A system for the assessment of human performance in concurrent verbal and manual control tasks

A multipurpose laboratory system incorporating a voice interactive terminal and graphic display system is described. The facility is designed to investigate some aspects of human performance on concurrent verbal and tracking tasks. The results of a pilot study showing decrements in dual-task performance are reported.     

An information processing system for the psychiatric emergency room

An information processing system for a psychiatric emergency room is described. Several studies are presented that show the utility of the system. In the first study, variables involved in diagnosis are explicated. The second study attempts to determine the characteristics that distinguish recidivists from nonrecidivists at an emergency room. The third study attempts to find patient variables related to success in short-term treatment programs. The final study is aimed at discovering whether there are psychopathological effects related to the use of inhalants. Together, these studies show the potential of a mental health information system for learning more about the nature of mental disorders and their treatment.     

Predicting the Everyday Life Events of Older Adults

Predicting the everyday life events of people is a relatively unexplored topic, although several major theoretical approaches deal with related issues. The dispositional approach would assign a causal role to personality, while the situational approach would locate causation in the person's environment. Variations on these two extreme themes invoke an interactionist interpretation. Beyond this, a genuinely transactional approach focuses on the enduring person-environment relationship established as people deal with major and everyday life events. This study investigated a wide range of predictors of daily positive, negative, and ill-health events over time in a sample of 206 older adults. Results showed that personality variables played only a minor role in predicting daily events, although an interaction between extraversion and social network size was significant. Background demographic variables and the major stressors of recent conjugal bereavement and physical disability played a role in daily event occurrences. Overall, the strongest degree of predictability of events came from the events themselves: The high degree of event stability over time indicated the value of a genuinely transactional model in understanding the occurrence of everyday events.     

Some effects of positive life events on community mental health

Measures of positive and negative events were derived from a life-event inventory to test the predictions of an equilibrium model and a positive mental health model of psychological well-being. These measures were related to indicators of individual and community well-being with data obtained through a household survey of 454 residents. Residents who reported more negative events also reported more psychological distress and less positive adjustment. Positive events were associated with reports of positive adjustment. An analysis of census tract scores on life events revealed that the relative absence of positive events in census tracts was associated with higher service utilization rates to the community mental health center serving those tracts. The number of negative events was unrelated to service rates for census tracts but was related to several demographic indicators of well-being.     

Child performance on discrimination tasks: Effects of amount of stimulus variation

Two independently conducted studies investigated stimulus variation effects on children's discrimination learning. The stimuli in the first study were generated by a conjunctive rule and were presented in pairs. Mean trials to criterion was significantly lower for the single-feature change treatment (17.4) than for the multiple-feature change treatment (29.9). Single-feature change-treatment transfer scores were significantly higher only for stimuli that differed in terms of one of the features. The second study not only replicated the initial finding concerning the single-feature change treatment but also found that students made more errors in reaching criterion when stimuli were generated by an exclusive disjunctive rule and were presented singly. For all tasks, the single-feature change treatment with stimuli presented in pairs was accompanied by fewer errors to criterion than the other treatments.     

Accuracy of Clinician Predictions of Future Self‐Harm: A Systematic Review and Meta‐Analysis of Predictive Studies

Assessment of a patient after hospital‐treated self‐harm or psychiatric hospitalization often includes a risk assessment, resulting in a classification of high risk versus low risk for a future episode of self‐harm. Through systematic review and a series of meta‐analyses looking at unassisted clinician risk classification (eight studies; N = 22,499), we found pooled estimates for sensitivity 0.31 (95% CI: 0.18–0.50), specificity 0.85 (0.75–0.92), positive predictive value 0.22 (0.21–0.23), and negative predictive value 0.89 (0.86–0.92). Clinician classification was too inaccurate to be clinically useful. After‐care should therefore be allocated on the basis of a needs rather than risk assessment.