales, however these have not been widely used to specifically investigate CT scan findings and cognitive impairment in schizophrenic patients. This is the report of an investigation which aimed to examine the relationship between positive and negative symptoms, CT scan findings and performance on a wide range of neuropsychological tests known to be sensitive to the effects of localized cerebral disruption in neurological patients 1 in a group of schizophrenic patients. The results suggest that patients with severe negative symptoms have localized cerebral atrophy of the frontal regions of the brain and are impaired on tests of frontal lobe function. These findings support the hypothesis of different subgroups of schizophrenia, in which the underlying aetiology of one subgroup, may be organic in nature.
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ItemPersonal attributes in inter-personal contexts: statistical models for individual characteristics and social relationships( 1998-07)The thesis develops models for social phenomena based on two primitive concepts: individual and relation. The models - based on the p* class of models for social networks - are designed to examine the inter-dependence of individual characteristics together with the social relations that exist among those individuals. The goal of constructing such models is to extend the capacity to develop rich descriptions of social processes. Relations among individuals are represented by a network or networks of interpersonal ties. The first part of the thesis describes models solely for such sets of relational ties. Techniques to represent data dependencies, approaches to model interpretation, and methods for valued attribute and relational data, are developed. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemCulturally different and successful?: case studies of gifted Vietnamese secondary students( 1993-01)There is concern in the literature that gifted children from ‘culturally different’ populations, such as Hispanics and Blacks, are underrepresented in special programs due, in part, to the often insensitive traditional methods of identification used that do not detect particular abilities that are valued and promoted within that particular culture. Contrary to these findings, studies indicate that gifted Asians are in profusion. They present themselves as excellent, motivated students and it is almost expected that they will achieve highly in the areas of mathematics and science. The focus of this paper is a study of seven highly capable secondary school boys of Vietnamese background. In several of these cases the children have had huge hurdles to overcome including the death of a mother, escape by boat, life in a refugee camp, parents whose skills are not being utilised as well as being ‘different’. Despite this they have been successful. A case study approach was adopted to look at the nature of these students, the role of the parents and the attitudes towards giftedness. The aim is to present a holistic view of the child rather than obscure their unique characteristics in a muddle of statistics of a large scale study. This paper takes the position that it is dangerous to make such generalisations and that although gifted from the same cultural group will have certain similar traits, the assumption that common values will automatically apply to them should be curtailed as the particular circumstances of the individual child leads to different manifestations in each.
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ItemThe effectiveness of three treatment regimens used in the management of neonatal abstinence syndrome( 1995-09)This study proposed a multifactorial model of development to understand the development of infants during their first 12 months of life who had been born to chemically dependent women. The impact of maternal chemical dependency on pregnancy outcome, factors associated with severity of neonatal abstinence syndrome and effectiveness of three treatments used in the management of neonatal abstinence syndrome was studied in 271 mother-infant pairs, who were managed by the Chemical Dependency Unit, Royal Women’s Hospital, Melbourne between April 1991 and May 1994. The chemically dependent mothers and their infants were grouped on the basis of their primary drug of abuse: viz methadone, heroin, non-opioid and codeine groups. Fifty two infants born to drug-free mothers were recruited from a routine antenatal clinic of the same hospital to serve as a control group. The controls were matched for maternal age, marital status, race socioeconomic status, educational level, alcohol and tobacco consumption. Patterns of maternal drug use were determined by reports from methadone treatment programs, drug rehabilitation centres, medical records, personal interviews and urine toxicologic assays performed on mothers during pregnancy and on their infants during the first 48 hours of life. Urine was assayed for metabolites of methadone, amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine, opiates, cannabis and benzodiazepines. There were 180 heroin-dependent, one morphine-dependent and one pethidine-dependent pregnant women enrolled in methadone maintenance programs. The methadone group consisted of these 182 methadone-maintained women and their offspring. Thirty five heroin-dependent women and their offspring formed the heroin group. The non-opioid group consisted of 46 chemically dependent women who used multiple drugs but not opioid drugs during their pregnancy and their offspring. There were eight mother-infant pairs in the codeine group. The mothers in this group primarily abused medication containing codeine in pregnancy. