Personality and depression: a validation study of the Depressive Experience Questionnaire

This study investigated the validity of Blatt's model of depression as indicated by his operational measure of its constructs via the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (DEQ; Blatt, D'Afflitti, & Quinlan, 1976). Hypothesized relations between the two relevant scales of the DEQ and Tellegen's (1982) Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire, (MPQ) were examined, Participants consisted of 195 women, including 67 hospitalized unipolar depressives, 77 never-hospitalized unipolar depressives, and 51 nonpsychiatric controls. Overall, the results partially supported the validity of the DEQ even though all participants were women and prior studies have indicated the DEQ's greater discriminative validity for men than for women. However, several of the most strongly predicted relations, such as between DEQ Self-Criticism and MPQ Achievement were not confirmed. Coherent, significant relations between scales of the two measures remained after partialling out the effects of severity of depression.     

Behavioral state organization of very low birth weight infants: Effects of developmental handling during caregiving

Handling infants for nursing care in the neonatal intensive care unit has been associated with physiological and behavioral distress. The purpose of this study was to determine whether an individualized approach to nursing care designed to reduce stressors and support behavioral organization would positively affect behavioral state organization during caregiving. The developmental approach was contrasted with a traditional approach in 38 infants (< 1700 g, 53% female, 85% white) at 28, 30, and 32 weeks postconceptional age. Subjects served as their own controls in a cross-over design, with assessment of four caregiving sessions at each age. Results showed that with developmental caregiving, time spent in sleep and drowsy wakefulness was higher, and time in alert and non-alert wakefulness and fuss/cry was lower than with traditional caregiving. Results demonstrate a positive effect of developmental handling for behavioral state organization. However, the findings for the alert state were unexpected and require further exploration of how alertness may be promoted without the physiological and behavioral costs of disorganized arousal.     

A positron emission tomography (PET) study of autobiographical memory retrieval

Memory for the experiences of one's life, autobiographical memory (AM), is one of the most human types of memory, yet comparatively little is known of its neurobiology. A positron emission tomography (PET) study of AM retrieval revealed that the left frontal cortex was significantly active during retrieval (compared to memory control tasks), together with activation in the inferior temporal and occipital lobes in the left hemisphere. We propose that this left frontal lobe activation reflects the operation of control processes that modulate the construction of AMs in posterior neocortical networks.     

Placement Stability Following Short-Term Residential Care

Youth discharged from a short-term residential facility and reunified with their parents were contacted at least one year after discharge to determine whether or not they had a disruption in their placement since reunification. Follow-up intervals of 149 youth contacted (82% of the eligible sample) ranged from a minimum of 12 months to a maximum of 30 months post-discharge. Differences in the time to placement disruption were analyzed using survival analysis techniques. After controlling for adjustment differences during the treatment program, youth behavior problems, and family problems, a significant interaction of youth age and treatment intensity was found: Compared to the others, younger youth who received additional treatment components had placement disruptions later and less frequently.     

Reaction time to tones in tonal backgrounds and a comparison of reaction time to signal onset and offset

In order to learn more about the processing of auditory information, simple reaction time (RT) measurements were made when subjects were asked to respond to tones presented against a tonal background. In the first experiment, a counterintuitive result was obtained: with two widely separated frequencies, 1,900 and 4,000 Hz, the presence of the background facilitated RT. In a second experiment, using two frequencies which were closer together (3,500 and 4,000 Hz), slowing of RT in the presence of the background was observed, as would be expected from the literature on auditory masking. A third experiment suggested that the information carried by signal offset is not an important factor in the facilitation observed with widely separated tones. In this experiment an unexpected result was found: subjects receiving offsets in their right ears responded significantly more slowly than did subjects receiving offsets in their left ears.     

Men and women as computer-using teachers

Education is one institutional arena in which women professionals comprise a majority of adult computer users. Using data from a national survey of schools, it was found that women comprise two-thirds of the primary computer-using teachers (PCUTs) in elementary schools, and the proportion of women in this role in secondary schools is nearly the same as the proportion of women among secondary school teachers as a whole. Elementary schools whose primary computer-using teacher was a woman used their computer more for programming instruction and less as a drill-and-practice tool than where a man was the PCUT. Microcomputers were used for more hours of the day and with more positive consequences at elementary schools whose PCUT was a woman. In contrast, at the secondary level, schools with men PCUTs had more extensive programs of microcomputer use in nearly every aspect measured.     

Anticonformity aspects of depression in mild depressive states

Controversial issues regarding the relation of conformity and anticonformity variants of dependency to depression and self-esteem were examined. The Willis-Hollander model of social influence and an experimental paradigm which permits differentiation of dependency responses into conformity and anticonformity subcategories were used. Ninety female college students who had been given the Beck Depression Inventory and a measure of self-esteem engaged in a perceptual judgment task, with two degrees of social influence. Depression and self-esteem were unrelated to independence and conformity. The main finding in the step-wise regression analyses was that depression was significantly related (p less than .001) to the anticonformity variant of dependency. The assumption that depression is related to dependency was supported, but the conventional position that such dependency consists of the conforming variant, involving compliance and approval- and guidance-seeking, was not supported, at least within the range of depression sampled.