Assessment of dimensions of childhood firesetting among patients and nonpatients: The Firesetting Risk Interview

A model of firesetting risk poses that high curiosity, involvement in fire-related activities, exposure to peer/parental models, limited knowledge and skill related to fires, and poor parental supervision, among other features, are characteristic of firesetters. To operationalize several domains of the model, the Firesetting Risk Interview (FRI) for parents was developed consisting of 15 a priori dimensions. To provide a partial test of the measure and its generality across children with and without clinical dysfunction, 343 children (ages 6–13) and parents were drawn from samples of nonpatients (nonreferred), outpatients, and inpatients. In accord with the model, firesetters and nonfiresetters were found to differ in their curiosity about fire, recent involvement in fire-related activities, expression of negative emotions, early experiences with fire, exposure to others' involvement with fire, and parents' use of general disciplinary consequences. These group differences did not interact with the child's clinical status, level of antisocial behavior, or demographic background.This study was supported by grant MH-39976 from the Antisocial and Violent Behavior Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, and by a Research Scientist Development Award (MH00353) from the National Institute of Mental Health. The authors acknowledge the contribution of Tina Castrodale, Brian Day, and Amy Van Dyke, and the cooperation of Dr. Paul Le Mehieu of the Pittsburgh Public School System. Portions of these data were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Atlanta, 1988.     

Effects of methylphenidate on inhibitory control in hyperactive children

This study investigated the effects of methylphenidate (MPH) on inhibitory control in hyperactive children. A double-blind, placebo-control, within-subject (crossover) design was used in which 12 children, between 6 and 11 years of age, were each tested four times in each drug condition: 0.3 mg/kg and 1.0 mg/kg of methylphenidate, and placebo. Dependent measures included (a) the probability of inhibiting responses to a primary choice reaction time task given a stop signal, on the Stopping Task, and (b) response latency and errors on the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT). MPH improved the efficiency of the central inhibitory mechanism by speeding the inhibitory process, thereby affording the children greater control over their actions and enabling them to increase the probability with which they inhibited responses given a stop signal. MPH increased response latency but did not reduce errors on the MFFT, and observation of the children's task performance highlighted the interpretive problems associated with this task. Performance on both tasks was better at a dosage of 1.0 mg/kg than at 0.3 mg/kg.     

A brief scoring method for voice stress analysis

The Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE) detects inaudible frequency changes in the human voice, and it is claimed that the pattern of these changes can provide a measure of psychophysiological arousal. A few studies have given some support to this hypothesis, but further clarifica tion is needed. One major technical problem in this research is that the traditional scoring esyStem is unreliable unless considerable numbers of scores are taken and averaged , The paper presents a conveniently brief scoring system which has fair reliahility, and which correlates significantly with a measure of Critical Flicker Fusion Threshold.     

Cognitive simulation modeling on the VAX-11

The ability of the VAX-11 to serve as both a real-time and a large-memory-space machine is described. The issue of how to do cognitive simulation work on the VAX-11 is addressed.     

Assessing compliance to home relaxation: A simple technology for a critical problem

A simple, low-cost, and reliable technology for assessing compliance with relaxation practice in the natural environment is presented. Brief, audible cue tones are overdubbed onto selected client relaxation tapes, which are ordered by the therapist and then played in sequence by the client. The presence/absence or number of cue tones on each tape in the sequence is self-monitored, thereby providing the therapist with a record for objectively assessing whether or not the tapes were used as instructed. A clinical case example is presented to illustrate use of the procedure. Finally, advantages and limitations of the procedure are discussed.A portion of this paper (clinical case study) was presented at the meeting of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, November 1980, New York. This research was partly supported by the Medical Research Service of the Veterans Administration. The authors wish to express their appreciation to Leonard H. Epstein for his support and stimulation in the early development of this and related projects.     

Monaural localization following exposure to different segments of acoustic space

Four groups of eight monaural listeners received practice on locating sounds coming from different segments of the horizontal plane prior to a test in which all sounds originated within the same region. An additional eight monaural listeners were given the final localization test without the pretest practice. Knowledge of results was withheld. The main finding was that positive transfer of training was not equally apparent for all groups. That group for which the pretest and test involved the same ear and the same azimuthal positions of loudspeakers performed best. Practice in locating rearwardly positioned sounds did not benefit the localization of frontally positioned sounds even when the same ear was functioning in both situations. Experience in locating sounds from all segments of the horizontal plane appears to be required in order to build up an adequate internal representation of the acoustic surrounds.     

Phonological recoding in lexical decision: Effects of spelling-to-sound regularity depend on how regularity is defined

This study is concerned with two contrasting accounts of lexieal access in reading, phonological receding and direct access. Experiment I demonstrated that exception words that have a guide to their pronunciation listed in theOxford Paperback Dictionary (e.g., GAUGE) gave rise to longer lexical decision times than matched regular words (e.g., GRILL). Experiment 2 contrasted three types of words: exceptions that have dictionary-listed pronunciations, exceptions without listed pronunciations, and regular words. Lexieal decision responses to the first type were significantly longer than those produced to the other two types. Nonlisted exception words, however, did not differ from regular words. Experiment 3 confirmed the results of Experiment 2, using pronunciation speed as the dependent measure. Experiment 4 showed that the slower lexical decision times associated with dictionary-listed exception words remain when subjects are given speeded-response instructions. In contrast to earlier studies of a similar kind, these results indicate the existence of a phonological receding stage in reading. Furthermore, they suggest that the phonological recoding system is more flexible than was previously thought.