INTEGRAL MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Integral Science provides the empirical rigor needed to shift medicine's worldview. The shift in science will give rise to Integral Medicine, which will emerge from the integration and transformational change of biomedicine, psychosocial approaches, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and other reform movements. The root metaphor of Integral Medicine is a healthy and sustainable ecosystem. At its heart are mind–body holism and collaborative learning. Healing and the creation of health will emphasize educational, self-care, and community support models. Implications are discussed for practice, research, and education.     

Early Language Impairment and Young Adult Delinquent and Aggressive Behavior

Clinic and forensic studies have reported high rates of language impairments in conduct disordered and incarcerated youth. In community samples followed to early adolescence, speech and language impairments have been linked to attention deficits and internalizing problems, rather than conduct problems, delinquency, or aggression. This study examines the young adult antisocial outcomes of speech or language impaired children. Language impaired boys had higher levels of parent-rated delinquency symptoms by age 19 than boys without language impairment, controlled for verbal IQ and for demographic and family variables. Language impaired boys did not differ from controls in self-reported delinquency or aggression symptoms on a standardized checklist; however, language impaired boys reported higher rates of arrests and convictions than controls. Language impairment was not related to aggression or delinquency in girls. We examine alternate models of the interrelationships between language, academics, and behavior, at ages 5, 12, and 19.     

Distinctiveness models of memory and absolute identification: evidence for local, not global, effects

Many models of memory assume that the probability of remembering an item is related to how distinctive that item is relative to all the other items in the set, with no distinction made between the contributions of near or far items. These “global” distinctiveness models do well in accounting for the ubiquitous serial position effects observed in numerous memory paradigms, including absolute identification. Here, we provide experimental confirmation of Bower's (1971) suggestion that, contrary to a fundamental prediction of global distinctiveness models, midseries items can be more discriminable than their immediate neighbours. We show that such data are consistent with a revised distinctiveness account in which the factor affecting discrimination performance is primarily the distinctiveness of an item relative to its close neighbours.     

Cultural and ethical issues concerning research on American Indian youth

A study of American Indian youths illustrates competing pressures between research and ethics. A stakeholder-researcher team developed three plans to protect participants. The first allowed participants to skip potentially upsetting interview sections. The second called for participants to skip potentially upsetting interview sections. The second called for participants flagged for abuse or suicidality to receive referrals, emergency 24-hr clinical backup, or both. The third, based on the community's desire to promote service access, included giving participants a list of service resources. Interviewers gave referrals to participants flagged as having mild problems, and reported participants with serious problems to supervisors for clinical backup. Participants seldom chose to skip sections, so data integrity was not compromised. However, participants did have more problems than expected (e.g., 1 in 3 had thought about suicide, 1 in 5 had attempted suicide, and 1 in 4 reported abuse), so service agencies were not equipped to respond. Researchers must accept the competing pressures and find ethically appropriate compromises that will not undermine research integrity.     

Selective looking by infants

Previous studies of selective looking have shown that adults and young children can easily follow one visually specified event while ignoring another on which it is optically superimposed. The present experiments show that 4-month-old infants have the same ability. Two films were shown superimposed on the same screen, while one soundtrack was played in an attempt to influence the subjects' perceptual selection. When the films were separated during test periods, the infants looked mostly at the previously silent film, suggesting that it was novel for them. Control experiments showed that completely unfamiliar films elicited comparable novelty preferences in the same situation, that the soundtrack could also influence perceptual selection during side-by-side presentation of the same films, and that cross-modal habituation to the soundtrack alone could not account for the results. Perception is inherently selective, even in the first months of life.     

The best teacher: Mediating effects of experience with employed women on men managers' responses to subordinates' mistakes

What role does experience with working women play in determining men managers' views of women managers? To investigate this question, we analyzed responses of a small sample of experienced men managers with varying degrees of experience with working women. Of primary concern were men managers' attribution of causes for a woman manager's poor performance and their choice of response to such poor performance. The data confirmed that experience with women managers as colleagues and with employed wives affects the stability of men managers' causal attributions as well as the severity of their responses to a woman manager's poor performance. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Children's serial recall errors: implications for theories of short-term memory development

Three experiments examined developmental changes in serial recall of lists of 6 letters, with errors classified as movements, omissions, intrusions, or repetitions. In Experiments 1 and 2, developmental differences between groups of children aged from 7 to 11 years and adults were found in the pattern of serial recall errors. The errors of older participants were more likely to be movements than were those of younger participants, who made more intrusions and omissions. The number of repetition errors did not change with age, and this finding is interpreted in terms of a developmentally invariant postoutput response inhibition process. This interpretation was supported by the findings of Experiment 3, which measured levels of response inhibition in 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds by comparing recall of lists with and without repeated items. Response inhibition remained developmentally invariant, although older children showed greater response facilitation (improved correct recall of adjacent repeated items). Group differences in the patterns of other errors are accounted for in terms of developmental changes in levels of output forgetting and changes in the efficiency of temporal encoding processes.     

American Indian Youth: Personal,Familial, and Environmental Strengths

We present data from interviews with 401 youths on the relationship of personal, familial, and environmental strengths to the outcomes of urban and reservation American Indian youths. Urban youths consistently nominated more strengths than tribal youths, except in the area of tribal strengths. Quantitative data show how those strengths relate to their school success, daily functioning, mental health, and ethnic identity. Personal and familial strengths are related to positive school success and functioning. Environmental strengths demonstrate complex relationships in which tribal strengths are related to increased mental health problems and school strengths are related to fewer problems. The results of our study speak to the need to include multiple categories of different strengths in research and to focus on strengths as well as problems in clinical interventions.