Are DSM-IV-TR Borderline Personality Disorder, ICD-10 Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, and CCMD-III Impulsive Personality Disorder Analogous Diagnostic Categories Across Psychiatric Nomenclatures?

This study examined the validity of the borderline construct which encompasses diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV-TR Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), ICD-10 Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD), and CCMD-III Impulsive Personality Disorder (IPD) in a sample of 1,419 Chinese psychiatric patients. Participants completed the Chinese Personality Disorder Inventory and the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory-2 assessing various disordered personality features. Adequate internal consistency was found for the borderline construct (α = .83). Exploratory factor analysis revealed two components: (1) affective and cognitive disturbances, and (2) impulse dysregulation, which were replicated by confirmatory factor analysis. Item analysis indicated that the various borderline criteria displayed similar levels of diagnostic efficiency, which does not support the elimination of fear of abandonment and transient psychotic features from the EUPD and IPD criteria set. Findings of this study suggest that BPD, EUPD, and IPD may represent analogous diagnostic categories across classification systems.     

Is the map in our head oriented north?

We examined how a highly familiar environmental space--one's city of residence--is represented in memory. Twenty-six participants faced a photo-realistic virtual model of their hometown and completed a task in which they pointed to familiar target locations from various orientations. Each participant's performance was most accurate when he or she was facing north, and errors increased as participants' deviation from a north-facing orientation increased. Pointing errors and latencies were not related to the distance between participants' initial locations and the target locations. Our results are inconsistent with accounts of orientation-free memory and with theories assuming that the storage of spatial knowledge depends on local reference frames. Although participants recognized familiar local views in their initial locations, their strategy for pointing relied on a single, north-oriented reference frame that was likely acquired from maps rather than experience from daily exploration. Even though participants had spent significantly more time navigating the city than looking at maps, their pointing behavior seemed to rely on a north-oriented mental map.     

Solubility criterion for sequential disordering in metal-metal multilayers upon solid-state reaction

An n-body Ni-Ti potential is derived and applied in a molecular dynamics simulation to study the maximum supersaturated solubility of the terminal solid solutions and solid-state reaction in a Ni/Ti bilayer. It reveals that during interfacial reaction of the Ni/Ti bilayer the Ti lattice reaches its maximum solubility by dissolving Ni earlier than Ni does through dissolution of Ti, which results in a sequential disordering of first Ti and then Ni, although Ti has a higher melting point than Ni. In the Ni-Zr, Ni-Mo and Ni-Ta systems, however, the Ni lattice collapses more rapidly because it reaches a maximum solubility earlier than its partners, which have higher melting points than Ni. A solubility criterion is thus relevant for all the above cases; the lower the maximum solid solubility the less stable is the lattice of the metal upon solid-state reaction.     

Abstract: Sample Size Planning for Latent Curve Models

When designing a study that uses structural equation modeling (SEM), an important task is to decide an appropriate sample size. Historically, this task is approached from the power analytic perspective, where the goal is to obtain sufficient power to reject a false null hypothesis. However, hypothesis testing only tells if a population effect is zero and fails to address the question about the population effect size. Moreover, significance tests in the SEM context often reject the null hypothesis too easily, and therefore the problem in practice is having too much power instead of not enough power.

An alternative means to infer the population effect is forming confidence intervals (CIs). A CI is more informative than hypothesis testing because a CI provides a range of plausible values for the population effect size of interest. Given the close relationship between CI and sample size, the sample size for an SEM study can be planned with the goal to obtain sufficiently narrow CIs for the population model parameters of interest.

Latent curve models (LCMs) is an application of SEM with mean structure to studying change over time. The sample size planning method for LCM from the CI perspective is based on maximum likelihood and expected information matrix. Given a sample, to form a CI for the model parameter of interest in LCM, it requires the sample covariance matrix S, sample mean vector , and sample size N. Therefore, the width (w) of the resulting CI can be considered a function of S, , and N. Inverting the CI formation process gives the sample size planning process. The inverted process requires a proxy for the population covariance matrix Σ, population mean vector μ, and the desired width ω as input, and it returns N as output. The specification of the input information for sample size planning needs to be performed based on a systematic literature review. In the context of covariance structure analysis, Lai and Kelley (2011) discussed several practical methods to facilitate specifying Σ and ω for the sample size planning procedure.     

Assessing the Incidence and Perceptions of Sexual Harassment Behaviors Among American Undergraduates

A nine-item scale of sexual harassment behaviors was developed and tested in a two-study sequence. In the first study, male and female college students with job experience rated the frequency with which they experienced these behaviors from both supervisors and co-workers. Revisions were made on the basis of these results, and the revised scale was administered to a different yet similar sample to measure the perceptions of each behavior as sexual harassment. Results of both studies showed a significant difference for the ratings of supervisor and co-worker behaviors.     

The role of formal information sharing in key account team effectiveness: does informal control matter and when

Team selling is a useful approach for retaining strategically important accounts in business-to-business markets. For key account sales teams, ensuring adequate access to information about customer needs offers sustainable competitive advantages. However, the internal alignment of market information remains a recurring managerial issue in key account team selling. This study develops a moderated mediation model to identify management strategies that encourage team members' formal information sharing, which in turn improves team effectiveness. Analysis of a multilevel data set comprising 37 fluid key account teams reveals that customer orientation and task interdependence increase formal information sharing among team members. Managers' exercise of professional control strengthens the positive impact that formal information sharing has on team satisfaction. However, the practice has a dysfunctional influence on the positive effect of task interdependence on formal information sharing. Firms with key account management (KAM) programs must decide whether the marginal benefits attained by advocating such professional control outweigh the possible drawbacks.     

Functional equivalence of spatial images from touch and vision: evidence from spatial updating in blind and sighted individuals

This research examined whether visual and haptic map learning yield functionally equivalent spatial images in working memory, as evidenced by similar encoding bias and updating performance. In 3 experiments, participants learned 4-point routes either by seeing or feeling the maps. At test, blindfolded participants made spatial judgments about the maps from imagined perspectives that were either aligned or misaligned with the maps as represented in working memory. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 revealed a highly similar pattern of latencies and errors between visual and haptic conditions. These findings extend the well-known alignment biases for visual map learning to haptic map learning, provide further evidence of haptic updating, and most important, show that learning from the 2 modalities yields very similar performance across all conditions. Experiment 3 found the same encoding biases and updating performance with blind individuals, demonstrating that functional equivalence cannot be due to visual recoding and is consistent with an amodal hypothesis of spatial images.     

2～4岁儿童对"大""小"空间形容词词义掌握的研究

本研究以2～4儿童为研究对象。在自然实验条件下,通过精心设计的四项实验,得出结论：2岁儿童还未了解大小词义;2．5岁儿童能判别当前两同类物体的大小;3岁儿童能对两同类物体的大小相对性比较;4岁儿童能掌握不同类物体间大小的搭配;4岁儿童9成能掌握人与物间相对大小的匹配,但仅一半儿童掌握三个同类物体同时比较时大小相对关系,即4岁儿童还未对“大”“小”词义完全掌握。实验表明儿童掌握“大”“小”空间形容词是由易到难,由浅到深,由绝对禁止到相对灵活,由以自我为中心到以外界为中心。