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This article reviews and discusses the part of neuroscience relevant to mental health within the contemporary capitalist context, and suggests ways in which the effects of this context on the nervous system can be reconceptualised and researched in the future. Firstly, the principal components of neoliberal capitalism are presented together with how it has historically influenced neuroscience. We then argue in favour of a neurodiversity perspective, as opposed to the dominant model of conceptualising neural (mal-)functioning, brain plasticity and potential for change and adaptation. We review the available empirical research indicating that the socio-economic environment is harmful to minds and brains. Lastly, we set out a theoretical framework that can generate neuroscientific hypotheses with regards to the effects of the capitalist context on brains and minds, as well as a frame for post-capitalist research.

Transdiagnostic mental health factors measuring anxious-depressive, compulsivity and intrusive thought and social withdrawal symptom dimensions have been identified as useful constructs that relate to a variety of cognitive constructs. However, the factor measurement relies on the administration of hundreds of questionnaire items which is both costly and a burden to participants. Additionally, it is unclear to what extent these factors generalise across datasets. Therefore, this study sought to optimise the measurement as well as assess the stability of these three factors. Using exploratory factor analysis on 209 questionnaire items, we replicated the same three-factor structure across a pooled dataset of n = 4782 participants, as well as within four independent subsets of the data. Using a machine learning approach, we reduced the number of items to 71 while still measuring the factors with high accuracy. We externally validated these factor scores by replicating previously observed associations with behaviour on a metacognition task. Our results support the generalisability of these symptom dimensions and provide a useful approach to optimising their measurement.

This article expounds acta’s model of participatory community theatre developed over the years since the organisation was founded in 1985. It examines how acta’s commitment to access and participat...

Mechanistic hypotheses about psychiatric disorders are increasingly formalized as computational models of information-processing in the brain. Model parameters, characterizing for example decision-making biases, are hypothesized to correlate with clinical constructs. This is promising, but here we draw attention to some techniques used to minimize noise in parameter estimation which are in common use but may be unhelpful. Namely, the use of empirical priors that do not incorporate relationships between psychopathology and modelled processes will suppress the very relationships of interest. This is because the variability associated with psychopathology will be indistinguishable from that due to noise from the point of view of the hierarchical, or random-effects, fit that used the empirical priors in question. We advocate incorporating cross-domain, e.g. psychopathology-cognition relationships into the parameter inference itself.

Old, hearing-impaired listeners generally benefit little from lateral separation of multiple talkers when listening to one of them. This study aimed to determine how spatial release from masking (SRM) in such listeners is affected when the interaural time differences (ITDs) in the temporal fine structure (TFS) are manipulated by tone-vocoding (TVC) at the ears by a master hearing aid system. Word recall was compared, with and without TVC, when target and masker sentences from a closed set were played simultaneously from the front loudspeaker (co-located) and when the maskers were played 45° to the left and right of the listener (separated). For 20 hearing-impaired listeners aged 64 to 86, SRM was 3.7 dB smaller with TVC than without TVC. This difference in SRM correlated with mean audiometric thresholds below 1.5 kHz, even when monaural TFS sensitivity (discrimination of frequency-shifts in identically filtered complexes) was partialed out, suggesting that low-frequency audiometric thresholds may be a good indicator of candidacy for hearing aids that preserve ITDs. The TVC difference in SRM was not correlated with age, pure-tone ITD thresholds, nor fundamental frequency difference limens, and only with monaural TFS sensitivity before control for low-frequency audiometric thresholds.

