Are two heads better than one? Peer support and children's eyewitness reports

This study examined the effects of peer support on children's event reports. In Experiment 1, 48 children aged between 5 and 10 years who had been scheduled for a school dental visit involving an invasive procedure were interviewed about it 2–4 days later. Children were interviewed alone, with an informed peer (who had also recently had a dental appointment), or with an uninformed peer. Anxiety was assessed both prior to the dental appointment and at the time of the recall interview. Peer support did not influence children's anxiety or the amount or the accuracy of information reported in prompted recall. However, younger children interviewed alone were significantly more likely to be misled than those interviewed in the presence of a support child. In Experiment 2, children aged between 5 and 7 years took part in a neutral event contrived for the study. They were interviewed about it 3 days later, either alone or with an informed or uninformed support child present. The support child was encouraged to take an active part in the interview and to help the target child to describe what happened. Peer support did not influence the recall of the target child in either prompted recall or in response to questions. However, together the target and informed support children reported more information than did children interviewed alone or with uninformed support. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impact of Appointment Waiting Time on Attendance Rates at a Clinical Cancer Genetics Service

The increase in demand for clinical cancer genetics services has impacted the ability to provide services timeously. Given limited resources, this often results in extended appointment waiting times. Over the last 3 years, the Cancer Genetics Service at the National Cancer Centre Singapore has continued to experience a steady increase in demand for its service. Nevertheless, significant no-show rates have been reported. This study sought to determine whether an association exists between appointment waiting times and attendance rates. Data was gathered for all participants meeting inclusion criteria. Attendance rates and appointment waiting times were calculated. The relationship between mean waiting times for those who did and did not attend their scheduled appointments was evaluated using Welch’s t test and linear regression model. The results showed a significant difference in mean appointment waiting times between patients who did and did not attend (32.66 versus 43.50 days respectively; p?<?0.0001). Furthermore, patients who waited for longer than 37 days were significantly less likely to attend. No-show rates increased as the waiting time increased, at a rate of 19.60% per 20 days and 21.40% per 30 days. In conclusion, appointment waiting time is a significant predictor for patient attendance. Strategies to ensure patients receive an appointment within the necessary timeframe at the desired setting are important to ensure that individuals at increased cancer risk attend their appointments in order to manage their cancer risks effectively.     

Active memory processes in visual sentence comprehension: Clause effects and pronominal reference

Two experiments were conducted to investigate active memory processes during reading. Subjects read two-clause sentences one word at a time at a self-paced rate. Following each sentence a probe word was presented; subjects were to decide if this word occurred in the sentence they had just read. The first experiment examined clausal effects during reading. Reaction times to items from the final clause were shorter than those to items from a previous clause even when the same number of words intervened. The second experiment used the clause effect to address the issue of proniminal reference. Results indicated that a pronoun in the final clause activated the meaning of its antecedent, thus demonstrating that the method is sensitive to both surface and meaning codes in active memory.     

Factors Associated with First Session Nonattendance at a University-Based Family Therapy Clinic

Two hundred four consecutive psychotherapy initiators who called for an initial appointment at a university-based family therapy clinic during a one-year period were examined to see what factors influenced nonattendance. Researchers considered factors such as demographics, substance use, medical and psychiatric involvement, clinic practice, and constellation expected to attend. The 118 (58%) initiators who kept their appointment differed significantly from the 86 (42%) who did not in distance to the clinic, partner's age, number of children, marital status, employment, time of appointment, and therapeutic constellation. Divorce, unemployment, having a partner between the ages of 18–24, and having children were significant indicators of nonattendance. An appointment scheduled between 1:00 and 4:59 P.M., seeking conjoint psychotherapy, and living between 6 and 25 miles from the clinic were significant indicators of attendance. Implications for improving initial appointment attendance are presented.     

INCREASING APPOINTMENT KEEPING BY REDUCING THE CALL-APPOINTMENT INTERVAL

We examined the effect of reducing the interval between a patient's call for an appointment and the appointment itself. In Experiment 1, patients calling a family planning unit of a public health department were assigned appointments within either 1 or 3 weeks of their call. Data on patient “shows” and “no-shows” were recorded weekly for 6 weeks. Show rates for those in the 1-week appointment group were significantly higher than those in the 3-week group. In Experiment 2, patients were assigned to appointment dates either the next operating clinic day (next-day group) or 2 weeks from the call date (2-week group). Show rates for those in the next-day group were significantly better than show rates for patients in the 2-week group. Clinic productivity, time spent with patients, and consumer satisfaction were also assessed. Implications for appointment scheduling are discussed.     

