Burnout not only affects psychiatric nurses' ability to provide optimal patient care, but its consequences extend to the nurse's psychological and physical health. Couched in a cognitive-transactional model, the broad aim of the current study was to measure burnout levels for psychiatric nurses and to determine the respective roles of the environment and the individual on burnout levels. Burnout levels were measured using Maslach and Jackson's (1986) Burnout Inventory. Environmental variables measured included work load, collegial support. role conflict and role ambiguity. Finally, Antonovsky's (1987) sense of coherence (SOC) measured the characteristics of the individual. Although burnout levels were generally high, a low sense of personal accomplishment was particularly problematic. Emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation correlated significantly with all factors of the work environment and with the SOC. Personal accomplishment related only to role conflict. Multiple regression analyses showed the sense of coherence and work load to explain a large proportion of both emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation, and role conflict to explain a small but significant amount of the variance in personal accomplishment. Moderated multiple regression analyses added to a growing body of research pointing towards a possible direct effect of the SOC on burnout.

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The symptoms of schizophrenia are frequently divided into positive and negative subtypes. It has been suggested that the negative symptoms are similar to those seen with prefrontal lobe cortical dysfunction. Several neuropsychological investigations of that hypothesis have been carried out, but none have directly compared a negative symptom group with a positive symptom group on the same test battery. In the present study, the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS; Kay, Fiszbein, & Opler, 1987) was used to distinguish two groups of 20 patients with schizophrenia with predominant positive or negative symptoms. A battery of 7 neuropsychological tests considered capable of isolating prefrontal lobe dysfunction was administered. A significant group difference was noted on 6 of the tests; the negative symptom group performed much worse than the positive symptom group. The results of this study support the hypothesis that a relationship exists between the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and prefrontal lobe dysfunction.

Human ontogeny entails the construction and use of semiotic mediational means to regulate psychological functions intrapersonally and interpersonally. In the Vygotskyan school of thought, speech is regarded as both a mediatory tool and a mediated higher mental function and, as such, is considered central to the development of children's cognition. Grounded in Vygotsky's work on speech as an instrument of thought, this study examined the dynamics of verbal mediation of children's problem solving with specific focus on the use of social, private and inner speech. The study investigated the incidence and semantic composition of speech produced during problem solving and delineated the age related changes of the semantic profile of private speech in relation to social speech and inner speech. A total of 120 children, aged from 5 years, 6 months to 9 years, 5 months, with equal distribution of boys and girls, completed the Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices. The participants within the four age groups were of different ethnic origin but all spoke English as their first language. The results indicated that children relied extensively on all three types of speech and that the semantic content of both social and private speech was primarily task-oriented. Unlike social speech, private speech presented with a dual, cognition-centred and emotions-centred semantic profile, in which complex age-related changes, as shown by a one-way MANCOVA, permeated children's verbal denotations of salient task-related dynamics. Importantly, significations of emotional processes featured consistently in the content composition of private speech and showed a steady age-related occurrence. It was concluded that verbal mediation of children's problem solving is multimodal, multifocal and multidirectional.

A dominant leftward cradling bias has been observed in women in non feeding interaction with infants. Reasons for this behavior have been sought in behavioral asymmetries, but none have sufficiently justified the presence of this leftward pattern. Recently, the cradling bias has been linked to affective processing, considered to be a specialized function of the nondominant (right) hemisphere (Manning & Chamberlain, 1990). This study investigates Manning and Chamberlain's (1990) suggestions that a relationship exists between leftward cradling and the interpretation and expression of affect. Eighty-six nulliparous women were tested for this relationship by correlating direction of cradling bias with visual field dominance for perception of facially expressed emotion and expression of affect. No significant relationship was found to directly support the hypotheses.