The discrimination of interaural phase differences (IPDs) requires accurate binaural temporal processing and has been used as a measure of sensitivity to temporal envelope and temporal fine structure (TFS). Previous studies found that TFS-IPD discrimination declined with age and with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), but age and SNHL have often been confounded. The aim of this study was to determine the independent contributions of age and SNHL to TFS and envelope IPD discrimination by using a sample of adults with a wide range of ages and SNHL. A two-interval, two-alternative forced-choice procedure was used to measure IPD discrimination thresholds for 20-Hz amplitude-modulated tones with carrier frequencies of 250 or 500 Hz when the IPD was in either the stimulus envelope or TFS. There were positive correlations between absolute thresholds and TFS-IPD thresholds, but not envelope-IPD thresholds, when age was accounted for. This supports the idea that SNHL affects TFS processing independently to age. Age was positively correlated with envelope-IPD thresholds at both carrier frequencies and TFS-IPD thresholds at 500 Hz, when absolute thresholds were accounted for. These results suggest that age negatively affects the binaural processing of envelope and TFS at some frequencies independently of SNHL. © 2014 Acoustical Society of America.

The frequency following response (FFR) arises from the sustained neural activity of a population of neurons that are phase locked to periodic acoustic stimuli. Determining the source of the FFR noninvasively may be useful for understanding the function of phase locking in the auditory pathway to the temporal envelope and fine structure of sounds. The current study compared the FFR recorded with a horizontally aligned (mastoid-to-mastoid) electrode montage and a vertically aligned (forehead-to-neck) electrode montage. Unlike previous studies, envelope and fine structure latencies were derived simultaneously from the same narrowband stimuli to minimize differences in cochlear delay. Stimuli were five amplitude-modulated tones centered at 576 Hz, each with a different modulation rate, resulting in different side-band frequencies across stimulus conditions. Changes in response phase across modulation frequency and side-band frequency (group delay) were used to determine the latency of the FFR reflecting phase locking to the envelope and temporal fine structure, respectively. For the FFR reflecting phase locking to the temporal fine structure, the horizontal montage had a shorter group delay than the vertical montage, suggesting an earlier generation source within the auditory pathway. For the FFR reflecting phase locking to the envelope, group delay was longer than that for the fine structure FFR, and no significant difference in group delay was found between montages. However, it is possible that multiple sources of FFR (including the cochlear microphonic) were recorded by each montage, complicating interpretations of the group delay.

OBJECTIVE:The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of the type of speech material on the benefit obtained from temporal fine structure (TFS) information in speech for young normal-hearing (YNH) and older hearing-impaired (OHI) participants.DESIGN:The design was based on the work of . They measured the speech reception thresholds for a target talker in a background talker as a function of the frequency range over which TFS information was available. The signal was split into 32 channels, each with a bandwidth equal to the equivalent rectangular bandwidth of the "normal" auditory filter at the same center frequency. Above a cutoff (CO) channel, channels were vocoded and contained only temporal envelope information. Channels up to and including CO were not processed. Hopkins et al. found that, as CO was increased, speech reception thresholds decreased more for normal-hearing participants than for participants with cochlear hearing loss, suggesting that the latter were less able to use TFS information. We used the same design, but compared results when the target speech materials were open-set sentences, as used by Hopkins et al., and when they were more predictable sentences with a closed word set (Danish Dantale 2).RESULTS:With the open-set material, YNH listeners benefited more from TFS information than OHI listeners, replicating . For the YNH participants, the benefit of adding TFS was greater for the open-set material than for the closed-set material, while no difference in TFS benefit across speech materials was found for the OHI participants.CONCLUSIONS:The choice of speech material is important when assessing the benefit of TFS. Several factors may facilitate recognition in the absence of TFS cues, including small set size, predictable temporal structure of the target speech, and contextual effects. We speculate that TFS information is useful for reducing informational masking, by providing cues for the perceptual segregation of the target and background. When the target speech is highly predictable, informational masking may be minimal, rendering TFS cues unnecessary.

