Observational assessment systems use for basic and applied research

Three observational assessment systems, the Time-Sample Behavioral Checklist, the Staff-Resident Interaction Chronograph, and the Clinical Frequencies Recording System, are shown to have remarkable utility for a wide range of basic and applied research questions. The assessment systems have already been employed to measure independent and dependent variables in a number of treatment outcome and staff training studies and as measures in more basic studies of environmental history effects for chronic mental patients. Current and planned investigations employing the observational measures are outlined. These include psychometric studies of the instruments themselves, investigations of various parameters of ongoing treatment programs, and empirical validations of proposed nosological diagnostic schemas. Finally, several metamethodological issues germaine to observational assessment, in general, are noted, including the observation vs. interpretation debate and the role of precise observational measurement in applied research contexts.The research reported in this article was supported, in part, by Public Health Service Grants MH-15553 and MH-25464 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and by grants from The Joyce Foundation, Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, and the Purdue Research Foundation.Based on a paper presented at the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, New York City, September 1979, as part of a symposium New Assessment systems for residential treatment, management, research, and evaluation.     

Systems use to objectify program evaluation,clinical, and management decisions

The utility of the observational assessment systems at different levels — from local clinical to systemwide management — is outlined. An overview is provided of TSBC information applied to individualized problem identification and programming/monitoring, discharge and competency determinations, and both absolute and comparative program evaluation. The utility of SRIC information for prgoramming/monitoring and for staff training and evaluation is outlined in addition to the applied uses of the information of the assessment systems in combination. Once implemented, the continuous data from the systems allow for empirically based self-corrective improvements in the quality of mental health services while automatically providing a basis for legal documentation and accurate cost/effectiveness comparisons of mental health programs.Preparation of this article and the research and development on which the article is based were supported, in part, by Public Health Service Grants MH-15553 and MH-25464 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and by grants from The Joyce Foundation and the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.Presented at the 87th Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, New York City, September 1979, as part of a symposium on New assessment systems for residential treatment, management, research, and evaluation.     

“Emotionally, Soulfully, Spiritually ‘Free to Think and Act’: The Helen Flanders Dunbar (1902–59) Memorial Lecture on Psychosomatic Medicine and Pastoral Care”

This essay aims to stimulate rethinking about religious and medical healing and wholeness. While psychiatrist (Helen) Flanders Dunbar (1902–1959) is well known as a psychosomatic investigator and as Medical Director of the Council for Clinical Training, the initial home of Anton Boisen's groundbreaking movement for the clinical pastoral education of institutional chaplains and parish ministers, she is less appreciated as a theologically-trained scholar. This essay explores an earlier era's understanding of the spiritual and the more soulful components of healing and how Dunbar combined these to focus on helping all peoples become free to think and act. This essay was originally delivered as The Helen Flanders Dunbar Memorial Lecture on Psychosomatic Medicine and Pastoral Care at Columbia Presbyterian Center of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York on November 2, 1999.     

Parental interpersonal perceptual style,child adjustment,and parent—Child interactions

This research examined relationships between parental interpersonal perceptual style (IPS)—the extent to which they are biased in their perceptions of children's behaviors—and (a) the adjustment of their own children and (b) parent-child interactions. In two studies, groups of parents first viewed a videotape of a male or female target child interacting with an adult in a playroom and then completed a behavior checklist about the target child that measured their IPS. In Study 1, parents' (especially fathers') IPS was found to be related to interaction between them and their 5-to7-year-old child; for example, the less negatively biased the father was, the more likely the child was to openly display antagonistic behavior toward his or her parents. In Study 2, fathers' (but not mothers') IPS was found to be related to the teacher- and peer-assessed level of psychosocial adjustment of their own third-grade child; fathers of problem children tended to be more negatively biased in their perceptions than were fathers of either adequate or highly adjusted children. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the role that person perception processes play in family functioning and child development.This article is an adaptation of a paper presented as part of a symposium held during the 1977 meeting of the American Psychological Association. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant No. 24250, Adult Perceptions and Child Behavior Dysfunctions.We wish to thank Linda Oiacomo and Phyllis Watts for their help. We also wish to thank the numerous students who provided invaluable assistance by collecting, coding, and scoring the data. The cooperation of the administration and staff of the Lansing, Michigan, School District, especially Eva Evans and Richard Benjamin, and the administration and staff of the East Lansing, Michigan, School District, especially Robert Docking and Warren Starr, is also very gratefully acknowledged.     