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemLinguistic politeness in middle childhood: its social functions, and relationships to behaviour and development( 1997-07)This research compared Brown and Levinson’s “face saving” account of linguistic politeness with the everyday or social normative account in the context of children’s requesting skills. The research also explored the relationship between children’s politeness skills and their behavioural adjustment. The subjects comprised four groups of ten-and-a-half year old children: a comparison group without behaviour problems, a hostile-aggressive group; an anxious-fearful group; and a comorbid group. All the children were selected from the Australian Temperament Project subject population based on parents’ ratings of the children on the hostile-aggressive and anxious-fearful subscales of the Rutter Child Behaviour Questionnaire. Study 1 found that all the groups of children discriminated between others on the power and distance dimensions in ways consistent with social norms, e.g. adults are judged as more powerful than children. Study 1 also showed that the hostile-aggressive and comorbid groups were significantly less likely to discriminate between others on these dimensions compared to the comparison group. Study 2 showed that for all the children studied politeness as a normative way of speaking was marked by use of please whereas face saving politeness was marked by the use of question directives and hints compared to other request forms. Further, Study 2 showed that there were no differences between children with and without behaviour problems in their use of please to mark different ways of asking.
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ItemDisturbances in processing inferences in language following right hemisphere brain damage( 1982)It was argued, that contrary to conventional localisation models attributing all linguistic function to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere played an important part in the processing of paralinguistic information. Studies of disturbances in prosody; understanding of emotional content in verbal messages; processing of visuospatial aspects of language and processing of pictorial information following right hemisphere damage were reviewed. It was suggested that right hemisphere damaged patients appear to have particular difficulty in drawing inferences from verbal messages, implying an inability to integrate verbal information. It was decided to explore the ability of right hemisphere patients to draw simple inferences from material which was deliberately lacking in emotional content and was designed to contrast the ability to process visuospatial information from non-spatial information. A short memory task was created in which recognition of items which were not heard before but which were semantically continuous with the original story would indicate the integration and storing of the information in the story, rather than its actual lexical representation. A pictorial analogue was also designed to explore pictorial processing. A task matching pictorial alternatives to spoken metaphors was also included since it was suggested the right hemisphere patients were unable to do this task. Three experimental groups were explored; right anterior cortical brain damaged patients; right posterior cortical brain damaged patients, and right subcortical (capsular) and sex was also included. The results indicated that contrary to expectation, the right cortical brain damaged group could process inferences in language both spatial and non-spatial. However, it was found that these patients have a particular problem in rejecting recognition items which did not belong to the original set. This difficulty appeared to be exacerbated when the original material was semantically redundent or involved an understanding of spatial relationships. It was speculated that this may reflect a retrieval rather than memorising difficulty. The performance of the cortical patients on pictorial tasks was found to be more severely disturbed than verbal, and this was considered to be possibly due to a failure to resolve the alternative meanings of the pictures. The cortical patients were also found to prefer literal pictorial alternatives for metaphors, more often than controls. This was also speculated to be due to some failure to appreciate the appropriate meaning of the spoken metaphor, or a difficulty in processing the pictorial information correctly to select a picture depicting the appropriate interpretation. The subcortical (capsular) group performed distinctly differently from the cortical group. It was argued that while these patients also had difficulty rejecting items as not belonging to a cognitive set, they also appeared to be performing in a manner originally expected of the cortical group, i.e. there was suspicion that they were not storing information for meaning but for other more superficial characteristics. These patients performed uniformly regardless of the mode of presentation, pictorial or verbal. They also showed some tendency to select literal meanings of metaphors more often than controls.