The relationships between spatial speech recognition (SSR; the ability to understand speech in complex spatial environments), binaural temporal fine structure (TFS) sensitivity, and three cognitive tasks were assessed for 17 hearing-impaired listeners. Correlations were observed between SSR, TFS sensitivity, and two of the three cognitive tasks, which became non-significant when age effects were controlled for, suggesting that reduced TFS sensitivity and certain cognitive deficits may share a common age-related cause. The third cognitive measure was also significantly correlated with SSR, but not with TFS sensitivity or age, suggesting an independent non-age-related cause.

Community organizing for education reform continues to expand across U.S. cities, and this article provides a framework for understanding how grassroots advocacy organizations influence local education policy. Comparing two landmark policy reforms achieved by advocates in California, we analyze the complicated role advocates have in reform that they initiate and see through to implementation. We highlight how political context, ideas about social change, and advocacy strategies interact in the advocacy process. We find advocates must agitate enough to compel change, while maintaining legitimacy with public officials who can institutionalize reform. A framework for analyzing local advocates’ work is particularly salient as community organizing for education reform continues to spread across US cities.

Temporal fine structure (TFS) sensitivity, frequency selectivity, and speech reception in noise were measured for young normal-hearing (NHY), old normal-hearing (NHO), and hearing-impaired (HI) subjects. Two measures of TFS sensitivity were used: the "TFS-LF test" (interaural phase difference discrimination) and the "TFS2 test" (discrimination of harmonic and frequency-shifted tones). These measures were not significantly correlated with frequency selectivity (after partialing out the effect of audiometric threshold), suggesting that insensitivity to TFS cannot be wholly explained by a broadening of auditory filters. The results of the two tests of TFS sensitivity were significantly but modestly correlated, suggesting that performance of the tests may be partly influenced by different factors. The NHO group performed significantly more poorly than the NHY group for both measures of TFS sensitivity, but not frequency selectivity, suggesting that TFS sensitivity declines with age in the absence of elevated audiometric thresholds or broadened auditory filters. When the effect of mean audiometric threshold was partialed out, speech reception thresholds in modulated noise were correlated with TFS2 scores, but not measures of frequency selectivity or TFS-LF test scores, suggesting that a reduction in sensitivity to TFS can partly account for the speech perception difficulties experienced by hearing-impaired subjects.

Recent work suggests that hearing-impaired subjects are relatively insensitive to temporal fine structure (TFS) information, but that sensitivity among subjects varies considerably. developed a fast and easy to administer test of sensitivity to TFS, but it can only be used at medium to high frequencies. Here we describe a binaural method that can be used at lower frequencies. An adaptive two-alternative forced-choice task was used. Each interval contained four tones with frequency f; in one interval all tones were diotic, and in the other tones one and three were diotic while tones two and four had an interaural phase shift, Δϕ. The task was to identify the interval with the phase-shifted tones. For normal-hearing subjects, the effects of sensation level and training on performance were small, and the test could be performed reliably for f = 250, 500, and 750 Hz.SumarioVarios trabajos recientes sugieren que las personas con impedimentos auditivos son relativamente no sensibles a la informacion tem...

The ability of normally hearing and hearing-impaired subjects to use temporal fine structure information in complex tones was measured. Subjects were required to discriminate a harmonic complex tone from a tone in which all components were shifted upwards by the same amount in Hz, in a three-alternative, forced-choice task. The tones either contained five equal-amplitude components (non-shaped stimuli) or contained many components, but were passed through a fixed bandpass filter to reduce excitation pattern changes (shaped stimuli). Components were centered at nominal harmonic numbers (N) 7, 11, and 18. For the shaped stimuli, hearing-impaired subjects performed much more poorly than normally hearing subjects, with most of the former scoring no better than chance when N=11 or 18, suggesting that they could not access the temporal fine structure information. Performance for the hearing-impaired subjects was significantly improved for the non-shaped stimuli, presumably because they could benefit from spectral cues. It is proposed that normal-hearing subjects can use temporal fine structure information provided the spacing between fine structure peaks is not too small relative to the envelope period, but subjects with moderate cochlear hearing loss make little use of temporal fine structure information for unresolved components.