Computer content analysis of sex differences in the language of children

This study presents empirical procedures for the collection and content analysis of the oral language of kindergarten children. The analysis technique used material and machines available to most researchers. The results of the analysis of language samples of 144 randomly selected children from the entire kindergarten class of the Ithaca, New York, school system showed that boys produced significantly more language than did the girls as well as significantly more references to aggression, self, time, space, quantity, fears, good, act of oral communication, negation, and affirmation, and asked more questions of the examiner than did the girls. The girls made significantly more female references than did the boys. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Hobby horses in Lascaux — On pictures and semiosis

This contribution is about semiology and art history. More specifically, it argues against the frequent claims that art history ought to take much more notice of semiology than it has tended to do so far. The argument against these claims is simple and basic: art history deals largely with images, and semiology does not — it has, in fact, little to say about them.Semiology has recently been presented as a supra-disciplinary theory that, although in practice most often applied to written texts, could equally well be applied to the art of painting. It has been considered merely a historical accident that semiotics was developed primarily in conjunction with literary texts. I do not think this is so. Semiology (or semiotics) not only has a strong anti-iconical bias, this bias was in fact one of its principles from the very beginning.Furthermore, the so-called supra-disciplinary theory of semiotics (in the form advocated for the humanities) is based upon specific views of language, signification and meaning, and these are not as evident as they are often made out to be — not even with regard to language itself. In particular the overriding importance attached to the role of arbitrariness within sign systems is questionable.In any case images are indeed in a class of their own, and without the acknowledgement of what is typical about them, it is hard to make much sense of either their use or construction — let alone of the history of art.     

“Some more” notes,toward a “third” sophistic

Historians of rhetoric refer to two Sophistics, one in the 5th century B.C. and another c. 2nd century A.D. Besides these two, there is a 3rd Sophistic, but it is not necessarily sequential. (The 3rd is counter to counting sequentially.) Whereas the representative Sophists of the 1st Sophistic is Protagoras, and the second, Aeschines, the representative sophists of the 3rd are Gorgias (as proto-Third) and Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man.To distinguish between and among Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and then Protagoras, Gorgias, and Lacan, the author determines how far each of these personages can count. The model of counting, used semiotically across the topoi of possible/impossible, is that of the people of New Guinea: one thing, two things, many things. It is determined (generally) that the philosophers, including Aristotle, count to one; the Sophists to two; and Gorgias, Lacan, and Lyotard, et al. count to many things, thereby breaking up a monism or binarism. The ancient philosophers employ a substratum of probability to hold together the contraries of possible/impossible; the Sophists employ anti/logic, which keeps the contraries/antitheses separate and therefore without synthesis, but which eventually threatens the integrity of the substratum, or the law of non-contradiction; and Gorgias, Lacan, Lyotard et al. theorize about the impossibility/Resistance of the Logos (reason, logic, law, argumentation, history) to Theory/Totalization, because of the Gorgian Kairos and the Lacanian Real — both of which enter the Logos and break up the cycle of the antitheses and create something new, irrational (Untersteiner).This breaking up has a negative/positive influence on Protagoras's man-measure doctrine, which in turn has a similar influence on the problem of the ethical subject. The subject/agent not only no longer knows (by way of Logos) but also no longer acts (as independent agent); the subject becomes a function of Logos as determined by Kairos/Real; it moves from a hypotaxis/syntaxis of one and two to a radical parataxis/paralogy of some more.From the Impossibility/tragedy of knowledge, however, comes the Possible, or Possibilisms, which allows for the new (though divided) ethical subject to reclaim its position as individual. Such a reclamation of the subject, however, has a profound effect on argumentation, and especially the notion of consensus. What is wanted, then, in a Third Sophistic ethical — as opposed to a political — rhetoric is dissensus through radical parataxes and paralogies.     

