The hyperactive child at adolescence: Cognitive,emotional, and social functioning

In view of the paucity of detailed followup studies on hyperactive children, the performance of 15 adolescents diagnosed hyperactive 5 years previously was compared to that of a control group of equivalent age, sex, intelligence, and social class. Eleven cognitive tests measuring sustained attention, visual-motor and motor skills, abstraction, and reading ability, as well as three self-assessment tests examining selfesteem, activity level, social functioning, academic status, and career aspirations were administered. The hyperactives performed significantly worse than the controls on the sustained attention, visualmotor, and motor tasks, and on two of the four reading tests. They also gave themselves significantly lower ratings on some of the selfesteem and sociability items. It would appear that the hyperactives at adolescence still have attentional and stimulus-processing difficulties, which affect not only their academic performance but also their social functioning.This study was supported by a Federal-Provincial Mental Health Grant to Dr. G. Weiss. The authors wish to thank Katherine Levine and Margaret Radigan for their assistance with test preparation and scoring. Thanks are also extended to Ken MacRae for his computer-processing advice, particularly his help with several multivariate and principal components analyses from which the present authors have derived their current theoretical position. Klaus Minde and Nancy Cohen are now at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, while Elizabeth Hoy is at the Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland.     

Behavioral marriage therapy. III. The contents of Gurman et al. may be hazardous to our health

This paper was written as a reply to a critique of behavioral marital therapy (BMT) by Gurman, Kniskern, and Knudson (6, 7). The reply is divided into four sections. First, the paper addresses the critics' comments on the conceptual model put forth by BMT, correcting and clarifying various misconceptions, and restating some of the basic ideological principles in the behavioral model. Second, the paper discusses behavioral change techniques and technology, along with extratechnological treatment considerations. Again, misrepresentations of BMT are corrected. Third, an analysis of the literature investigating the therapeutic efficacy of BMT is reviewed, and the conclusion is reached that BMT is demonstrably effective, at least for a substantial number of mildly to moderately distressed couples. Criticisms are made of the analysis of the same literature conducted by Gurman et al. We conclude that, contrary to the spirit of the paper by Gurman et al., BMT is a viable framework for conceptualizing and treating relationship problems and that the commitment of its adherents to experimental investigation promises continued evolution, refinement, and improvement.     

A modified Aitken Pivotal Condensation Method for partial regression and multiple correlation

In this modification of the Aitken Pivotal Condensation Method for obtaining partial regression weights and multiple correlation coefficients, the unit matrices used by Aitken are eliminated, with a resultant decrease in the computational work. Through a simplified arrangement of successive matrices, each one is reduced by the same simple rule. Other modifications also contribute to ease of computation and facilitate checking.     

Terrorists and Democrats: Individual Reactions to International Attacks

Three experiments conducted in 1997 and 1998 explored individual responses to reported fictitious international conflict involving the United States and other nations. Participants escalated the conflictual level of their responses to repeated attacks. In Experiment 1, escalation of conflict was greater in response to terrorist attacks than to military ones. In Experiment 2, after the initial attacks, men were more conflictual in responding to terrorist attacks by a democratic nation than by a nondemocratic nation, whereas the opposite pattern was found for women. In Experiment 3, participants responded with a higher level of conflict to terrorist attacks on military targets than to attacks on cultural/educational targets. Participants with greater personality dominance showed steeper escalation of conflict in their responses across successive attacks. These results are interpreted within the framework of an image theory of international relations and an expansion of the democratic peace hypothesis.     

Sensory modality and stimulus control in the pigeon: Cross-species generality of single-incentive selective-association effects

In earlier studies with rats, the effectiveness of the auditory element of a tone–light discriminative stimulus was enhanced when the conditioned incentive value of the compound was negative rather than positive. The present experiment systematically replicated these results in pigeons trained to press a treadle in the presence of a tone–light compound under food-reinforcement or shock-avoidance schedules. Positive incentive value was conditioned to the compound by associating it with either food or relative safety from shock. The compound was made negative in other groups by associating it with shock or the absence of food. When tone and light were presented separately following this training, control by the auditory element was significantly enhanced in the conditions designed to make the compound negative rather than positive. The similarity of this constraint on learning in rats and pigeons suggests that it involves a fundamental attentional and incentive-motivational process with widespread species generality.