A follow-up investigation of families referred to outside agencies

A follow-up study was conducted to determine the outcome of 254 referrals made by 47 school psychologists in New York and New Jersey. The referrals represented randomly selected cases in which the recommendation was made to the families of elementary school childred to use service external to the school setting. Evaluation of referral outcome was determined in light of the reason prompting the referral recommendation. Explanations for the outcome of referrals summarized in this investigation were advanced and the limitations of this study noted.     

Ear differences in the recall of monaurally presented sentences

Using a short-term memory paradigm, with an interpolated task, college students were required to recall monaurally presented sentences. Four types of sentences, representing a factorial combination of Surface Structure, either right-branching or self-embedded, and Semantic Constraint, either semantically normal or semantically anomalous, were used. Analysis of recall data indicated a right ear advantage (REA). This result clearly contradicts Kimura's (1967) “perceptual rivalry” hypothesis which assumes that auditory conflict as induced, for example, through dichotic stimulation, is necessary for producing a REA in verbal processing. It was concluded that short-term and attentional factors contributed to the presence of the REA. No interactions involving Ear and either Surface Structure and/or Semantic Constraint were obtained and, therefore, no conclusion could be drawn regarding the view (Kimura and Folb, 1968; Studdert-Kennedy and Shankweiler, 1970) that the lateralized speech encoding mechanisms operate solely at a phonemic or subphonemic level.     

A scale to measure attitudes toward working

The purpose of this study was to develop a scale that could measure attitude toward work and be used to determine the relation between length of unemployment time and work attitudes. Standardization of the Employment Readiness Scale was completed through its administration to three independent groups (N = 430): (1) employed workers: employees who worked in unskilled, semiskilled, and occasionally skilled job classifications; (2) unemployed individuals who were actively looking for regular employment at the Tennessee State Employment Service; and (3) the chronically unemployed: individuals, who, for the most part, were not looking for regular employment and who were seeking night lodging and meals at the Salvation Army or the Knoxville Union Rescue Mission. Through item analysis, it was determined that 43 of the 45-scale items were significant at or beyond the .01 level. It was further established that a relationship existed between work attitudes and length of unemployment. The longer an individual was unemployed, the less positive was his attitude toward work.     

Effect of simultaneous auditory stimulation on vibrotactile thresholds

Vibrotactile thresholds were determined at 250 and 400 Hz in the presence of (1) the sounds emitted by the vibrator, (2) continuous tonal or narrow-band masking noise, or (3) a pulsed tone synchronized with the vibrator signal. The measure of a cross-modality effect was the threshold shift occurring between each condition and the control condition, in which earmuff silencers eliminated the vibrator sounds. Continuous tones or noise had no effect upon vibrotactile thresholds. However, auditory signals synchronized with the vibrator signals did significantly elevate vibrotactile thresholds.     

Blocking the incorrect alley in a two-drive learning situation

This experiment was designed to test the effect of blocking the path to an irrelevant reward on the subject's later performance when motivated for that reward, with a view to clarifying a well-known problem-situation.

An experimental group of 17 hooded rats was run in a two-choice maze, with food in one goal-box and water in the other, being motivated alternately for one or the other. The wrong goal-box was always blocked. Their performance on the first trial of the daily series was significantly poorer than that of a control group of 18 hooded rats, for which both boxes were always open. This difference persisted when, in a second period of training, the rhythm of motivation was altered for both groups.

It is concluded that blocking an irrelevant reward can have a disturbing effect and that this may be relevant to the problem-situation. It is also shown that such a result is to be predicted from Deutsch's (1953, 1956) theory.     

Applying Bifactor Statistical Indices in the Evaluation of Psychological Measures

The purpose of this study was to apply a set of rarely reported psychometric indices that, nevertheless, are important to consider when evaluating psychological measures. All can be derived from a standardized loading matrix in a confirmatory bifactor model: omega reliability coefficients, factor determinacy, construct replicability, explained common variance, and percentage of uncontaminated correlations. We calculated these indices and extended the findings of 50 recent bifactor model estimation studies published in psychopathology, personality, and assessment journals. These bifactor derived indices (most not presented in the articles) provided a clearer and more complete picture of the psychometric properties of the assessment instruments. We reached 2 firm conclusions. First, although all measures had been tagged “multidimensional,” unit-weighted total scores overwhelmingly reflected variance due to a single latent variable. Second, unit-weighted subscale scores often have ambiguous interpretations because their variance mostly reflects the general, not the specific, trait. Finally, we review the implications of our evaluations and consider the limits of inferences drawn from a bifactor modeling approach.     

Is Knowledge of God a Cognitive Achievement?

This essay considers whether reformed epistemology is compatible with the claim that knowledge is a cognitive achievement. It is argued that knowledge of God is not only compatible with a more general achievement claim, but is also compatible with a much stronger achievement claim – namely, the strong achievement thesis where achievements are characterized by the overcoming of some obstacle. With respect to reformed epistemology, then, it is argued that the obstacle that is overcome is an environment that is not conducive to belief in God given the cognitive consequence of sin. This essay suggests two ways in which the agent is involved in the process of overcoming this obstacle.     

Attentional control mediates fearful responding to an ecologically valid stressor

Background and Objectives: Attentional control (AC) is defined as the ability to voluntarily shift and disengage attention and is thought to moderate the relationship between preexisting risk factors for fear and the actual experience of fear. Design: This longitudinal study elaborates on current models of AC by examining whether AC moderates or mediates effects of an ecologically valid stressor (a college examination) and also whether AC is predictive of state-like fear over longer timescales than previously reported. Methods: Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that AC would moderate the relationship between trait anxiety and affective distress in response to the examination stressor. We also tested a competing mediational model based on AC theory. These models were tested in two separate samples (sample 1, N = 219; sample 2, N = 129; Total N = 348) at two time points, at the beginning of a college semester in a large undergraduate class and 5 minutes prior to a college examination. Results: Mediation but not moderation of anxiety by AC was supported in both samples using multiple dependent measures. Conclusions: We conclude that AC may be useful in predicting affective distress in naturalistic settings, particularly in cases where anxiety is anticipatory.     

Similarity effects in visual working memory

Perceptual similarity is an important property of multiple stimuli. Its computation supports a wide range of cognitive functions, including reasoning, categorization, and memory recognition. It is important, therefore, to determine why previous research has found conflicting effects of inter-item similarity on visual working memory. Studies reporting a similarity advantage have used simple stimuli whose similarity varied along a featural continuum. Studies reporting a similarity disadvantage have used complex stimuli from either a single or multiple categories. To elucidate stimulus conditions for similarity effects in visual working memory, we tested memory for complex stimuli (faces) whose similarity varied along a morph continuum. Participants encoded 3 morphs generated from a single face identity in the similar condition, or 3 morphs generated from different face identities in the dissimilar condition. After a brief delay, a test face appeared at one of the encoding locations for participants to make a same/different judgment. Two experiments showed that similarity enhanced memory accuracy without changing the response criterion. These findings support previous computational models that incorporate featural variance as a component of working memory load. They delineate limitations of models that emphasize cortical resources or response decisions.