Informed horses are influential in group movements,but they may avoid leading

In species that move in cohesive groups, animals generally reach decisions through socially distributed processes, and individual knowledge is expected to influence collective decision making. Pooling of information should not be considered a general rule, however, since conflicts of interest may occur between group members. When resources are limited or highly attractive, higher-ranking individuals can prevent others from accessing food, and subordinates may have an interest in withholding information about its location. We investigated the role individual knowledge may play in recruitment processes in four groups of horses (Equus caballus). Animals were repeatedly released in a food search situation, in which one individual had been informed about the location of a preferred food, while another was a naïve control subject. Horses that were informed about the location of the feeding site were seen to approach the food source more steadily and were followed by a higher number of group members than their uninformed counterparts. Recruitment processes appeared mostly passive. Among the informed subjects, lower-ranking individuals were overall less followed than the higher-ranking ones. Most lower-ranking horses arrived alone at the feeding site. Non-followed informed subjects spent less time in active walk and used direct paths less frequently than followed animals, and they were joined by fewer partners at the attractive food source and spent more time feeding alone. This indicates that the influence of informed individuals on the behavior of other group members was a mixed process. Some horses brought nutritional benefits to their conspecifics by leading them to food supplies, whereas the behavior of others might be functionally deceptive.     

The effect of clause wrap-up on eye movements during reading

The effect of clause wrap-up on eye movements in reading was examined. Readers read passages in which a target category noun referred to either a high typical or a low typical antecedent. In addition, the category noun was either clause final or non-clause final. There were four primary results: (1) Readers looked longer at a category noun when its antecedent was a low typical member of the category than when it was a high typical member; (2)readers looked longer at the category noun and at the post-category region when they were clause final than when they were not clause final; (3) readers regressed from a category noun or post-category region more frequently when it was clause final than when it was not clause final; and (4) readers made longer initial saccades when their eyes left the category noun or post-category region when this word was in clause final position than when it was not clause final. The last result suggests that sometimes higher order processes that are related to making a decision about when to move the eyes impinge on lower level decisions that are typically associated with deciding where to move the eyes.     

Control motivation and attributions for performance

Two experiments examined the relationship between the desire for effective control over performance outcomes and attributions of causality for those outcomes. In Experiment 1, subjects were led to believe that they had either succeeded at or failed a test that was either unimportant or important. As predicted, failure of the important test was attributed more to lack of effort (a controllable cause) and less to lack of ability (an uncontrollable cause) than was failure of the unimportant test. In Experiment 2, all subjects were led to believe that they had failed a test. Once again, subjects were informed that the test was either important or unimportant. In addition, half the subjects were told that they would be undergoing more tests in a later testing session, while half were not informed of any future testing. As in Experiment 1, subjects failing the important test attributed their failure less to lack of ability than did subjects failing the unimportant test. The anticipation of future testing interacted with test importance in its effects on attributions to ability. Subjects performing the unimportant task attributed their failure more to lack of ability when anticipating future performance than when not. Attributions of subjects performing an important task were not affected by the anticipation of future performance. Results were discussed in terms of the need for control over performance outcomes.     

知情同意的意义（上）——生物库伦理学该如何理解参与者观点

解释了在进入参与生物库的门户时参与者的角色。三项实证研究对生物库参与者在生物库知情同意程序的观点进行了审慎评估和讨论。这些研究表明,对知情同意伦理要求方面,参与者的观点是带有广泛不同见解的异质组而不是同质组;需要理解在招募中捐赠者的实际情境和在这些情境下他们的感觉;许多参与者可能并不按知情同意概念所期待的方式理解参与行为;知情同意的程序对很多人而言仍然是很重要的,其灵活性也证明可以满足那些非正统的参与者的某些期望。提出通过全新的视角审视患者参与的伦理学。     

