A comparison of depressed and nondepressed disturbed children on measures of attributional style,hopelessness, life stress,and temperament

Upon admission to a hospital treatment program, clinically depressed and nondepressed children (aged 9–17 years) were assessed on measures of attributional style, hopelessness, depression, life stress, and child temperament. The depressed group tended to attribute positive events to specific and unstable factors when compared with the nondepressed sample. Group differences also were found on child temperament measures. However, no differences were reported between the diagnostic groups on self-reported depression, hopelessness, or life stress. The findings suggested that there may not be a unique constellation of cognitive characteristics in depressed children when compared with a nondepressed clinical sample. For both depressed and nondepressed groups, treatment did appear to affect self-reported depression and overall ratings of depressogenic attributional style.     

Judgmental relativism as a validity threat to standardized psychiatric rating scales

Judgemental relativism is a threat to the replicability and validity of measures of client behavior from direct rating scales whenever raters are exposed to different levels of client functioning since the internal standards, or anchor points, used to judge dimensional continua may vary on the basis of prior experience. Traditional interrater reliability indexes fail to identify such effects. The influence of judgmental relativism on summated ratings from the Nurses Observational Scale for Inpatient Evaluation (NOSIE-30) for 1040 adult mentally ill clients was examined with clinical staff raters from 24 treatment units in which the Time-Sample Behavioral Checklist (TSBC) provided full-week objective measures of actual client functioning via hourly direct observational coding (DOC). Regression analyses found that the same level of objective performance received higher or lower ratings across treatment units dependent on the raters'exposure to client groups that differed in level of functioning. Analyses of rating errors found that clients with better levels of functioning relative to others within treatment units were rated even higher than performance warranted. The operation of halo and contrast effects is explored and guidelines are provided for determining when judgmental relativism may produce or nullify significant differences. DOC assessments should be used instead of retrospective ratings to support most decisions in residential settings. Specific recommendations for the application of rating scales and improving data quality are provided.This study was the basis of a master's thesis at the University of Houston by Betty E. Rich under the direction of Gordon L. Paul and Marco J. Mariotto. Richard M. Rozelle, to whom appreciation is expressed for helpful comments, served on the examination committee. This study was partially supported by grants to Gordon L. Paul from the National Institute of Mental Health, Public Health Service (MH-15353; MH-25464); the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities; the Joyce Foundation; the MacArthur Foundation; the Owsley Foundation; the Cullen Foundation; and the Center for Public Policy, University of Houston.     

Analogical transfer in young children: Analogies as tools for communication and exposition

Children's ability to transfer what they learn in one situation to analogous problems was examined in a series of four studies. Subjects ranged in age from 3 to 10 years. The problems involved novel uses of familiar tools or simple biological themes such as mimicry as a method of defence. The data suggest that the apparent transfer reluctance shown by children in previous studies is the result of what they have been required to learn and the conditions under which they have been required to learn it. In the present studies, children as young as 3 years transferred readily if the problem domain was one they understood and engaged in, and if the traditional laboratory paradigm was modified so as to promote transfer rather than just to test for its spontaneous occurrence.     

Negotiating transitions: a supervision model for home-based family therapists

Home-based family-centered treatment programs provide mental health and case management services to families in their own home. Treatment objectives include the prevention of residential or psychiatric placement, strengthening the family unit, and promoting family self-sufficiency. Little has been written, however, regarding the supervision of home-based, family-centered therapists. The purpose of this article is to describe a supervision model to teach novice-level family therapists to think systemically and to do family therapy with multiproblem at-risk families.     

Lesioning a connectionist model of visual search: selective effects on distractor grouping.

A connectionist model of visual search is presented, in which search is determined by patterns of grouping between distractors and between the target and the distractors. Grouping is based on conjunctive relations between simple form elements (corners, line-end terminators), and uses principles of similarity and spatial proximity. In its normal, 'unlesioned' state, the model simulates the search data generated by human subjects when they search for simple form conjunctions amongst either homogeneous or heterogeneous distractors (Humphreys & Muller, in press). In this paper, the performance of the model is examined after the model is subject to various types of 'lesion'. 'Lesioning' is produced either by increasing the internal noise on the activation functions governing the interactions between processing units, or by eliminating processing units from different loci in the model. Increasing the internal noise within the model, or lesioning units within 'high-level' processing stages, can generate the selective effects on search found in a detailed single case study of an agnosic patient (Humphreys, Riddoch, Quinlan, Price & Donnelly, this volume): Namely, there is selective disruption of search for a form conjunction amongst homogeneous distractors relative to search for the same target amongst heterogeneous distractors. This selective effect can be attributed to the 'lesion' disrupting grouping between distractors, which normally facilitates search with homogeneous distractors. The simulations demonstrate that (1) search processes can be disrupted by adding internal noise to search functions, (2) that there can be selective effects on grouping processes, and (3) that these selective effects can be associated with different types of lesion to different stages in the model. The implications of the simulations for understanding visual processing impairments in agnosia are discussed.     

Archetypes and patriarchy: Eliade and Jung

This paper first presents the understandings of the concept of archetype held by Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade. After comparing their use of the term, the paper next presents some major archetypes concerning sex roles that each theorist describes. The problems such notions create for women are analyzed. The paper ends with a discussion of some possible solutions to the difficulties caused by the human proclivity for archetypal imaging.She is also founder and chair of the board of Resources for Ecumenical Spirituality.     

Children's memory for a personally experienced event: Implications for testimony

This study was prompted by an interest in children's abilities to testify in legal settings. Based on the fundamental premise that children cannot provide accurate testimony about events that cannot be remembered, this investigation focused on 3- and 6-year-olds' memory of a salient, personally experienced event. The event selected was that of a visit to the doctor for a physical examination. Children at both ages remembered most of the features of the check-up at an immediate memory test, although the older children performed somewhat better than younger children. In addition, the performance of the 3-year-olds decreased over delay intervals of 1 and 3 weeks, whereas that of the 6-year-olds remained constant over this period. Moreover, at all assessment points the older children provided more information in response to open-ended general questions than did the younger children. Both groups of children were quite good at giving accurate responses to misleading questions, although the 3-year-olds performed below the level of 6-year-olds. The need for further controlled studies of children's memory capabilities is discussed.