One task intended to measure sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) involves the discrimination of a harmonic complex tone from a tone in which all harmonics are shifted upwards by the same amount in hertz. Both tones are passed through a fixed bandpass filter centered on the high harmonics to reduce the availability of excitation-pattern cues and a background noise is used to mask combination tones. The role of frequency selectivity in this “TFS1” task was investigated by varying level. Experiment 1 showed that listeners performed more poorly at a high level than at a low level. Experiment 2 included intermediate levels and showed that performance deteriorated for levels above about 57 dB sound pressure level. Experiment 3 estimated the magnitude of excitation-pattern cues from the variation in forward masking of a pure tone as a function of frequency shift in the complex tones. There was negligible variation, except for the lowest level used. The results indicate that the changes in excitation level at threshold for the TFS1 task would be too small to be usable. The results are consistent with the TFS1 task being performed using TFS cues, and with frequency selectivity having an indirect effect on performance via its influence on TFS cues.

This is one of a series of BMJ summaries of new guidelines based on the best available evidence; they highlight important recommendations for clinical practice, especially where uncertainty or controversy exists.

Sensorineural hearing loss is the most common type of hearing impairment worldwide. It arises as a consequence of damage to the cochlea or auditory nerve, and several structures are often affected simultaneously. There are many causes, including genetic mutations affecting the structures of the inner ear, and environmental insults such as noise, ototoxic substances, and hypoxia. The prevalence increases dramatically with age. Clinical diagnosis is most commonly accomplished by measuring detection thresholds and comparing these to normative values to determine the degree of hearing loss. In addition to causing insensitivity to weak sounds, sensorineural hearing loss has a number of adverse perceptual consequences, including loudness recruitment, poor perception of pitch and auditory space, and difficulty understanding speech, particularly in the presence of background noise. The condition is usually incurable; treatment focuses on restoring the audibility of sounds made inaudible by hearing loss using either hearing aids or cochlear implants.

Sensorineural hearing loss is the most common type of hearing impairment worldwide. It arises as a consequence of damage to the cochlea or auditory nerve, and several structures are often affected simultaneously. There are many causes, including genetic mutations affecting the structures of the inner ear, and environmental insults such as noise, ototoxic substances, and hypoxia. The prevalence increases dramatically with age. Clinical diagnosis is most commonly accomplished by measuring detection thresholds and comparing these to normative values to determine the degree of hearing loss. In addition to causing insensitivity to weak sounds, sensorineural hearing loss has a number of adverse perceptual consequences, including loudness recruitment, poor perception of pitch and auditory space, and difficulty understanding speech, particularly in the presence of background noise. The condition is usually incurable; treatment focuses on restoring the audibility of sounds made inaudible by hearing loss using either hearing aids or cochlear implants.

When musical notes are combined to make a chord, the closeness of fit of the combined spectrum to a single harmonic series (the ‘harmonicity’ of the chord) predicts the perceived consonance (how pleasant and stable the chord sounds; McDermott, Lehr, & Oxenham, 2010). The distinction between consonance and dissonance is central to Western musical form. Harmonicity is represented in the temporal firing patterns of populations of brainstem neurons. The current study investigates the role of brainstem temporal coding of harmonicity in the perception of consonance. Individual preference for consonant over dissonant chords was measured using a rating scale for pairs of simultaneous notes. In order to investigate the effects of cochlear interactions, notes were presented in two ways: both notes to both ears or each note to different ears. The electrophysiological frequency following response (FFR), reflecting sustained neural activity in the brainstem synchronised to the stimulus, was also measured. When both notes were presented to both ears the perceptual distinction between consonant and dissonant chords was stronger than when the notes were presented to different ears. In the condition in which both notes were presented to the both ears additional low-frequency components, corresponding to difference tones resulting from nonlinear cochlear processing, were observable in the FFR effectively enhancing the neural harmonicity of consonant chords but not dissonant chords. Suppressing the cochlear envelope component of the FFR also suppressed the additional frequency components. This suggests that, in the case of consonant chords, difference tones generated by interactions between notes in the cochlea enhance the perception of consonance. Furthermore, individuals with a greater distinction between consonant and dissonant chords in the FFR to individual harmonics had a stronger preference for consonant over dissonant chords. Overall, the results provide compelling evidence for the role of neural temporal coding in the perception of consonance, and suggest that the representation of harmonicity in phase locked neural firing drives the perception of consonance., Highlights • Harmonic structure of musical chords is encoded by phase locking in the brainstem. • Individual preference for consonance can be predicted by neural coding. • The neural coding of the harmonicity of a musical chord predicts how pleasant it is. • Monaural interactions generate neurally coded harmonics. • Generated harmonics enhance neural harmonicity and pleasantness of consonant chords.

