Developmental changes in children's abilities to match and label emotionally laden situations

In two studies, male and female preschoolers and third- and fourth-graders were tested on their abilities to match and generate affective labels for 19 types of emotionally laden situations. Age changes were found in the accuracy with which situations were both labeled and matched; the ability to match similar situations was more strongly related to age than was the ability to label emotions. Matching and labeling abilities were positively related to each other. Both age groups were best at labeling situations depicting happiness, anger, and sadness, and at matching situations depicting sadness, anger, and disgust, but both age groups were capable of matching a wide variety of emotions depicted in situations at a better than chance rate. Only situations depicting fear, nervousness, and embarrassment were not matched better than chance by either preschoolers or third- and fourth-graders.This research was supported by a grant to the first author from Boston University Graduate School, No. GRS-661-PS. Portions of this paper were presented in Toronto at the Biannual Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, April 1985. The authors would like to thank Gail Desmond, Lesley Landau, Ana Ortiz, Phyllis Sternlight, Mark Steward, and Orna Wolfson for their help in various phases of this project, and especially the Lowell Day Nursery for its cooperation.     

Cost containment as professional challenge

Cost containment by means of prospective payment and other mechanisms is widely seen as a challenge to modern medicine; but the challenge is seldom articulated clearly in terms of core professional values and the moral content of a claim to professionalism. Medical ethics, as it has evolved as a field of study in the past twenty years, has contributed little to the concept of professionalism in medicine. For an investigation of professionalism in the face of cost containment to evolve fruitfully, several things must occur. The true nature of today's challenge to medicine must be appreciated. The balance between tradition and response to social change in defining a professional value system must be appreciated. Physician income must be explicitly addressed as a moral issue. And practical strategies for investigating and affirming core professional values must be developed for health delivery systems and medical education settings.     

Diagnosticity and the base-rate effect

A common judgmental task involves predicting the category membership of an individual on the basis of information specific to that individual and background information regarding the base rate of different categories. According to statistical theory, predictions may deviate from base rates only to the extent that the individuating information is diagnostic. Previous research has demonstrated that diagnosticity is often judged by “representativeness,” the degree to which the individuating information is differentially suggestive of the different possible categories. Thus, information with high differential representativeness will swamp base-rate information even if it is almost worthless (e.g., because its source is unreliable). The present studies varied differential representativeness by manipulating the prediction categories’ similarity to one another vis-a-vis the individuating information. It was found that the effect of the base rate increased systematically as differential representativeness decreased. Representativeness was measured independently by several converging techniques. These measures predicted the magnitude of the base-rate effect, supporting the hypothesis that neutral stimuli are assigned to categories in proportion to the base rates.     

Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) tasting in paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenic patients.

The present study reports on the association between Phenylthiocarbamide tasting for paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenic patients. The incidence of PTC tasting is highly variable, and tasters and nontasters are frequently associated with some pathological states. 25 paranoid and 25 nonparanoid schizophrenic patients were examined for their PTC taste sensitivity. Frequency of paranoid tasters resembles the distribution of the normal population, whereas the nonparanoid patients are significantly different in their taste thresholds, with a higher incidence of nontasters. The members of this latter group have twice the incidence of psychiatric illness in their family histories as those of the former group. The significance of these findings is discussed as related to vulnerability for schizophrenia.     

Sex-role stereotyping,the motive to avoid success,and parental identification

Fifth- and tenth-grade girls were compared with respect to three sex-role-related variables: sex-role stereotyping; the motive to avoid success; and one aspect of identification motivation — the desire to emulate the father versus the mother. These variables were seen as reflecting certain conflicts and problems associated with feminine sex-role socialization. Age-related increases in stereotyping, the incidence of fear of success, and desire to emulate the father rather than the mother were expected. The motive to avoid success was expected to be associated with low stereotyping and with rejection of the maternal model. In the results, significant increases with age were found in stereotyping and father preference. The expected correlates of the motive to avoid success were found, but in each case for only one of the two age levels. Findings were discussed in relation to difficulties associated with feminine development.     

Assessing empirical research in bioethics

Empirical research can aid ethical reflection in bioethics by identifying issues, by seeing how they are currently resolved, and by assessing the consequences of these current resolutions. This potential can be misused when the ethical issues in question are fundamentally non-consequentialist or when they are consequentialist but the empirical research fails to address the important consequences. An example of the former problem is some recent studies about bad consequences resulting from commercialized living kidney donor programs. These consequences could be avoided, but the crucial non-consequentialist ethical issues about exploitation and commercialization would still remain. Examples of the latter problem are provided by recent studies of the allocation of ICU beds and of physician deception, where important consequences were not adequately studied.     

Assessing individual differences: effects of responding to prior questionnaires on the substantive and psychometric properties of self-esteem and depression assessments

It has become a common practice among psychological researchers to administer batteries of individual difference assessments to research participants, although little is known about whether the substantive and psychometric integrity of the questionnaires are maintained when they are administered after the subject has completed other instruments. The studies presented here consider these issues in relation to the assessment of self-esteem and depression. In the first study, college students responded to a self-esteem inventory (a) by itself (control group), (b) after one prior questionnaire, (c) after three prior questionnaires, or (d) after five prior questionnaires. Results indicated that filling out one or more questionnaires before an assessment of self-esteem resulted in reports of lower self-esteem relative to the control condition. Additional analyses revealed that filling out three or five prior questionnaires created lower reliabilities of subscale scores and lower estimates of concurrent validity between self-esteem and depression. When the effect of prior questionnaires on the General Self-Esteem subscale was examined, the aforementioned results were replicated, and the prior questionnaire treatment created heterogeneous variances across the experimental groups. The second study was designed as a replication of the first study, using an assessment of depression as the target questionnaire. These results revealed that reports of depressive symptomatology increased as the number of prior questionnaires increased. Again, the prior questionnaire treatment created heterogeneity of variance between the groups, but did not adversely affect its internal consistency.