Modal logic with names

We investigate an enrichment of the propositional modal language with a universal modality having semanticsx iff y(y ), and a countable set of names — a special kind of propositional variables ranging over singleton sets of worlds. The obtained language _c proves to have a great expressive power. It is equivalent with respect to modal definability to another enrichment () of, where is an additional modality with the semanticsx iff y(y x y ). Model-theoretic characterizations of modal definability in these languages are obtained. Further we consider deductive systems in _c. Strong completeness of the normal _c-logics is proved with respect to models in which all worlds are named. Every _c-logic axiomatized by formulae containing only names (but not propositional variables) is proved to be strongly frame-complete. Problems concerning transfer of properties ([in]completeness, filtration, finite model property etc.) from to _c are discussed. Finally, further perspectives for names in multimodal environment are briefly sketched.     

Cross-validation of a minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI) subscale for the assessment of combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder

We have examined the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) scores of 80 carefully diagnosed veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in an attempt to cross-validate the PTSD subscale and three-point MMPI code of Keane, Malloy, and Fairbank (1984). In general, although we replicated Keane and co-workers'cutoff scores, our hit rates were slightly lower than those reported originally.This research was supported in part by NIMH Grant MH-37839 to Dr. Kolb.     

Standard and non-standard Newcomb Problems

Examples involving common causes — most prominently, examples involving genetically influenced choices — are analytically equivalent not to standard Newcomb Problems — in which the Predictor genuinely predicts the agent's decision — but to non-standard Newcomb Problems — in which the Predictor guarantees the truth of her predictions by interfering with the agent's decision to make the agent choose as it was predicted she would. When properly qualified, causal and epistemic decision theories diverge only on standard — not on non-standard — Newcomb Problems, and thus not on examples involving common causes.     

What's so logical about the “logical” axioms?

Intuitionists and classical logicians use in common a large number of the logical axioms, even though they supposedly mean different things by the logical connectives and quantifiers — conquans for short. But Wittgenstein says The meaning of a word is its use in the language. We prove that in a definite sense the intuitionistic axioms do indeed characterize the logical conquans, both for the intuitionist and the classical logician.     

Psychometric Assessment of the Comprehensive Effects of Alcohol Questionnaire: Comparing a Brief Version to the Original Full Scale

The current set of studies compared the psychometric properties of the original Comprehensive Effects of Alcohol Questionnaire (CEOA) to a 15-item version (B-CEOA) in a nonclinical undergraduate sample (N = 581), and attempted to replicate and extend the B-CEOA findings in an undergraduate sample referred to an alcohol intervention (N = 734). Psychometric assessment included construct validity, internal consistency, and concurrent validity, using both positive and negative expectancy items in all analyses. Results provided further support for the empirical validity of the original CEOA, and provided support for the use of the B-CEOA despite the reduction in the number of items. The B-CEOA factor structures obtained using exploratory and confirmatory techniques provided support for a 4-factor structure of expectancies and 3-factor structure of valuations. Findings reveal potential problems with positive and negative expectancy items. Trade-offs regarding factor structure, internal consistency, and administration time should be considered in using the B-CEOA vs. the CEOA.     

The family as portrayed on prime-time television, 1947–1990: Structure and characteristics

Successful family series across four decades of American prime-time television were examined. Family portrayals were defined as either conventional or nonconventional. Conventional families were categorized as couples without children and couples with children. Nonconventional families were categorized as single parent or contrived. Additional family characteristics were also recorded including sex of single parent, reason for singleness, social class status, females employed outside the home, live-ins, race, and whether the presentation was dramatic or comedic. The data show a trend toward more equal presentation of conventional and nonconventional families, few divorced or female single parents, and few minority families. Implications of findings are discussed and future research questions suggested.     

Avoiding an EST Monopoly: Toward a Pluralism of Philosophies and Methods

We contend in this article that the EST movement is becoming an ideological and economic monopoly through the exclusive use of one philosophy of science—empiricism. This epistemology monopolizes the methods that produce the ESTs. We provide lists of the values and assumptions that other scholars have demonstrated is endemic to empirical research, and we provide here an in-depth discussion about one central, uninvestigated value of such research. We, then, show the impact of this value—bias and favoritism—not only on the research itself but also on what is deemed an EST. This is followed by a discussion of a non-monopolistic alternative, an alternative that disallows the relativism and anything goes of psychotherapys history but avoids the dogmatism of an exclusive ideology.     