To determine whether non-linear frequency compression (NLFC) is effective for hearing-impaired adults in a clinical setting. To determine whether benefit from NLFC is related to duration of NLFC experience or severity of high-frequency hearing loss.Participants were fitted with Phonak frequency compression hearing aids as part of their standard clinical care, using the manufacturer's default fitting settings. Participants had been using NLFC for between 1 and 121 weeks at the time of testing. Speech recognition thresholds in noise and consonant recognition in quiet were measured with and without NLFC enabled.Forty-six experienced adult hearing-aid users.Consonant recognition in quiet, but not speech recognition in noise was significantly better with NLFC enabled. There was no significant correlation between duration of frequency compression experience and benefit. Benefit for consonant recognition was negatively correlated with mean audiometric thresholds from 2-6 kHz.NLFC was beneficial for consonant recognition but not speech recognition in noise. There was no evidence to support the idea that a long period of acclimatization is necessary to gain full benefit. The relation between benefit and high-frequency thresholds might be explained by the poor audibility of compressed information for some listeners with severe loss.

Nursing education is developing a wide variety of ways to educate for cultural competence that expedites culturecongruent care and effective diversity management in practice. Using a praxis orientation, this article reports research done on an innovative nursing field school during the past four summers on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Learning context emphasizing formation of a collaborative, caring community is created for 6-week immersion learning experiences during which student groups work with the High Plains OgIaIa Lakota in tribal programs. Triangulated data based on participant observation and student journals, stories, discussions, interviews, academic coursework, and evaluation surveys provide a comprehensive record of complex and multifaceted field school and immersion learning processes. Through collaboration with students, Diekelmann's "Concernful Practices" are tested and adapted for fit as a framework for organizing and examining the field school experience, as well as the practice of health care across cultures.

Improvement in interaural phase difference (IPD) discrimination over 2 to 3 h was compared for two two-alternative forced-choice paradigms: A three-interval paradigm, in which the IPD was in interval two or three, and a paradigm with two intervals of four stimuli in which the IPD was in the second and fourth stimuli of one interval (AAAA vs ABAB). The difference in performance between the beginning and end of the testing period was smaller for the two-interval paradigm, supporting the use of this paradigm for fast measurement of discrimination thresholds without the need for a long period of training. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.

Hearing aids use amplitude compression to compensate for the effects of loudness recruitment. The compression speed that gives the best speech intelligibility varies among individuals. Moore [(2008). Trends Amplif. 12, 300-315] suggested that an individual's sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) information may affect which compression speed gives most benefit. This hypothesis was tested using normal-hearing listeners with a simulated hearing loss. Sentences in a competing talker background were processed using multi-channel fast or slow compression followed by a simulation of threshold elevation and loudness recruitment. Signals were either tone vocoded with 1-ERB(N)-wide channels (where ERB(N) is the bandwidth of normal auditory filters) to remove the original TFS information, or not processed further. In a second experiment, signals were vocoded with either 1 - or 2-ERB(N)-wide channels, to test whether the available spectral detail affects the optimal compression speed. Intelligibility was significantly better for fast than slow compression regardless of vocoder channel bandwidth. The results suggest that the availability of original TFS or detailed spectral information does not affect the optimal compression speed. This conclusion is tentative, since while the vocoder processing removed the original TFS information, listeners may have used the altered TFS in the vocoded signals.

