Latent Class Analysis of Adolescent Psychosocial Functioning and Course of Major Depression

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - There are few studies on the predictors of long-term course of major depressive disorder (MDD) with an onset in childhood and adolescence. Studies...     

Children's understanding of the knowledge prerequisites of drawing and pretending

Many young children will claim that someone is pretending to be something even when the person does not know what that something is. To examine whether children's failure to take knowledge prerequisites into account is part of a more fundamental problem in recognizing how mental representations constrain external ones, the authors asked children whether an artist who did not know what something was, yet whose drawing bore resemblance to it, was drawing it. The same questions were asked regarding pretending. Children performed similarly on pretending and drawing questions, and performance on both questions improved when the protagonists' point of view was emphasized. Performance for drawing improved somewhat when alternative goals were stated. Further, cross-sectional data indicated that understanding how knowledge relates to producing external representations increases gradually from age 4 to age 8, suggesting that experiential factors may be crucial to this understanding.     

Emotional and aesthetic antecedents and consequences of music-induced thrills

The significance of music-induced thrills or chills was explored in 3 experiments (N= 223). Specifically, the ability of antecedent (priming) stimuli in different modalities and aesthetic domains (national anthems, stories, architectural objects, paintings) to increase the participants' thrills responsiveness to music by Rachmaninoff and Haydn was examined. In addition, the differential effects of having or not having experienced thrills on the participants' subsequent willingness to donate blood, and on their mood and self-concept, were tested. It was found that while the antecedent stimuli in different modalities could themselves induce thrills in a predictable manner, these priming stimuli, and the thrills they elicited, had relatively weak effects on the thrills subsequently induced by the Rachmaninoff and Haydn pieces. The measures of altruism, self-concept, and mood were not affected by either the antecedent variables or the thrills experience. Thrills may often accompany profound aesthetic experiences and provide their physiological underpinning, yet themselves be of limited psychological significance.     

Sequential evaluation of behavioral treatments and methylphenidate dosage for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

We used a sequential approach to evaluate the relative and combined effects of different types of behavioral treatments, as well as dosage of methylphenidate (MPH), on the disruptive behavior of 3 students who had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Results showed that individualized behavioral treatments produced decreases in disruptive behavior equivalent to MPH for all 3 participants and demonstrated the need to evaluate behavioral treatments and medication dosage on an individual basis.     

Trajectories of Parenting Processes and Adolescent Substance Use: Reciprocal Effects

Drawing on transactional theories of child development, we assessed bidirectional links between trajectories of adolescent substance use and parenting processes from early through mid adolescence. Hierarchical generalized models estimated trajectories for 3,317 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, exploring both between- and within-individual effects. Between individuals, adolescents reporting more regular family activities and greater father and mother knowledge of friends and teachers experienced lower levels of substance use through mid adolescence. Similarly, adolescents with more frequent substance use reported lower family activities, father knowledge, and mother knowledge, though these differences dissipated over time. More conservative within-individual differences indicated a prospective protective effect of family activities, with increases in adolescent participation in family activities predicting later declines in substance use. Results support the central importance of engagement in regular family activities, and suggest the need for further exploration of transactional processes between parents and children in the development of risk behaviors.     

Presentation modality affects false memory

Roediger and McDermott (1995) rejuvenated interest in Deese’s (1959) paradigm for producing reliable intrusions and false alarms. Using this paradigm in three experiments, we demonstrated that visual study presentation dramatically reduces the rate of false memories. Only auditory study presentation resulted in equal production of studied and critical items. Correct recall and recognition were unaffected. The suggestion that visual presentation provides a means for discriminating between false and true memories was supported by Experiment 3: Pleasantness rating of study items significantly reduced the creation of false memories regardless of modality.     

The influence of distinctive processing on retrieval-induced forgetting

Recall of a portion of a previously experienced list benefits subsequent recall of that portion of the list but leads to poorer recall of nonpracticed items from the same set (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). One explanation for this retrieval-induced forgetting is that during practice of part of a set, the non-practiced items compete for recall and are suppressed; this suppression process inhibits later recall of the nonpracticed items. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between distinctive processing of the original set and retrieval-induced forgetting, on the assumption that distinctive processing reduces response competition. In the first experiment, distinctive processing induced by difference judgments among the studied items did reduce forgetting relative to a standard encoding task and a similarity judgment task. In fact, the difference judgment task completely eliminated retrieval-induced forgetting. In the second experiment, the similarity judgment task was analyzed in relation to a task assumed to foster associative integration (Anderson & McCulloch, 1999). Even though the similarity judgment met the requirements for associative integration, retrieval-induced forgetting persisted following similarity judgment. The results are consistent with the view that distinctive processing benefits memory within an organizational context (Hunt & McDaniel, 1993; Smith & Hunt, in press).     

Prospective memory in young and older adults: the effects of ongoing-task load

Prospective memory involves remembering to perform intended actions in the future. Previous work with the multinomial model of event-based prospective memory indicated that adult age-related differences in prospective-memory performance were due to the prospective (not the retrospective) component of the task (Smith & Bayen, 2006 , Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 623). However, ongoing-task performance was also lower in older adults in that study. In the current study with young and older adults, the difficulty of the ongoing task was manipulated by varying the number of colors per trial to create easier and harder versions of the ongoing task for each age group. The easier version included 2 colors per trial for older adults and 4 colors for young adults. The harder version included 4 colors for older adults and 6 colors for young adults. By adjusting the ongoing-task difficulty, older adults were able to perform the ongoing task as well or better than the young adults. Analyses with the multinomial model revealed that making the ongoing task easier for older adults (or more difficult for young adults) did not eliminate age-related differences in prospective-memory performance and the underlying prospective component.