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ItemMultiple loss: a phenomenology of attachment and its felt absence in fostered children( 1997)This thesis addresses two questions. The first concerns the shape of contemporary attachment theory and the place for a phenomenological approach to research in this field. The second applies this idea to the study of attachment disruption as experienced in childhood, specifically exploring the lived world of attachment and its absence for six multiply fostered children. Phenomenological psychology is concerned with explicating and describing the fullness of human experience, as lived in its immediacy, prior to theory or reflection. This thesis originated in the regret that while this kind of understanding once existed in John Bowlby’s early writings, it has since been “worn smooth with use” by the experimental frame in which attachment has predominantly come to be examined. Chapter 1 looks at the phenomenological insights apparent in Bowlby’s writings, before tracing the movement away from these roots by the contemporary attachment field through its ongoing adherence to the experimental paradigm and concern with typology. From this base, the review of literature shows that the foster care and adoption fields have tended to use attachment theory for its ability to explain and predict behaviour. As a consequence, the field has yielded very little knowledge about the inner world of attachment, particularly as experienced by children who have endured multiple disruptions and losses in caregiving. Chapters 2 and 3 layout the origins of the phenomenological method and its application within the present research. Findings from the analyses of interviews and drawings are presented in the form of phenomenological depth descriptions in Chapter 4. Here, the Individual and General Structures layout the psychological predicates for the experiences of “feeling attached” and of “not feeling attached”. The interface of attachment as lived by these children and attachment as theorised is then explored in the final chapter.
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ItemIndividual differences in reading ability( 1985)The present investigation comprised two experiments that were concerned with individual differences in reading-comprehension ability in relatively skilled adults. Experiment One investigated the relationship that exists between reading-comprehension skill and linguistic awareness when the latter was assessed on three levels - the semantic, the syntactic, and the phonological. It was found that individuals who achieved different levels of comprehension accuracy on a passage-reading test, also performed differently on a task that required them to bring their knowledge about form-class properties of words to conscious awareness. Thus, skilled comprehenders responded more accurately than less skilled comprehenders in a task that required them to judge whether two words served the same grammatical function in sentences. On the other hand, less skilled comprehenders did not perform below the level of skilled comprehenders in two other word-judgement tasks that required them to attend to the meanings or initial sounds of words. Experiment Two was designed to investigate the relationship between reading-comprehension skill and syntactic processes in greater detail. The semantic and syntactic word-judgement tasks from Experiment One were included, as well as two sentence-judgement tasks - meaning and grammaticality classification. Furthermore, in order to determine whether group differences would be observed when individuals did not have to make explicit judgements concerning specific linguistic properties of stimuli, subjects were also required to perform a single-sentence question-answering task. To provide more direct evidence concerning possible differences in the on-line syntactic processes of skilled and less skilled comprehenders, the sentences used in these tasks varied systematically as a function of several different types of syntactic complexity. It was hoped that this would throw some light on any differential increase in processing difficulty that the reader groups experienced as a result of (a) an increase in the number of clauses contained in sentences, (b) a lack of correspondence between the surface order of words and their underlying grammatical roles, and (c) the omission of optional grammatical function words. The results obtained in this experiment replicated those of Experiment One in that skilled comprehenders performed more accurately than less skilled comprehenders in the syntactic but not the semantic word-judgement task. In accordance with this finding, it was also true that reliable ability-related differences were more likely to be detected when individuals were instructed to focus on the grammatical well-formedness of word strings than when they were asked to attend to their meaningfulness. However, group differences were even more pronounced when individuals were required to process single sentences in sufficient detail to answer subsequent comprehension questions. In addition, although no evidence was obtained to suggest that less skilled comprehenders were affected more than skilled comprehenders by increasing the number of clauses contained in sentences, there was some evidence to suggest that skilled comprehenders were better able to cope with increases in syntactic complexity that occur when optional grammatical function words are omitted. However, this ability-related difference was only observed when sentences deviated from the standard S-V-O word order of English, and when the meanings of the individual words that they contained did not constrain the way in which those words could be combined to form a meaningful sequence (i.e., when semantically reversible object relative-clause sentences served as stimuli). On the basis of the findings from both of these experiments, it was concluded that skilled adult comprehenders were better able than less skilled adults to bring their syntactic knowledge to conscious awareness, and also that they were more likely to spontaneously perform a complete syntactic analysis of text whilst reading.