The neural mechanisms of pitch coding have been debated for more than a century. The two main mechanisms are coding based on the profiles of neural firing rates across auditory nerve fibers with different characteristic frequencies (place-rate coding), and coding based on the phase-locked temporal pattern of neural firing (temporal coding). Phase locking precision can be partly assessed by recording the frequency-following response (FFR), a scalp-recorded electrophysiological response that reflects synchronous activity in subcortical neurons. Although features of the FFR have been widely used as indices of pitch coding acuity, only a handful of studies have directly investigated the relation between the FFR and behavioral pitch judgments. Furthermore, the contribution of degraded neural synchrony (as indexed by the FFR) to the pitch perception impairments of older listeners and those with hearing loss is not well known. Here, the relation between the FFR and pure-tone frequency discrimination was investigated in listeners with a wide range of ages and absolute thresholds, to assess the respective contributions of subcortical neural synchrony and other age-related and hearing loss-related mechanisms to frequency discrimination performance. FFR measures of neural synchrony and absolute thresholds independently contributed to frequency discrimination performance. Age alone, i.e., once the effect of subcortical neural synchrony measures or absolute thresholds had been partialed out, did not contribute to frequency discrimination. Overall, the results suggest that frequency discrimination of pure tones may depend both on phase locking precision and on separate mechanisms affected in hearing loss.

Sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) at low frequencies may be adversely affected by hearing loss at high frequencies even when absolute thresholds at low frequencies are within the normal range. However, in several studies suggesting this, the effects of hearing loss and age were confounded. Here, interaural phase discrimination (IPD) thresholds for pure tones at 500 and 750 Hz were measured for 39 subjects with ages from 61 to 83 yr. All subjects had near-normal audiometric thresholds at low frequencies, but thresholds varied across subjects at high frequencies. IPD thresholds were correlated with age. IPD thresholds for the test frequency of 750 Hz were weakly correlated with absolute thresholds at high frequencies, but these correlations became non-significant when the effect of age was partialed out. The results do not confirm that sensitivity to TFS at low frequencies is influenced by hearing loss at high frequencies, independently of age.

Central to providing culturally appropriate nursing care is sensitivity to and knowledge about the group being cared for. Although "mental health" and "mental illness" are artificial concepts among people who do not differentiate and treat mind, body, and spirit separately, and who may not differentiate illness from other problems of living, many individuals ethnically rooted in one or more Asian cultures enter Western mental health care systems. Quality nursing care requires understanding and respect for traditional values, beliefs, and practices that may differ significantly from those typical of Western European-based societies. Whether clients are traditional in orientation or highly acculturated to Western ways, nurses are responsible for providing culturally appropriate care. This article discusses mental health and nursing care from various perspectives of Asian and Asian-American clients, and in particular those of Chinese descent.

The information used to discriminate complex tones with (largely) unresolved components was assessed. In experiment 1, subjects discriminated a harmonic complex tone, H, with fundamental frequency F0, from an inharmonic tone, I, in which all components were shifted upwards by the same amount in hertz. Tones H and I had the same envelope repetition rate but different temporal fine structure (TFS). The tones were passed through a fixed bandpass filter centered on harmonic N, to reduce excitation pattern cues. For all F0s (35-400 Hz), performance decreased as N was increased from 11 to 15, but, except for F0=35 Hz, remained above chance for N=15, where all harmonics should be unresolved. This suggests that discrimination can be based on TFS rather than on partially resolved components. In experiment 2, subjects discriminated the F0 of complex tones filtered as in experiment 1. Here, both envelope rate and TFS cues were available. Except for F0=35 Hz, discrimination thresholds, expressed as the Weber fraction for a change in time interval, were similar to those measured in experiment 1, suggesting that performance in experiment 2 was dominated by the use of TFS rather than envelope cues.

