Speech competence of children vulnerable to psychopathology

Verbal productivity and cohesion and reference patterns of children of schizophrenics (N=23), unipolars (N=43), bipolars (N=38), and normals (N=53) were assessed using the Rochester and Martin (1979) evaluation system. Children of all offspring groups could be discriminated from one another, with children of schizophrenics showing the most deviant speech performance across all dependent measures. Children of schizophrenics were less verbally productive and had poorer patterns of cohesion between ideas than children of normals. In addition, they produced more unclear and ambiguous references to previously mentioned ideas than did children of normals. The consistency of deviance and performance on specific dependent variables in these children at risk for schizophrenia was similar to the speech performance of thought-disordered schizophrenics. Possible explanations for these similarities were discussed and evaluated.This research was supported by grant number MH21145 from the National Institute of Mental Health and by funds from the William T. Grant Foundation. The authors would like to thank Lina Jandorf for her invaluable assistance in data collection and scoring.     

Willingness to Help a Stranger: The Effects of Social Context and Opinion Similarity1

Two field experiments investigate how information about aspects of the social environment affects willingness to help others who are similar or dissimilar. Subjects were pedestrians who found a lost packet of materials containing information about the opinions of the packet's loser and a survey report which claimed that the quality of life in the neighborhood had either improved or deteriorated. In the fiist study, the opinions were varied in order to create different degrees of opinion similarity between the loser and subject. Results showed that relatively slight differences between the loser's and subject's opinions made subjects unwilling to help (return the lost packet) when information about the social environment suggested a negative state of affairs, e.g., quality of life deteriorating. However, when information about the social environment suggested a positive state of affairs, subjects were willing to help, even if there was little similarity of opinion. In the second study, subjects learned that the loser of the packet agreed with their views on one opinion but disagreed on another. In this study, one of the two opinions concerned the same social issue as the one described in the survey report. Results demonstrated that subjects helped when there was agreement on the social issue that was also highlighted in survey reports of a negative state of affairs in the social environment and withheld help when there was disagreement on this issue. There were trends for the same result with information about a positive state of affairs in the social world.     

Determinants of perceived choice,number of options,and perceived time in making a selection

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of number of choice options and perceived time taken to make a selection upon perceived choice. College students were asked to make a selection from a set of options which varied in numerosity; after making their selection, they were given information which varied their perception of time in making the selection. As predicted, perceived choice was found to be greater (1) the greater the number of options when a person perceived that he had taken a relatively short time; (2) if the selection involved a moderately large number of options than if it involved either a small or a very large number when a person perceived that he had taken a relatively long time; (3) the longer the time a person thought he had taken, except when the selection involved a very large number of options-in which case, perceived choice was greater the shorter the perceived time. The experiment also provided evidence about the relationship between perceived choice and perceived competence.     

Dynamic changes in work/rest duty cycles in a study of sleep deprivation

The effects of moderate workload and 72 h of sleep deprivation were studied using a modified continuous-performance paradigm. Ten subjects were tested hourly on a number of perceptual and cognitive tasks designed to require approximately 30 min to complete, with the remainder of each hour free. As sleep deprivation continued, the average time on task increased at an accelerating rate. The rate of increase differed among tasks, with longer tasks showing greater absolute and relative increases than shorter ones. Such increases confound sleep deprivation and workload effects. In this paper, we compare the advantages and disadvantages of several experimental paradigms; describe details of the present design; and discuss methodological problems associated with separating the interactions of sleep deprivation, workload, and circadian variation with performance.     

STAR: A unique embedded performance assessment technique

STAR (The Strategic and Tactical Assessment Record) is a versatile research tool designed to evaluate the effects of sustained performance and other stressors on integrated, complex cognitive functioning. This completely automated task is presented in the form of a highly motivating computer game. However, unlike typical computer games, successful performance of STAR depends on an individual’s ability to rapidly and accurately assess risk/benefit ratios in a variety of situations, and on the skilled use of an array of multipurpose control systems. STAR is unique in that approximately 80 performance measures are unobtrusively embedded in the operations required to “play the game”; no obvious performance assessment interferes with task presentation. STAR provides multiple measures of psychomotor function, attention, memory, information processing, decision making, risk-taking behavior, subjective state, errors, and error paths. In this report, we describe STAR, and summarize two preliminary experiments designed to separately evaluate the effects of task difficulty and task stress level on complex performance.