Variables associated with adolescent alcohol use: a multiethnic comparison

The authors examined the influence of sociodemographic variables on the frequency and intensity of alcohol use among a nationally representative sample of Black, Hispanic, and White adolescents who had participated in the 1991 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1993). The sample consisted of 8,756 U.S. adolescents aged 12 to 18 years. The authors found that (a) approximately 19% of the respondents had used alcohol in the last 30 days: (b) among the respondents who had used alcohol, 21% had consumed 1 or more drinks per drinking episode; and (c) there were important similarities as well as important differences in variables that promoted alcohol use among Black. Hispanic, and White adolescents.     

Personality characteristics associated with romantic attachment: a comparison of interview and self-report methodologies

This study compared the personality attributes associated with self-report versus interview assessment of romantic attachment. Twenty-three-year-olds (N = 83) completed the Romantic Attachment Interview, the Experiences in Close Relationship Inventory, and measures of response bias, self-enhancement, and self-insight. Five psychologists evaluated the participants' personality. Although both self-report and interview assessment were related to attachment-relevant personality attributes, interview assessment was slightly more likely to explain unique variance in personality, especially regarding intrapsychic attributes. Self-enhancement was negatively related to secure attachment and positively related to dismissing attachment. The opposite pattern emerged for self-insight. A subgroup of 12 vulnerable individuals who described themselves as securely attached on self-report was judged as dismissing according to interview assessment. These individuals scored low on self-insight and high on self-enhancement and psychological vulnerability. The results are discussed with reference to the relative strengths of different measures of romantic attachment and relations among dismissing attachment, self-enhancement, and narcissism.     

A stage is a stage is a stage: a direct comparison of two scoring systems

L. Kohlberg (1969) argued that his moral stages captured a developmental sequence specific to the moral domain. To explore that contention, the author compared stage assignments obtained with the Standard Issue Scoring System (A. Colby & L. Kohlberg, 1987a, 1987b) and those obtained with a generalized content-independent stage-scoring system called the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System (T. L. Dawson, 2002a), on 637 moral judgment interviews (participants' ages ranged from 5 to 86 years). The correlation between stage scores produced with the 2 systems was .88. Although standard issue scoring and hierarchical complexity scoring often awarded different scores up to Kohlberg's Moral Stage 2/3, from his Moral Stage 3 onward, scores awarded with the two systems predominantly agreed. The author explores the implications for developmental research.     

Action video game playing is associated with improved visual sensitivity, but not alterations in visual sensory memory

Action video game playing has been experimentally linked to a number of perceptual and cognitive improvements. These benefits are captured through a wide range of psychometric tasks and have led to the proposition that action video game experience may promote the ability to extract statistical evidence from sensory stimuli. Such an advantage could arise from a number of possible mechanisms: improvements in visual sensitivity, enhancements in the capacity or duration for which information is retained in visual memory, or higher-level strategic use of information for decision making. The present study measured the capacity and time course of visual sensory memory using a partial report performance task as a means to distinguish between these three possible mechanisms. Sensitivity measures and parameter estimates that describe sensory memory capacity and the rate of memory decay were compared between individuals who reported high evels and low levels of action video game experience. Our results revealed a uniform increase in partial report accuracy at all stimulus-to-cue delays for action video game players but no difference in the rate or time course of the memory decay. The present findings suggest that action video game playing may be related to enhancements in the initial sensitivity to visual stimuli, but not to a greater retention of information in iconic memory buffers.     

The improved name game: better use of expanding retrieval practice

Morris and Fritz (2000) demonstrated the effectiveness of the name game as a retrieval-practice based technique for learning the names of group members. We hypothesised that a reversed version of the name game would be even more effective. Performance was contrasted with a no-retrieval condition that mimicked the name game in every way except for the retrieval of the names, allowing an estimate of the specific contribution of retrieval practice. The benefit of a few refresher rounds of the game after 2 weeks was also examined. The reversed name game was superior to the original name game and the refresher rounds benefited all groups. The very considerable superiority of the name game over the no-retrieval condition demonstrated the magnitude of the benefit of expanding retrieval practice.     

The improved name game: Better use of expanding retrieval practice

Morris and Fritz (2000) demonstrated the effectiveness of the name game as a retrieval-practice based technique for learning the names of group members. We hypothesised that a reversed version of the name game would be even more effective. Performance was contrasted with a no-retrieval condition that mimicked the name game in every way except for the retrieval of the names, allowing an estimate of the specific contribution of retrieval practice. The benefit of a few refresher rounds of the game after 2 weeks was also examined. The reversed name game was superior to the original name game and the refresher rounds benefited all groups. The very considerable superiority of the name game over the no-retrieval condition demonstrated the magnitude of the benefit of expanding retrieval practice.     

Evaluation of a mental health treatment court with assertive community treatment

Without active engagement, many adults with serious mental illnesses remain untreated in the community and commit criminal offenses, resulting in their placement in the jails rather than mental health facilities. A mental health treatment court (MHTC) with an assertive community treatment (ACT) model of case management was developed through the cooperative efforts of the criminal justice and mental health systems. Participants were 235 adults with a serious mental illness who were booked into the county jail, and who volunteered for the study. An experimental design was used, with participants randomly assigned to MHTC or treatment as usual (TAU), consisting of adversarial criminal processing and less intensive mental health treatment. Results were reported for 6 and 12 month follow-up periods. Clients in both conditions improved in life satisfaction, distress, and independent living, while participants in the MHTC also showed reductions in substance abuse and new criminal activity. Outcomes are interpreted within the context of changes brought about in the community subsequent to implementation of the MHTC.     