Processing syntactically ambiguous sentences: Evidence from semantic priming

In this paper, we report the results of a study which investigates the processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences. We examined the processing of sentences in which an embedded clause is interpretable as either a complement clause or as a relative clause, as in, for example,The receptionist informed the doctor that the journalist had phoned about the events. The embedded clause in such sentences is typically analyzed as a complement to the verbinformed, rather than as a relative clause modifyingthe doctor. A number of models parsing predict this is the only analysis ever considered, while others predict that both interpretations are computed in parallel. Using a cross-model semantic priming technique, we probed for activation ofdoctor just after the embedded verb. Since only the relative clause analysis contains a connection betweenthe doctor and the embedded verb, we expected reactivation ofdoctor at that point only if the relative clause analysis were a viable option. Our results suggest that this is the case: Compared to priming in an ambiguous control sentence, a significant reactivation effect was obtained. These results are argued to support a model of parsing in which attachment of a clause may be delayed.The research reported here was supported in part by a grant from the McDonnell-Pew Cognitive Neurosciences Program, in part by grant DC-01409 (a research and training grant funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders), and in part by a SERC postdoctoral fellowship B/90/ITF/293. We are grateful to Andrew Barss, Paul Bloom, Merrill Garrett, David Swinney, and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to Paul Gorrell for extremely useful discussion of parsing issues. We thank Suzanne Delaney for giving voice to our stimulus sentences. The results of this study were presented at the Fifth Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, New York, March 1992.Order of authors is alphabetical.     

The interaction of perceptual processes and ambiguous sentences

General principles of speech perception resolve several experimental conflicts about whether listeners interpret one or all meanings of an ambiguous sentence We argue that during all ambiguous clause, both meanings are processed, but immediately after the clause over, it recoded with only one meaning retained This model resolves the apparently conflicting results of previous experimental, it also predicts that underlying structure ambiguity m incomplete clauses increases Comprehension time In complete clauses, ambiguity does not increase relative comprehension time; it mayreduce comprehension time for ambiguities whose interpretations are perceptually distinct in those tasks where either meaning is appropriate Two new experiments offer preliminary confirmation of these predictions     

Syntactic influences on stuttering in young child stutterers

This study examined the location and rate of stuttering in the spontaneous speech of nine young stutterers (4.0–6.6 yr) in relation to certain aspects of syntax. It was designed to answer the following questions: Is there more stuttering at clause onset (boundary) than at other points in the clause? Does the type of clause influence rate of stuttering? Is there more stuttering on complex than on simple sentences? The syntactic analysis defined 10 clause types (seven pertaining to complex sentences and three pertaining to simple sentences); clause boundaries (taking into account “filler” words occuring in such positions); and hierarchical constituent structure within sentences. Stuttering was found with significantly greater frequency at clause boundaries than at internal (nonboundary) positions of clauses. This was apparent for nine of the 10 clause types, the exception being complement clauses. The word “and” at the beginning of simple and complex sentences provoked a high rate of stuttering. The hierarchical structure within the clause did not influence the location of stuttering, and sentence complexity was not a factor in the rate of stuttering.     

The role of social cognition models in predicting attendance at health checks

Abstract

The present study sought to apply the Health Belief Model and the Theory of Planned Behaviour to the prediction of attendance at health checks. In addition, the way in which patients were invited to the health checks and the effect this had on both the uptake of the service and the role of cognitive factors in predicting attendance was analysed. Based in a single general practice, 818 patients were either sent an invitation letter which included an appointment time or they were sent an open invitation to contact the practice to make their own appointment time. Prior to the commencement of the programme health belief questionnaires were sent to patients. The results of the study firstly showed that letters offering patients an appointment produced a much higher attendance rate (70%) than letters containing an open invitation (37%). Secondly, through stepwise discriminant function analyses, the predictors of attendance behaviour were found to vary according to how patients were invited. For patients sent an appointment, attenders were found to be more likely than non-attenders to place a high value on their health, to believe that their health is influenced by powerful others, that certain referent groups would advise them to attend, that attending would lead to positive outcomes and that motivational barriers would not prevent them from attending. For patients sent an open invitation, intention to attend and perceived control were found to be independent predictors of attendance behaviour. These results suggest that attendance at health checks may not be a homogeneous behaviour such that the beliefs which distinguish attenders and non-attenders may be seen to vary according to the way in which the service is offered.     

The relationship between career decision status and important work outcomes

This paper describes a longitudinal study exploring the relationship between career decision status and work outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction, organizational commitment and performance) in a group of newly appointed graduates. Graduates employed into similar roles in a large Multinational Consultancy were tracked over 12 months at three time intervals: on appointment; 6 months after appointment and 12 months after appointment. It was concluded that job satisfaction promotes career comfort, decidedness predicts organizational commitment and this relationship is moderated by met expectations, and that neither being decided or comfortable predicts performance. Some evidence was found to suggest that those employees claiming high self-clarity (that is knowledge of their abilities, skills, and personality) were rated as higher performers. It was concluded that career decidedness is still relevant to a contemporary work environment, but that comfort with career decisions and knowledge of self (i.e. self-clarity) has the potential for far greater impact.     

