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Biomedical subjects

R P Hobson

Publications and source records attributed to R P Hobson.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1996

An outbreak of multiply-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae in the Grampian region of Scotland.

A predominantly hospital-based outbreak of multiply-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae capsular type K2 (MRK) expressing expanded spectrum betalactamase (ESBL) activity and fully sensitive only to the carbapenems and amikacin is described. The organism was isolated from 283 patients between March 1992 and September 1995. The outbreak started in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a major acute hospital and spread through surgical wards, a medical ward, a geriatric unit in a separate hospital and various other local hospitals. Environmental screening revealed extensive ward contamination. The decline of the outbreak after the spring of 1995 coincided with the re-emphasis of standard infection control procedures and the launch of a works programme aimed at addressing underlying sites of environmental contamination. Of the 283 cases, 166 (59.0%) were detected through a specially instigated case finding programme. The MRK caused 11 cases of septicaemia, two postoperative intra-abdominal abscesses, one case of postoperative meningitis, 102 cases of urinary tract infection and 28 wound infections and was isolated from the respiratory tracts of five patients with ventilator associated pneumonia. The difficulty in controlling the outbreak is ascribed to heavy environmental contamination, frequent inter- and intra-hospital patient transfers and prolonged carriage of the outbreak strain.

Anti-Bacterial Agents↗
PubMed1995

Incidence and spread of Haemophilus influenzae on an Antarctic base determined using the polymerase chain reaction.

A PCR-based method of detecting Haemophilus influenzae in cultures inoculated from throat swabs was evaluated using samples from groups of laboratory staff and medical students and then applied to samples originating from the closed human community of an Antarctic research station. Suitable PCR primers to an H. influenzae gene (ompP2) were used to amplify the gene from DNA preparations made from mixed growth on chocolate agar with added vancomycin. PCR product was reamplified and subjected to restriction endonuclease digestion to allow temporal and spatial mapping of strains over an 8-month period. Eleven different strains of H. influenzae were detected. One particular strain was detected in a third of the base members.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

I, you, me, and autism: an experimental study.

The nature of autistic individuals' abnormalities in the use of personal pronouns has been a topic of considerable speculation but little systematic investigation. We tested groups of CA- and verbal MA-matched autistic and nonautistic mentally retarded children and young adults on a series of tasks that involved the comprehension and use of the personal pronouns "I," "you," and "me." All subjects were able to comprehend these pronouns within the test situations, and there were few instances of pronoun reversal. However, autistic subjects were significantly less likely to employ the pronoun "me" in a visual perspective-taking task (when instead they tended to say: 'I can see the . . .'), and lower ability subjects were more likely to use their own proper names rather than personal pronouns in certain photograph-naming tasks. There were also circumstances in which autistic subjects were less likely than controls to employ the pronoun "you" to refer to the experimenter. A high proportion of these autistic subjects were reported to have current difficulties with personal pronouns in their everyday life, and we discuss some alternative interpretations of the results.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

What is autism?

In a speculative and somewhat incautious frame of mind, I have tried to explore the question: What is autism? My suggestion has been that the essence of autism is, as Kanner indicates, an impairment in affectively patterned intersubjective personal relations. Such impairment usually has a predominant and often sufficient basis in biologic deficits intrinsic to the affected children. I have tried to indicate how such deficits might on the one hand be caused by heterogeneous physical afflictions and, even in some more broadly handicapped cases, a mixture of lower-order psychological impairments, and on the other hand give rise to the constellation of cognitive, linguistic, and motivational deficits that are characteristic of the syndrome. I have also referred to the dangers of circularity in defining too much of the clinical picture as essentially rather than characteristically autistic, and also in supposing that all children with this presentation are equally constrained in their developmental potential when selected patients might have an underlying psychopathology that allows for some recovery in cognitive as well as social functioning. I have not had space to give due acknowledgment to the ways in which many autistic children circumvent, compensate for, or otherwise overcome a number of their disabilities. Ultimately, it will be as great a challenge to explain what autistic children do achieve in their social relations, their thinking, and their language as to explain their characteristic deficits. In the meantime, autism may already reveal the degree to which human existence and human development pivot upon the capacity for genuinely interpersonal relations and interpersonal understanding. To inquire "What is autism?" is also to ask "What are the essence and implications of interpersonal life?"

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1990

On acquiring knowledge about people and the capacity to pretend: response to Leslie (1987)

Leslie (1987) has proposed a cognitivist model for the young child's "theory of mind" and capacity to pretend. Serious shortcomings in Leslie's nondevelopmental, nonsocial, and restrictively cognitive account are noted, and an alternative thesis is proposed: A young child's knowledge about people is grounded in the experience of affectively charged interpersonal relations, and the child's capacity for pretend play develops on the basis of prior abilities to perceive the nature of other people's relatedness to the world. Clinical phenomena associated with autism and congenital blindness provide evidence for this thesis.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1990

On psychoanalytic approaches to autism.

An analysis of the strengths and limitations of psychoanalytic approaches to autism serves to highlight the need for a theoretical scheme adequate to encompass social as well as cognitive development in autistic individuals. It is proposed that such a scheme will entail an account of normal development in which children's "object relations" feature prominently.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1990

Concerning knowledge of mental states.

How does a child acquire knowledge that other people are subjects of experience, and come to differentiate amongst mental states? In this paper I review some philosophical perspectives on these matters. In order to illustrate how the arguments have contemporary relevance, I criticize the 'theory of mind' approach currently favoured by many psychologists and point out certain implications for our view of early childhood autism.

Affect↗
PubMed1989

Emotion-related and abstract concepts in autistic people: evidence from the British Picture Vocabulary Scale.

Autistic and nonautistic retarded adolescents and young adults, individually matched for chronological age and performance on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS; Dunn, Dunn, & Whetton, 1982), were compared on those items of the BPVS that independent raters judged (a) emotion-related and (b) highly abstract. Compared to control subjects, autistic individuals scored lower on emotion-related vis-à-vis emotion-unrelated items, an effect that could not be attributed to the "social content" of the items. However, autistic and nonautistic subjects achieved similar scores when responding to highly abstract vis-à-vis "concrete" words of the BPVS. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have specific impairments in grasping emotion-related concepts. They also suggest the need for further study of autistic and nonautistic retarded subjects' difficulties in abstracting. The results have a bearing on the interpretation of the BPVS and on the use of this test as a matching procedure.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Recognition of emotion by mentally retarded adolescents and young adults.

Mentally retarded adolescents and young adults, together with nonretarded children individually matched for verbal mental age, were given tasks in which they chose photographs of faces to accompany emotionally expressive voices and photographs of nonemotional things or events to accompany recorded sounds. Retarded individuals performed less well than did nonretarded control subjects on the emotion tasks but were not so impaired on the nonemotion tasks. These results suggest that mentally retarded individuals may have specific deficits in recognizing how bodily expressions of emotion are coordinated with each other.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

Emotion recognition in autism: coordinating faces and voices.

Autistic and non-autistic mentally retarded adolescents and young adults were individually matched for age and verbal ability and were given tasks in which they chose photographs of faces for emotionally expressive voices, and photographs of non-emotional things or events to accompany recorded sounds. The results were that relative to control subjects, autistic individuals performed less well on the emotion tasks than on the non-emotion tasks. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have a disability in recognizing bodily expressions of emotion, and that there is a degree of task-specificity to this impairment.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

What's in a face? The case of autism.

Groups of verbal MA-matched autistic and non-autistic retarded adolescents and young adults were tested for their ability to recognize emotion and personal identity in photographed faces and parts of faces. The tasks were to match expressions of emotion across different individuals, and to identify unfamiliar individuals despite changes in emotional expression. Faces were also presented upside-down. The results indicated a specific abnormality in the way autistic individuals perceive emotion, and possibly sex, in people's faces. In addition, however, autistic subjects' superior ability in matching upside-down faces suggested a more far-reaching abnormality in their perception of faces.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1987

The autistic child's recognition of age- and sex-related characteristics of people.

Matched autistic, normal, and nonautistic retarded children were tested for their ability to choose schematic and photographed faces of a man, a woman, a girl, and a boy, to accompany videotaped sequences depicting a person of each class in (a) gestures, (b) vocalizations, and (c) "contexts" that might be considered typical for an individual of this age and sex. Although both autistic and control subjects were able to choose drawings of nonpersonal objects to correspond with videotaped cues, the autistic children were markedly impaired in selecting appropriate faces for the videotaped individuals. It is suggested that these results may reflect autistic children's relative disability in differentiating adults from children and males from females.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1987

The salience of facial expression for autistic children.

Autistic and non-autistic retarded children who were matched for verbal ability were shown 'standard' pairs of photographs of people who differed in three, two or one of the following respects: sex, age, facial expression of emotion, and the type of hat they were wearing. When given similar photographs to sort, the majority of non-autistic children sorted according to people's facial expressions before they sorted according to type of hat, but most autistic children gave priority to sorting by type of hat, and many neglected the facial expressions altogether. It is suggested that these results reflect autistic children's insensitivity to other people's facial expressions of emotion.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1986

The autistic child's appraisal of expressions of emotion: a further study.

Autistic and matched non-autistic retarded children were selected for their ability to recognize the correspondence between schematic drawings and videotaped scenes involving people. The subjects of both groups were able to choose schematic drawings of gestures for a person's gestures of emotion enacted on videotape. However, the autistic children were significantly impaired in choosing which of the drawings of gestures should 'go with' videotaped vocalizations and facial expressions characteristic of four emotional states. The results were found to be consistent with results from a previous, related study in which the same subjects had chosen drawn or photographed faces to indicate their judgements of the same videotapes of emotional expression. It is suggested that these findings reflect an important aspect of autistic children's social disability.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1986

The autistic child's appraisal of expressions of emotion.

Groups of MA-matched autistic, normal and non-autistic retarded children were tested for their ability to choose drawn and photographed facial expressions of emotion to "go with" a person videotaped in gestures, vocalizations and contexts indicative of four emotional states. Although both autistic and control subjects were adept in choosing drawings of non-personal objects to correspond with videotaped cues, the autistic children were markedly impaired in selecting the appropriate faces for the videotaped expressions and contexts. Within the autistic group, the children's performance in this task of emotion recognition was related to MA. It is suggested that autistic children have difficulty in recognizing how different expressions of particular emotions are associated with each other, and that this might contribute to their failure to understand the emotional states of other people.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1984

Early childhood autism and the question of egocentrism.

An individual's social competence is often considered in terms of his role-taking abilities. In the light of studies by Piaget, it has been supposed that a child's developing capacity to appreciate the viewpoints of others in a social context is reflected in his ability to recognize points of view in a visuospatial setting. If this is valid, then visuospatial role-taking tasks may afford a measure of some relatively "cognitive" component of the capacity to engage in social behavior. Tasks in which subjects were required to make judgments about different and yet related views of a three-dimensional scene or object, together with tests of operational thinking, were presented to normal children and to subjects with the diagnosis of infantile autism. The results indicate that autistic children are not more impaired in their recognition of visuospatial perspectives than are normal children of comparable intellectual level in tests of operational thinking. A further, more limited study yielded suggestive evidence that over this series of tasks, autistic children perform as well as subjects with Down's syndrome who have a similar verbal mental age. These findings render it improbable that autistic children are especially "egocentric" in their appreciation of visuospatial perspectives.

Autistic Disorder↗