Clinical features of major depressive disorder in adolescents and their relatives: impact on familial aggregation, implications for phenotype definition, and specificity of transmission

Three questions were addressed using family study data from a community sample: (a) Which clinical features of major depressive disorder (MDD) in adolescents are associated with elevated rates of MDD in relatives? (b) Which features of MDD in relatives distinguish family members of depressed adolescents from relatives of adolescents without mood disorders (NMD)? and (c) Do depressed adolescents with particular features have higher proportions of depressed relatives with the same features? Participants included 268 MDD adolescents, 401 NMD adolescents, and their 2,202 first-degree relatives. Rates of MDD were highest among relatives of depressed adolescents with recurrent episodes and greater impairment. Depression severity best distinguished the relatives of depressed adolescents from relatives of controls. Specific clinical features did not aggregate in families.     

The convergent and discriminant validity of subjective fit perceptions

This study examined whether employees develop perceptions about 3 different types of fit: person-organization fit, needs-supplies fit, and demands-abilities fit. Confirmatory factor analyses of data from 2 different samples strongly suggested that employees differentiate between these 3 types of fit. Furthermore, results from a longitudinal design of 187 managers supported both the convergent and discriminant validity of the different types of fit perceptions. Specifically, person-organization fit perceptions were related to organization-focused outcomes (e.g., organizational identification, citizenship behaviors, turnover decisions), whereas needs-supplies fit perceptions were related to job- and career-focused outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, career satisfaction, occupational commitment). Although demands-abilities fit perceptions emerged as a distinct construct, they were not related to hypothesized outcomes (e.g., job performance, raises).     

Five-factor model of personality and job satisfaction: a meta-analysis

This study reports results of a meta-analysis linking traits from the 5-factor model of personality to overall job satisfaction. Using the model as an organizing framework, 334 correlations from 163 independent samples were classified according to the model. The estimated true score correlations with job satisfaction were -.29 for Neuroticism, .25 for Extraversion, .02 for Openness to Experience, .17 for Agreeableness, and .26 for Conscientiousness. Results further indicated that only the relations of Neuroticism and Extraversion with job satisfaction generalized across studies. As a set, the Big Five traits had a multiple correlation of .41 with job satisfaction, indicating support for the validity of the dispositional source of job satisfaction when traits are organized according to the 5-factor model.     

On the bias of Huffcutt and Arthur's (1995) procedure for identifying outliers in the meta-analysis of correlations

This study documents how the use of A. I. Huffcutt & W. A. Arthur's (1995) sample adjusted meta-analytic deviancy (SAMD) statistic for identifying outliers in correlational meta-analyses results in inaccuracies in mean r. Monte Carlo simulations found that use of the SAMD resulted in the overidentification of small relative to large correlations as outliers. Furthermore, this tendency to overidentify small correlations was found to increase as the magnitude of the population correlation increased and resulted in mean rs that overestimated the population correlation. The implications for meta-analysts are discussed, and 2 possible solutions are offered.     

Psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Family Awareness Scale

The author examined the reliability and validity of the Chinese Family Awareness Scale (C-FAS) in 2 studies. In Study 1, data from 361 adolescents (a) showed that the C-FAS was temporally stable and internally consistent and (b) supported the concurrent and construct validities of the scale. In Study 2, data from clinical (N = 281) and nonclinical (N = 451) groups of adolescents showed that the C-FAS scores discriminated between the 2 groups. C-FAS scores were also correlated significantly with other measures of family functioning and psychological well-being. Results of the 2 studies suggest that the C-FAS displayed generally good psychometric properties in different samples of Chinese adolescents.     

The time course of competition for attention: attention is initially labile

Competition for attention between 2 written words was investigated by presenting the words briefly in a single stream of distractors (Experiment 1) or in different streams (Experiment 2-6), using rapid serial visual presentation at 53 ms/item. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was varied from 0 to 213 ms. At all SOAs there was strong competition, but which word was more likely to be reported shifted markedly with SOA. At SOAs in the range of 13-53 ms the second word was more likely to be reported, but at 213 ms, the advantage switched to the first word, as in the attentional blink. A 2-stage competition model of attention is proposed in which attention to a detected target is labile in Stage 1. Stage 1 ends when one target is identified, initiating a serial Stage 2 process of consolidation of that target.     

Effect of speech task on intelligibility in dysarthria: a case study of Parkinson's disease

This study assessed intelligibility in a dysarthric patient with Parkinson's disease (PD) across five speech production tasks: spontaneous speech, repetition, reading, repeated singing, and spontaneous singing, using the same phrases for all but spontaneous singing. The results show that this speaker was significantly less intelligible when speaking spontaneously than in the other tasks. Acoustic analysis suggested that relative intensity and word duration were not independently linked to intelligibility, but dysfluencies (from perceptual analysis) and articulatory/resonance patterns (from acoustic records) were related to intelligibility in predictable ways. These data indicate that speech production task may be an important variable to consider during the evaluation of dysarthria. As speech production efficiency was found to vary with task in a patient with Parkinson's disease, these results can be related to recent models of basal ganglia function in motor performance.     

Mechanisms of source confusion and discounting in short-term priming 2: effects of prime similarity and target duration

D. E. Huber, R. M. Shiffrin, K. B. Lyle, and K. I. Ruys (2001) tested two-alternative, forced-choice (2-AFC) perceptual identification in a short-term priming task. For repetition priming, passive viewing of primes resulted in a preference to choose repeated words, but actively responding to primes resulted in a preference against choosing repeated words. These results were explained with a computational model, responding optimally with unknown sources of evidence (ROUSE), using the offsetting mechanisms of source confusion and discounting. An analysis of ROUSE revealed conditions under which discounting efficacy should diminish, causing a preference for primed words even with active prime processing. Two new studies confirm 2 such conditions: very short target flash durations and very low similarity between primes and primed choice words. These a priori predictions contrast with the a posteriori data fits of a multinomial model developed by R. Ratcliff and G. McKoon (2001).     

Synesthetic color experiences influence memory

We describe the extraordinary memory of C, a 21–year–old student who experiences synesthetic colors (i.e., photisms) when she sees, hears, or thinks of digits. Using three matrices of 50 digits, we tested C and 7 nonsynesthetes to evaluate whether C's synesthetic photisms influence her memory for digits. One matrix consisted of black digits, whereas the other two matrices consisted of digits that were either incongruent or congruent with the colors of C's photisms. C's recall of the incongruently colored digits was considerably poorer than her recall of either the black or the congruently colored digits. The 7 nonsynesthetes did not show such differences in their recall of the matrices. In addition, when immediate recall of the black digits was compared with delayed recall of those digits (48 hr), C showed no decrease in performance, whereas each of the nonsynesthetes showed a significant decrease. These findings both demonstrate C's extraordinary memory and show that her synesthetic photisms can influence her memory for digits.