Processing of new arguments at clause boundaries

In a subject-paced reading-time study, we examined the processing of new arguments at clause boundaries. Word reading times increased with the cumulative number of new-argument nouns at clause boundaries (as well as at sentence boundaries). New-argument nouns had a greater impact at clause boundaries than at nonboundary locations. In accordance with a buffer-integrate-purge model of reading (see Jarvella, 1979), the increase of reading times at boundaries was attributed to the integration of new information from the current sentence with prior information in the text representation. The increase at nonboundary locations was attributed to the growing load of buffering the new information. Reading times at clause boundaries were influenced to a greater extent by text-level integration than by such sentence-level processes as organization of words into clauses and linking of clauses within a sentence. The new contribution of this study was that it showed that clause boundaries provide an opportunity not only for sentence-level processes, but also for a text-level process, namely, the integration of text-new information with the growing text representation.     

Risk factors for psychological morbidity in women attending a one-stop diagnostic clinic with suspected breast disease

Abstract

The present study was designed to identify risk factors for psychological morbidity in women attending a one-stop diagnostic clinic with suspected breast disease. A cohort of 158 women were recruited and were asked to complete scales measuring psychological morbidity and psychosocial factors in the period immediately before their appointment and to repeat the assessments of psychological morbidity on the day of the appointment. Relevant clinical and demographic data were also collated. Within the cohort 1.4% of respondents received a diagnosis of malignant disease. Psychological morbidity, both prior to and during the diagnostic appointment was strongly predicted by psychosocial factors (i.e., acceptance-resignation coping, personal self esteem and discrepancies in social support), accounting for 54% and 63% of the variance at pre-appointment and appointment day phases respectively. Other measured variables were found not to be correlated with and/or to account for a significant proportion of the variance in the measures of morbidity. These results suggest that these psychosocial variables should be targeted in interventions designed to reduce psychological morbidity in this patient group.     

The Influence of Focus Operators on Syntactic Processing of Short Relative Clause Sentences

Ni, Crain, and Shankweiler (1996) present evidence to suggest that the focus operator only can guide how reduced relative clause sentences are initially parsed. In this paper, we demonstrate that this does not hold for relative clause sentences that start with a noun-phrase, verb, noun-phrase construction. We report an eye movement study in which subjects read reduced and unreduced sentences of this type with and without the focus operator only. There were longer first-pass reading times in the critical region of reduced sentences than in the same region of unreduced sentences, regardless of the inclusion of only. Furthermore, readers spent less time re-inspecting portions of text after being garden pathed when reading reduced relative clause sentences that contained the focus operator than when reading reduced relative clause sentences that did not. We conclude that subjects initially syntactically misanalysed reduced relative clause sentences with and without only, and the inclusion of a focus operator facilitated recovery procedures rather than guiding initial parsing. These results are inconsistent with the referential theory and undermine the conclusions of Ni et al. (1996).     

Syntactic structure modifies attention during speech perception and recognition

The present paper demonstrates the interaction of syntactic structure and speech perception with a response task which minimizes the effects of memory: reaction time (RT) to clicks during sentences. (1) In 12-word unfamiliar sentences each with two clauses, RT is relatively slow overall to clicks located at the end of the first clause but decreases as a function of clause length. Clicks at the beginning of the second clause are not affected by length of the preceding clause. (2) In familiar sentences, RT is relatively fast to clicks located at the end of a clause while RT to clicks at the beginning of clauses is relatively unaffected by familiarity. (3) RT is not fastest overall to clicks located between clauses either in novel or familiar sentences. (4) As in previous studies, the subject's subsequent judegment of the location of the click tone are towards the clause break. (5) We could find no systematic interaction between RT and subjective click location. Findings (1) to (3) are consistent with the view that perceptual processing alternates between attending to all external stimuli and developing an internal representation of the stimuli. Finding (3) is in conflict with an “information channel” view of immediate attention to speech, which would predict high sensory attention to non-speech stimuli between clauses. However, findings (4) and (5) indicate that the channel view of perception may be correct for that perceptual processing which occurs after the immediate organization of the speech stimulus into major segments.     

Detection of a nonlinguistic stimulus is poorest at the end of a clause

Subjects detected a brief near-threshold tone while encoding two-clause sentences for later report. The objective tone locations were at the end of the first clause, at the beginning of the second clause, or in the clause boundary. The effects of intensity variations of the speech signal were assessed by having subjects detect the tones in the same speech stimuli played backward. Tones at the end of a clause are relatively harder to detect than in other positions, comparing forward and backward speech. This supports the view that listeners are preoccupied with internal processes at the end of a clause.