Ellen N. La Motte: the making of a nurse, writer, and activist.

This article examines the early career of Ellen N. La Motte (1873-1961) to trace how her training at the Johns Hopkins Training School for Nurses and years spent as a tuberculosis nurse in Baltimore shaped her perception of tuberculosis prevention and women's suffrage. Although studies of tuberculosis have frequently alluded to her work, no sustained biocritical discussion of her development as a nurse and scholar exists. Between 1902, when she graduated from nursing school, and 1914, the start of the Great War, La Motte published a textbook and dozens of articles in journals devoted to nursing and social reform and delivered many speeches at local, regional, and national meetings. In addition, as her reputation as an expert in the field of tuberculosis nursing grew, her advocacy for the vote for women increased, and she used her writing and speaking skills on behalf of the suffrage cause. This article assesses how the skills La Motte acquired during these years helped mold her into a successful and respected nurse, writer, and activist.

Specific biases for identifying facial expression of emotion in children and adolescents with conversion disorders.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to assess how children and adolescents with conversion disorders identify universal facial expressions of emotion and to determine whether identification of emotion in faces relates to subjective emotional distress. METHODS: Fifty-seven participants (41 girls and 16 boys) aged 8.5 to 18 years with conversion disorders and 57 age- and sex-matched healthy controls completed a computerized task in which their accuracy and reaction times for identifying facial expressions were recorded. To isolate the effect of individual emotional expressions, participants' reaction times for each emotion (fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and happiness) were subtracted from their reaction times for the neutral control face. Participants also completed self-report measures of subjective emotional distress. RESULTS: Children/Adolescents with conversion disorders showed faster reaction times for identifying expressions of sadness (t(112) = -2.2, p = .03; 444 [609] versus 713 [695], p = .03) and slower reactions times for happy expressions (t(99.3) = 2.28, p ≤ .024; -33 [35] versus 174 [51], p = .024), compared with controls (F(33.75, 419.81) = 3.76, p < .001). There were no significant correlations (at the corrected p value of .01) between reaction times and subjective reports of perceived distress (r values ranged from 092 to 0.221; p > .018). There were also no differences in identification accuracy for any emotion (p > .82). CONCLUSIONS: The observation of faster reaction times to sad faces in children and adolescents with conversion disorders suggests increased vigilance and motor readiness to emotional signals that are potential threats to self or to close others. These effects may occur before conscious processing.

Social phobics do not see eye to eye: a visual scanpath study of emotional expression processing.

Clinical observation suggests that social phobia is characterised by eye avoidance in social interaction, reflecting an exaggerated social sensitivity. These reports are consistent with cognitive models of social phobia that emphasize the role of interpersonal processing biases. Yet, these observations have not been verified empirically, nor has the psychophysiological basis of eye avoidance been examined. This is the first study to use an objective psychophysiological marker of visual attention (the visual scanpath) to examine directly how social phobia subjects process interpersonal (facial expression) stimuli. An infra-red corneal reflection technique was used to record visual scanpaths in response to neutral, happy and sad face stimuli in 15 subjects with social phobia, and 15 age and sex-matched normal controls. The social phobia subjects showed an avoidance of facial features, particularly the eyes, but extensive scanning of non-features, compared with the controls. These findings suggest that attentional strategies for the active avoidance of salient facial features are an important marker of interpersonal cues in social phobia. Visual scanpath evidence may, therefore, have important implications for clinical intervention.