Speech reception thresholds were measured with steady and amplitude-modulated noise maskers for signals processed to contain variable amounts of temporal fine structure (TFS) information. Subjects benefited more from TFS information for the modulated than for the steady masker. For both maskers, addition of TFS information up to 548 Hz improved performance, though the improvement was greater for the modulated masker. The addition of TFS information at higher frequencies improved performance further for the modulated masker only. These results are consistent with the idea that TFS information is important for listening in the dips of a fluctuating masker.

1. This article documents the development of a nursing role to support the staff and faculty of a state residential school for adolescents during closure of that institution. 2. The process of institutional closure resulted in increased ambiguity and need to redefine social expectations and responsibilities. Supportive nursing intervention facilitated the transition. 3. Theory and intervention associated with loss through death and dying can be appropriately adapted for use in nursing intervention during loss experienced with organizational death and institutional closure. 4. Because the meaning and experience of loss during institutional closure involves everyone and does not occur in a uniform or linear manner, nurses' roles must be flexible, responsive to contextual change, and introspective, as well as analytical and supportive.

For normally hearing subjects, thresholds for discriminating the fundamental frequency (F0) of a complex tone, F0DLs, increase when the number of the lowest harmonic, N, is above eight. A previous study showed that F0DLs were affected by component phase for N above 7, and it was argued that the increase in F0DLs with increasing N reflects a loss of temporal fine structure information. Here, subjects with moderate hearing loss were tested in a similar experiment. F0DLs were measured for tones with three successive harmonics, added in cosine or alternating phase. The center frequency was 2000 Hz. N was varied by changing the mean F0. A background noise was used to mask combination tones. F0 was roved across trials and N was roved by +/-1, to reduce use of excitation pattern cues. F0DLs were smaller for cosine than for alternating phase for four out of six subjects, and this occurred once N exceeded 5. In contrast to the result for normally hearing subjects, F0DLs decreased with increasing N. Performance was much worse than obtained for normally hearing subjects at the same center frequency, suggesting that most of the hearing-impaired subjects had a poor ability to use temporal fine structure information.

An eight-session training model used a social interactive framework to combine theoretical and methodological aspects of peer counseling, cross-cultural communication, and transcultural nursing, with a conviction that the participants (volunteers from an ongoing, urban methadone maintenance program) had significant strengths on which to build. The objective was to assist urban, drug dependent black women in taking control of their own lives through collaboration with health care professionals to develop and promote culturally acceptable behavioral alternatives related to reduction of risk for human immunodeficiency virus. The collaborative approach focused on rewards of behavioral change and minimized attention to prevention of negative behaviors, while openly valuing input from the women who are potential health promoters in their own communities. Evaluation of the Peer Counseling Leadership Training Program suggested that the approach facilitated personal risk-reducing behavioral change, improved self esteem, and successfully promoted involvement in community-based prevention efforts

Temporal fine structure (TFS) information in speech may be particularly useful when listening to a target in a background that contains temporal 'dips'. A change in TFS may allow identification of signal portions where the target‐to‐background ratio is high. This hypothesis was tested. Speech reception thresholds were measured with steady and an 8‐Hz amplitude‐modulated noise background for signals processed to contain variable amounts of TFS information. Signals were filtered into channels and channel signals for channel numbers above a 'cut off channel' (CO) were tone‐vocoded to remove TFS information, while channel signals with channel numbers of CO and below were left unprocessed. Signals from all channels were combined. Five values of CO were tested for each noise type, with ten normal‐hearing subjects. Subjects benefited more from TFS information when listening in the modulated masker than the steady masker. For steady noise, addition of TFS information above 548 Hz did not improve performance, wher...