Importance of goal setting in virtual project teams

This research investigated goal setting on engineering teams with geographically dispersed members. A survey was designed to measure the Quality of Goal Setting, Goal Commitment, Perceived Task Outcomes, and Perceived Psychosocial Outcomes, all constructs and scales used in previous research on project teams. 82 respondents from 12 virtual teams participated. Analysis suggested the quality of goal setting affected Perceived Task Outcome (t = 2.40, p < .05) but not Perceived Psychosocial Outcomes. Further regression analysis indicated goal commitment predicted significant variance in both Perceived Task Outcomes (t = 2.35, p < .05) and Perceived Psychosocial Outcomes (t = 4.3, p < .01). These results suggest that setting high quality goals and building commitment to goals significantly affect perceptions of outcomes on virtual project teams.     

Reliability, diagnostic efficiency, and validity of the Millon adolescent clinical inventory: examination of selected scales in psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents

This study examined the internal consistency, diagnostic efficiency, and validity of selected scales of the Millon adolescent clinical inventory (MACI; Millon et al., Manual for the Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory, National Computer Systems, Minneapolis, MN, 1993). 241 psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents were administered the MACI and a battery of established self-report measures and a multidisciplinary team independently assigned DSM-IV psychiatric diagnoses at the time of discharge. The internal consistency of MACI scales ranged from 0.71 to 0.93. Conditional probabilities (sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive power, and negative predictive power) were calculated for selected disorders using independently generated clinical diagnoses as the standard. The diagnostic efficiencies for the selected scales were variable, with adequate performance for predicting classes of diagnoses but not for specific diagnoses. The MACI showed good criterion validity for most disorders, with participants with a clinical diagnosis having a significantly higher corresponding MACI scale score than participants not assigned that diagnosis. Concurrent validity, tested by correlating MACI scale scores with those of relevant, validated measures, was generally good. The MACI appears to be a psychometrically sound self-report instrument and appears valuable as a screening instrument for many problems found in adolescent psychiatric inpatients.     

Experience, context, and the visual perception of human movement

Why are human observers particularly sensitive to human movement? Seven experiments examined the roles of visual experience and motor processes in human movement perception by comparing visual sensitivities to point-light displays of familiar, unusual, and impossible gaits across gait-speed and identity discrimination tasks. In both tasks, visual sensitivity to physically possible gaits was superior to visual sensitivity to physically impossible gaits, supporting perception-action coupling theories of human movement perception. Visual experience influenced walker-identity perception but not gait-speed discrimination. Thus, both motor experience and visual experience define visual sensitivity to human movement. An ecological perspective can be used to define the conditions necessary for experience-dependent sensitivity to human movement.     

Effect of bilateral stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus on parkinsonian dysarthria

Never was the effect of bilateral stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) evaluated quantitatively on all the components of speech production, that is articulation, respiration and phonation, at the same time. It is the purpose of this study which uses force measurements of the articulatory organs and acoustic analysis in 16 parkinsonian patients. With STN stimulation, reaction and movement time of the articulatory organs decreased and their maximal strength, as well as their precision increased. We also noted a large beneficial effect on voice with a significant improvement in respiratory and phonatory functions.     

Target uncertainty does not lead to more distraction by singletons: intertrial priming does

In two experiments, we examined why a singleton distractor has a stronger interfering effect in visual search when the target identity is uncertain. When participants searched for a shape, a color singleton distractor had a larger slowing effect in a mixed block, in which the target shape could change from trial to trial, than in a pure block, in which the target shape remained the same. Importantly, this increased singleton distractor effect could be traced back entirely to intertrial priming, since the increased costs occurred only on trials in which the target and the singleton distractor swapped identity (Experiment 1, allowing for priming between targets and singleton distractors) or on trials in which the target alone changed identity while the singleton distractor remained constant (Experiment 2, allowing for priming between targets only). This suggests that target uncertainty itself does not lead to strategic changes in the attentional selection of singletons. Instead, selection is affected by relatively automatic priming mechanisms that may be enhanced by competition for attention.     

Computerized perceptual analysis of patients with body dysmorphic disorder: a pilot study

Many factors influence the development of body image, one of which is the perception we have of our body. Perception can refer to actual visual input or the interpretation of vision; in other words, cognitive appraisal. The goal of this preliminary study is to determine if three groups (body dysmorphic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a non-psychiatric control group) differed in the perception of their faces. Thirty individuals, 10 in each group, were asked to make changes to a computerized image of their face. In addition, affective and perceptual tests were administered. The groups did not differ on affective and perceptual organizational measures, although the obsessive-compulsive disorder group reported a higher level of anxiety than the body dysmorphic disorder group. Imaging software showed that facial features were modified by patients with body dysmorphic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder in about 50% of cases. No modifications were made in the control group. Future studies need to investigate the possible causes of these differences.     

Emergent Literacy and Early Writing Skills

In the present study, the authors aimed to assess the short- and long-term predictive power of the various components of an emergent literacy model on early writing abilities in a language with a mainly transparent orthography (Italian). Emergent literacy skills were assessed in 72 children (M age = 5.05 years, SD = ± .03) who were followed longitudinally from preschool to the end of the first grade of primary school. Their early writing abilities (orthographic correctness in writing individual words) and their advanced writing abilities (orthographic correctness in text writing) were tested at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Multiple stepwise and logistic regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the predictive capacities of emergent literacy abilities on early and advanced writing competences. Results show that notational competence is a strong predictor of early writing skills and that phonological competence only has an effect insofar as it is integrated with notational competence. Emergent literacy competences do not significantly predict orthographic errors in advanced text writing. This research allows for reconsideration of the importance of phonological awareness and gives a central role to notational competence in predicting early writing competence.     

Where did you park your car? Analysis of a naturalistic long-term recency effect

Abstract

Three experiments studied the long-term retention of parking locations. In Experiment 1, members of the Applied Psychology Unit (MU) attempted to recall where they had parked during the morning and afternoon of each of the previous 12 working days. A marked recency effect was observed. In Experiment 2, members of the APU Subject Panel were invited for a single test session, and asked where they had parked after a delay of 2 hours, 1 week or 1 month. Recall was excellent and did not differ as a function of delay, allowing a simple trace decay interpretation to be ruled out. A third experiment invited subjects to attend on two occasions separated by a 2-week interval. The subjects were then required to recall their parking locations some 4 weeks after either their first visit or their second visit. Performance in both groups was inferior to that observed in Experiment 2, and declined over time. A temporal discrimination model, based on laboratory studies of both long-term and short-term recency in free recall, offers a plausible explanation of our results.     

Eating disorders in the course of life: A qualitative approach to vital change

Eating disorders (EDs) have become one of the biggest mental-health problems in the last decades, especially among youth and women. The present study aims to analyse the suitability of Prochaska and DiClemente’s Transtheoretical Model of Change when applied to the living experiences of people diagnosed with ED and their carers. For this purpose, we applied a narrative biographic approach to the ways in which people face their problems and vital development in the ED domain. Through the narrative analysis of these autobiographies, we aimed to study the patients’ own notions of ‘change’, ‘problem’ and ‘vital trajectory’. We focused on five autobiographic interviews of persons diagnosed as ED (four women and a man). The analysis yields three discourses which organize and give sense to our participants’ vital transitions: a discourse of functional adaptation to events and experiences; one that pays attention to random events and people entering your life; and one that has the personal initiative and agency of an individual agent at its core. It also illuminates particular ways of understanding determination, contemplation and pre-contemplation. These ways of understanding change are shown to extend the possible ways of thinking about people’s lives and ED patients’ perspectives.