Pediatric Psychology: Child Psychological Health in the Next Century

The future of pediatric psychology is reviewed and placed in brief historical context in relation to children's psychological health care. Contemporary trends affecting the delivery of psychological services, research, and clinical training are highlighted, with suggestions for future development. Pediatric psychology is a child-based, developmentally-focused multidisciplinary practice directed toward psychosocial and neuropsychological issues of health and illness in children and youth. Pediatric psychologists need to develop strong professional identities as health care psychologists combined with a collegial and collaborative arrangement with physicians to ensure the future growth and development of pediatric psychology in the next century as a major vehicle to promote children's health care.     

The Future of Psychology in Departments of Psychiatry

Health care reform has put increasing pressure on faculty of medical schools to become self-supporting. Opportunities for clinical revenue will decrease, but psychologists who are able to generate research funding will become increasingly competitive, albeit as mercenaries, i.e., capable of paying their own way plus generating a profit to support departmental operations and educational programs. Changes in the health care system signal an end to psychiatry's paternalistic relationship to psychology and present opportunities for psychology proactively to influence its future role in health care. Research, political action, and revised scientific mission, models, and roles represent important strategies in the redefining of psychology as a basic science and major profession in health care.     

Isoluminance and contingent color aftereffects

In the typical induction of the orientation-contingent color aftereffect (CCAE), the stimuli are composed of elements that differ in both color and luminance. Three experiments are reported that show that chromatic contrast between stimulus elements is insufficient for the induction of the orientation-CCAE and that luminance contrast is necessary. These experiments expand on previous research concerned with the role of luminance contrast in the induction of orientation-CCAEs by eliminating alternative explanations.     

Encoding, repetition, and the mirror effect in recognition memory: Symmetry in motion

Attention/likelihood theory has been used to explain the mirror effect in recognition memory. The theory also predicts that any manipulation that affects the recognition of old items will also affect recognition of the new items—more specifically, that all the underlying distributions will move and that they will move symmetrically on the decision axis. In five experiments, we tested this prediction. The first two experiments used encoding tasks during study to change recognition performance for high- and low-frequency words. The results show symmetrical dispersion of the underlying distributions. The final three experiments used repetition to increase recognition performance. Repetition produced a symmetrical pattern of movement that was different from that produced by encoding task. This pattern is, however, also covered by attention/likelihood theory. A further extension of the theory was used to predict response times.     

Recognition memory ROCs for item and associative information: The contribution of recollection and familiarity

Receiver-operating characteristics (ROCs) were examined in three recognition memory experiments. ROCs for item information (i.e., was this word presented?) were found to be curvilinear. However, ROCs for associative information (i.e., were these two words presented together?) were found to be linear. The results are in agreement with the predictions of a dual-process model that assumes that recognition judgments are -based on familiarity and recollection. Familiarity reflects the assessment of a continuous strength dimension and is well described as a signal detection process, whereas recollection reflects the retrieval of qualitative information about the study episode and behaves like a discrete threshold process. The results showed that memory judgments about items relied on a combination of recollection and familiarity, but that judgments about associations relied primarily on recollection. Further examination of the associative ROCs suggested that subjects were able to recollect that old pairs of items were in the study list, and, under some conditions, that new pairs were not in the study list.     

DEGREES OF FREEDOM AND THE INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM FIELD THEORY

Nick Huggett and Robert Weingard (1994) have recently proposed a novel approach to interpreting field theories in physics, one which makes central use of the fact that a field generally has an infinite number of degrees of freedom in any finite region of space it occupies. Their characterization, they argue, (i) reproduces our intuitive categorizations of fields in the classical domain and thereby (ii) provides a basis for arguing that the quantum field is a field. Furthermore, (iii) it accomplishes these tasks better than does a well-known rival approach due to Paul Teller (1990, 1995). This paper contends that all three of these claims are mistaken, and suggests that Huggett and Weingard have not shown how counting degrees of freedom provides any insight into the interpretation or the formal properties of field theories in physics.     

Effects of Disaggregation on Managerial Assessment Center Validity

Assessment center validity data from a large, international petrochemical company were disaggregated by managerial level and business stream. As with previous research, the correlations were higher for the current job grade criterion than for performance ratings. Overall, disaggregating the data did not have the effect of increasing the assessment center—performance rating validities. However, when the validation data were disaggregated by business stream, there were differences in the pattern of the relationships between assessment factors and performance.     

ANALYZING ALERTNESS AMONG PEOPLE WITH PROFOUND MULTIPLE DISABILITIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR PROVISION OF TRAINING

We investigated whether variations in alertness among individuals with profound multiple disabilities affected subsequent responsiveness to training programs. Three experiments were conducted involving 5 people. In Experiment 1, results indicated that alertness of 3 individuals increased with provision of skill-acquisition training programs. Results also indicated no predictive relationship between alertness levels prior to training and subsequent responsiveness to training. Experiment 2 replicated results of Experiment 1 with 2 participants from Experiment 1 and an additional participant. Results of Experiment 2 also indicated that the increased alertness levels accompanying provision of training were not a function of the participants simply being in an inactive environment prior to training. Results of Experiment 3 indicated that alertness of an additional participant increased through provision of another training intervention, involving a systematic preference assessment. Responses during the preference assessment appeared to be unrelated to previously existing alertness levels. These findings suggest the need for caution when considering the withholding of scheduled training because an individual appears to be nonalert.     

EFFECTS OF A VOICE OUTPUT COMMUNICATION AID ON INTERACTIONS BETWEEN SUPPORT PERSONNEL AND AN INDIVIDUAL WITH MULTIPLE DISABILITIES

We evaluated a means of increasing staff members' interactions with an individual with multiple disabilities through use of a voice output communication aid (VOCA). When activated, the VOCA allowed the individual to communicate through synthesized speech. Results indicated that staff members interacted with the individual more frequently when she had access to the VOCA, suggesting that VOCAs may represent an alternative to more traditional staff management programs for increasing interactions.