Wealth is associated with lower anxiety in a sample of Lebanese students

A sample of 160 Lebanese students in the American University at Beirut (a relatively wealthy sample) had a significantly lower mean score on the Kuwait University Anxiety Scale than a sample of 639 Lebanese students in the Lebanese University (a less wealthy sample). Sex differences in anxiety scores were not significant in the first sample, but were in the second.     

Intelligence is associated with criminal justice processing: Arrest through incarceration

Findings flowing from empirical research consistently indicate that IQ is associated with criminal involvement, with persons of relatively lower IQ being more likely to engage in various types of crime when compared with persons of relatively higher IQ. As with all research, however, there are a number of limitations with the existing literature that may bias the IQ–crime connection in unknown ways. Specifically, previous research has generally analyzed sub-samples drawn from non-nationally representative samples, has relied on a narrow range of criminal justice measures, has not fully examined whether the IQ–crime link is observed across demographic subgroups, and has not always ruled out the effects of potential confounds. The current study is designed to overcome the most serious of these limitations and offer new evidence of the link between IQ and criminal involvement. Analysis of data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) provides strong evidence indicating that IQ and crime are linked even after addressing various shortcomings of previous research. Limitations of the study are discussed and directions for future research are offered.     

Event content in a daily survey is differentially associated with concurrent mood

Daily life events were grouped according to their life content area and according to the desirability of the event as rated by the subject. Associations among event groupings and concurrently measured daily mood were examined. As in studies of major life events, some event classifications were more strongly associated with mood than were others: Specifically, desirable family-leisure events and undesirable work events were strongly related to mood. The results suggests that particular life areas deserve special attention in understanding environmental stress.     

Failure to condition to a cue is associated with sustained contextual fear

The acquisition of a conditioned fear response is adaptive, as it enables the organism to appropriately respond to predictors of aversive events. Consequently, the absence of predictive cues can be used as a signal for safety. We aimed to study whether deficient fear conditioning might lead to maladaptive fear. Following previous work, we predicted that failure to learn the CS-US association would result in higher contextual fear, and that participants who failed to learn would tend to exhibit higher trait anxiety. Conditioning took place in a virtual environment with two contexts. In one of the two contexts, offset of a CS (light) was associated with a shock. Each participant visited two places (a house and an apartment) in each of 12 blocks. In one of these places shocks were administered at the offset of an 8-s period of lights on (CS). The results showed that half of the participants demonstrated differential shock expectancy between situations in the shock context in which the CS was present versus absent. This indicates that these participants learned the contingencies between the shocks and both the context and the light CS. In contrast, the other half of the participants learned only the association with the context. As predicted, learning the CS-US contingency resulted in reduced self-reported fear in the absence of the CS in the danger context compared to the presence of the CS. On the other hand, participants who failed to learn the association displayed a sustained aversive state throughout the duration of the danger context. Skin conductance measures confirmed this pattern of results. Fear-potentiated startle during the threat context compared to the safe context was significant in both groups, while startle was only potentiated during the CS in the threat context in the group that learned the CS association (trend-level significant). Finally, scores on Spielberger's self-report scale of trait anxiety tended to be higher in the group of participants who did not learn the CS-shock association in the danger context compared to participants who did. In conclusion, these results confirm higher contextual fear in participants who did not acquire a conditioned response to the cue in comparison to participants who did. Also, virtual reality contexts provide a useful tool for the study of context conditioning.     

Agrammatic Broca's aphasia is not associated with a single pattern of comprehension performance

One influential hypothesis posits that the brain regions implicated in Broca's aphasia are responsible for specific syntactic operations that are necessary for the comprehension and production of sentences (Grodzinsky, 1986, 1990, in press). The empirical basis of this hypothesis is the claim that Broca's aphasics have no difficulty understanding sentences in the active voice (and other "canonical" sentence types, such as subject relatives and clefts with negative predicates), but perform at chance level with passive voice constructions (and other "noncanonical" sentences such as object-gap relatives and object clefts). In the face of well-established results indicating that Broca's aphasics can exhibit several different performance patterns on these sentence types, Grodzinsky, Pi?ango, Zurif, and Drai (1999) argued that these conflicting results do not challenge the theory when the data are analyzed appropriately. They carried out a creative statistical analysis of the comprehension performance of published cases of Broca's aphasia and concluded that all of these cases are in agreement with the predicted pattern: chance on passives and 100% correct on actives. Here we show that the statistical reasoning adopted by Grodzinsky et al. (1999) is flawed. We also show that the comprehension performance of a substantial number of the Broca's aphasics in their own sample does not conform to the pattern required. Rather, contrary to these authors' claim, Broca's aphasia is not associated with a consistent pattern of sentence comprehension performance, but allows for a number of distinct patterns in different patients.     

Psychological factors associated with maintenance of improved health behaviors in postcoronary patients

Multiple regression analyses of interview data determined whether certain behavioral, personality, and social support variables were associated with maintenance of changes in exercise, weight loss, and smoking cessation for a group of postcoronary patients. The results indicate that the psychological reactions to success or failure at one health behavior change, especially smoking, may affect the ability to maintain changes in other health behaviors. Also, the affective psychological sequelae to heart attacks may disrupt attempts to change health habits or may themselves be alleviated once successful health changes are achieved.