The concept of a proposition in classical and quantum physics

A proposition is associated in classical mechanics with a subset of phase space, in quantum logic with a projection in Hilbert space, and in both cases with a 2-valued observable or test. A theoretical statement typically assigns a probability to such a pure test. However, since a pure test is an idealization not realizable experimentally, it is necessary — to give such a statement a practical meaning — to describe how it can be approximated by feasible tests. This gives rise to a search for a formal representation of feasible tests, which leads via mixed tests (weighted means of pure tests) to vague tests (convex sets of mixed tests). A model is described in which the latter form a continuous lattice; the pure and mixed tests are the maximal elements and the feasible tests form a basis. Each type of test has its own logic; this is illustrated by the passage from mixed tests to pure tests, which corresponds to the transition from L to classical logic.This work was supported by a grant from the National Research Council of Canada.     

The Failed Courage of the Fanatic

Fanatic acts are carried out by those who regard their inner being as having to be denied. By means of a projective identification to a leader and a strident religious cause, they experience their unworthy and evil self as having to be sacrificed so that their good self—as projected on the leader and the cause—can survive and reign. True prophets, as contrasted with the leaders of fanatic groups, do not teach their disciples to hate and flee those who oppose them; but, instead, to build a better world by coming caringly together with their adversaries to heal the wounds of loneliness, shame, and self-hatred.     

Family therapy with one-parent families

In this article the author introduces an integrative approach to family therapy with one-parent families. This includes a diagnostic framework built on the developmental stages of the family, critical areas, and—most importantly—specific settings and therapeutic strategies based on the assumption that one-parent families can raise children as successfully as other families, but in a different manner.The term one-parent families is used in this article, although it is not the correct expression, simply because no child has only one parent. The term binuclear families does not fit with all of them, and single-parent-led families seems to be ambiguous but quite cumbersome to use.     

Theorizing Gender for Experimental Game Theory: Experiments with “Sex Status” and “Merit Status” in an Asymmetric Game

In experimental game-theoretic research, to the extent that sex has been considered at all, the approach has been to focus on the individual level of analysis. This paper reports the results of experiments designed to focus on sex/gender and to expand the level of analysis to include the institutional level. An asymmetric game was designed such that players in the male and female institutional locations had 3 and 2 alternatives, respectively. Players earned the institutional locations based on a test, so that top and bottom scorers respectively merited the 3- and 2-alternatives locations. Game-theoretic understandings of sex-of-player were compared to the expectations states theory concept of sex status; that is, men expect and are expected to perform more competently than women. Results indicated that top-scorer men and women behave similarly; bottom-scorer men resist their low merit status (behaving the most rationally of all player groups); bottom-scorer women accept their low merit status (behaving the most irrationally of all player groups). Whereas game theory cannot provide a coherent understanding of these findings, the concept of sex status helps to interpret the behavior of all four player groups and shows how judgments about rationality and irrationality depend critically on the interpretive framework used.     

Variations in use of the term “or”

Two studies showed that adults' responses to questions involving the term or varied markedly depending upon the type of question presented. When presented with various objects (A's and B's) and asked to circle all things which are A or B subjects tended to circle A's as well as B's, whereas when asked to circle all the A's or B's subjects showed a relatively stronger tendency to circle one or the other. Moreover the nature of the sets of objects (As and Bs) influenced behavior as well. There was also evidence that the effects due to question wording or set type transferred.     

The importance of conduct problems and depressive symptoms in predicting adolescent substance use

The current study assessed the relative importance of conduct problems and depressive symptoms, measured at two ages (11 and 15), for predicting substance use at age 15 in an unselected birth cohort of New Zealand adolescents. Among males, when the relative predictive utility of both conduct problems and depressive symptoms was assessed, only pre-adolescent depressive symptoms were found to predict multiple drug use 4 years later. No predictive relation was found between early symptomatology and later substance use among females. The strongest association between predictors and substance use emerged between age 15 multiple drug use and concurrent conduct problems for both males and females. Finally, both conduct problems and depressive symptoms at age 15 were also found to be associated with concurrent self-medication among females.This work was supported by USPHS grants MH-43746 and MH-45070 from the Antisocial and Violent Behavior Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health to Terrie Moffitt. Bill Henry was funded by a Fulbright Travel Award. The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit is supported by the Medical Research Council and Health Research Council of New Zealand. Appreciation is expressed to the interviewers who collected the data, and to the young New Zealanders who were members of the sample.