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ItemParaphilias: a developmental approach to psychopathology( 1998)It is proposed that developmental psychopathology provides a theoretical framework for advancing our understanding of paraphilias. This study involved a group of 63 community-based sex offenders, and 33 non-violent, non-sex, non-drug related offenders; the 63 sex offenders were further classified into the four subgroups of pedophilia, exhibitionism, rape, and multiple paraphilia. These groups overlapped in membership because of co-occurring paraphilic diagnoses. The present investigation set out to identify: a) the general, common, and specific developmental risk factors for paraphilias; b) the general, common and specific psychopathological features of paraphilias; and c) the relationships between the developmental risk factors and psychopathological features. The current results showed that: a) Childhood Emotional Abuse and Family Dysfunction, Childhood Sexual Abuse, and Childhood Behaviour Problems were general developmental risk factors for paraphilias; and b) Anger and Hostility, and Sexual Maladjustment and Heterosocial Skills Deficit were general psychopathological features of paraphilias. In order to overcome the methodological problem associated with analyses of co-occurring paraphilic diagnoses, a special analytic procedure was put in place, and this procedure involved systematic comparisons of the results of logistic regression analyses. The outcome of this procedure indicated that: a} Childhood Emotional Abuse and Family Dysfunction was a common developmental risk factor for the various types of paraphilias; b) Childhood Sexual Abuse was a specific developmental risk factor for pedophilia; c) Anger and Hostility was a common psychopathological feature for the various types of paraphilias; d) Sexual Maladjustment and Heterosocial Skills Deficit was a specific psychopathological feature of pedophilia; and e) Anger and Hostility was also a specific psychopathological feature of multiple paraphilia (suggesting a high level of Anger and Hostility for multiple paraphilia). No specific developmental risk factors were identified for exhibitionism, rape, or multiple paraphilia; nor was any specific psychopathological feature found for exhibitionism, or rape. Analyses at the variable level also demonstrated some interesting findings for the various types of paraphilias in terms of anger, anger expression, insecure attachment styles, heterosocial and sexual adjustment. The results of this study are discussed in relation to a developmental psychopathology perspective for paraphilias and other models of sexual offending.
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ItemEarly neuropsychological change in possible dementia of the Alzheimer type( 1996)Early detection of dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) is vital in understanding the natural course of the disease, which in turn guides the development of potential pharmacological treatment and management strategies. However, early detection of DAT has traditionally proved difficult. The study described in this thesis comprehensively examined neuropsychological function over a 24 month period in patients with early dementia, using as comparison groups individuals with isolated memory complaints (questionable dementia, QD), and normal controls. The neuropsychological battery utilised included standard measures of cognition, such as the WAIS-R and WMS-R, and experimentally-derived computerised tests of memory. The same pattern of neuropsychological change was exhibited by patients with early DAT and by QD subjects who later fulfilled standard criteria for the disease. In both groups pronounced impairment of recent memory preceded deficits in language and visuospatial function. The progression of cognitive deterioration observed in DAT is likely to reflect the spread of neuropathology throughout the cortex. In view of these findings, the selection of appropriate neuropsychological measures for the detection and staging of early DAT is discussed. One computerised measure, the paired associate learning test, was found to be particularly efficacious in the prediction and early detection of DAT. The QD group performed at a similar level to normal controls when first assessed using the paired associate learning subtest. However, over the course of the study, 43% of the QD subjects exhibited significant deterioration in scores on this measure. All subjects who deteriorated on the computerised paired associate learning task met standard criteria for DAT at the conclusion of the study. Diagnosis of probable DAT was not predicted by any other demographic or psychometric variable. These findings are discussed in terms of the special sensitivity of the associate learning paradigm to the neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease.