Reliability of self-reported service use: Test-retest consistency of children's responses to the Child and Adolescent Services Assessment (CASA)

This paper reports on the reliability of children's responses on the Child and Adolescent Services Assessment (CASA) — a self-report instrument for use with 8– to 18-year-olds that gathers information about services used to address mental health problems. Findings were based on interviews completed by 77 children at a one week test-retest interval. Results showed that reports of lifetime service use were as reliable as were reports of service use in the preceding three months. Children reported restrictive and intrusive services more reliably than services that were provided in their natural environment. Reliability appeared to be associated more strongly with characteristics of the type of service than with characteristics of the child. Children also could report reliably on some details about their encounters with service providers (e.g., length of stay, number of visits, and onset of service use).     

Modelling cognition in emotional disorder: The S-REF model

Cognitive therapy techniques are applied to an ever-increasing range of psychological disorders. However, both basic methods and general theory of therapy have evolved more slowly. Although cognitive therapy is based on experimentally testable concepts derived from cognitive psychology, an integration of these areas capable of explaining cognitive-attentional phenomena and offering treatment Implications remains to be achieved. In this paper, we outline the Self-Regulatory Executive Function (S-REF) model of emotional disorder, which integrates information processing research with Beck's schema theory. The model advances understanding of the roles of stimulus-driven and voluntary control of cognition, procedural knowledge (beliefs), and of the interactions between different levels of information-processing. It also accounts for cognitive bias effects demonstrated in the experimental psychopathology literature. The model presents implications concerning not only what should be done in cognitive therapy, but how cognitive change may be most effectively accomplished.     

Learned helplessness deficits: Uncontrollable outcomes or perceived failure?

An experiment is described showing that learned helplessness deficits are produced by prior exposure to uncontrollable outcomes rather than perceived failure. Although the controllability manipulation did produce differences in perceived success or failure, similar differences were also induced by means of instructional feedback. These latter differences, within the controllable and uncontrollable groups, were not associated with poorer performance by subjects given failure feedback. Moreover, the instructional feedback did not influence subjects' perceptions of controllability or uncontrollability. The results confirm that helplessness deficits cannot be explained as reactions to task failure.This research was supported by Research Grant A28015473 from the Australian Research Grants Scheme.     

The role of proprioception in the perception and control of human movement: Toward a theoretical reassessment

The theoretical role of proprioception in the perception and control of human movement is elusive because of the obvious inability to manipulate experimentally the various receptive systems. Individuals who have had the metacarpophalangeal joint and joint capsule removed and replaced with silastic inserts afford a unique opportunity to evaluate a principal source of proprioception, namely, slowly adapting joint afferents. In a set of experiments, we show that such individuals show no deficits in finger localization following joint replacement. We take this and other complementary findings as a preliminary basis for proposing a dynamic rather than kinematic account of movement production. In addition, we provide a reconceptualization of the function of proprioceptive information in the CNS. Our arguments focus on proprioceptive inputs as tuning or modulating interneuronal pools rather than providing dimension-pecific information to the brain, as is commonly assumed.     

Lay theories of delinquency

This paper is concerned with the range, structure and determinants of lay people's implicit theories of delinquency. The different explicit psychological and sociological theories were reviewed as were studies on lay beliefs about crime and delinquency. After pilot interviews in which people were asked to list what they believed to be the major causes of delinquency, over 350 people completed a questionnaire in which they rated 30 explanations for their importance in explaining delinquency. The results showed numerous sex, age and voting differences. Conservatives tended to blame a person's poor education for his or her delinquency, while Labour voters tended to explain delinquency in terms of societal factors. A factor analysis revealed six clear explanation types for delinquency some of which were clearly related to explicit theories. Results were discussed in terms of the psychology of explanations and the relationship between explicit and implicit theories. Implications of this research were also noted.     

Favouritism,fairness and joint profit in long-term relationships

This study was designed to test a number of hypotheses about the use of FAV and other strategies as measured by the intergroup ‘matrices’ in four long-term relationships-with spouse, child, friend and workmate. Forty subjects filled in matrices giving three measures of self-favouritism (FAV), and one each of fairness (F) and maximum joint profit (MJP), in relation to the allocation of money and time. It was found that FAV was not used for spouse, and was used less for child than for the non-family relationships (p < 0.01, p < 0.05). There was also an influence of altruism (A) against FAV, when time was distributed between spouse (p < 0.01) or child (p < 0.001) and the self. F was used most for spouse, followed by child, friend and workmate (p < 0.001), and was used more by females in distributing money (p < 0.01). MJP was not used at all for money, but was used to some extent for time.     

The good,the bad and the mad: Response bias in self-report measures

This study set out to examine the susceptibility of five extensively used, self-report measures to response set bias. Subjects were requested either to fake good, (give a good impression), fake bad, (give a bad impression), fake mad, (give an impression of mental instability) or respond honestly. Subjects who faked good had significantly higher Extraversion, Lie and Social Desirability scores but lowest Neuroticism, Psychoticism and Social Anxiety scores. Subjects who faked bad had significantly lower Extraversion and higher Psychoticism and Social Anxiety scores. Fake mad subjects scored higher on Self-Monitoring and Locus of Control. Four of the eight scales showed significant differences between subjects faking bad and those faking mad. The results are discussed in terms of questionnaire design and respondent's motivation.     

Psychoticism,social desirability and situation selection

Previous research on personality and activity preference has shown that extraverts have a significantly and meaningfully different pattern of activity preference from introverts. This finding was also true of high and low neurotics but not to the same extent. This study was designed to see whether the traits of psychoticism and social desirability are also related to situational selection. Subjects from a large group were divided first into high P and low P scorers, and then high L and low L scorers. They indicated how much time they had spent in leisure situations over the past week; rank ordered their preferences for activities related to some of Murray's major needs and presses; rated their choice or avoidance of other abstractly described situations; and then stressful, anxiety-provoking, social situations. It was shown that both psychoticism and social desirability are related to situation selection in meaningful and predictable ways. The implications for personality assessment are considered.     

Dynamic relationships between phonological memory and reading: A five year longitudinal study from age 4 to 9

We reconcile competing theories of the role of phonological memory in reading development, by uncovering their dynamic relationship during the first 5 years of school. Phonological memory, reading and phoneme awareness were assessed in 780 phonics‐educated children at age 4, 5, 6 and 9. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that phonological memory loaded onto two factors: verbal short‐term memory (verbal STM; phonological tasks that loaded primarily on serial order memory) and nonword repetition. Using longitudinal structural equation models, we found that verbal STM directly predicted early word‐level reading from age 4 to 6, reflecting the importance of serial‐order memory for letter‐by‐letter decoding. In contrast, reading had no reciprocal influence on the development of verbal STM. The relationship between nonword repetition and reading was bidirectional across the 5 years of study: nonword repetition and reading predicted each other both directly and indirectly (via phoneme awareness). Indirect effects from nonword repetition (and verbal STM) to reading support the view that phonological memory stimulates phonemically detailed representations through repeated encoding of complex verbal stimuli. Similarly, the indirect influence of reading on nonword repetition suggests that improved reading ability promotes the phoneme‐level specificity of phonological representations. Finally, the direct influence from reading to nonword repetition suggests that better readers use orthographic cues to help them remember and repeat new words accurately. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LZfTR0BjE .