Development of a short form for the MMPI-2 based on scale elevation congruence

The length of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is often considered a barrier to its use, leading to the development of short forms. Two methods of abbreviating the revised MMPI have now been developed. One agrees poorly with the long form in terms of which scales are elevated. The second ensures perfect congruence in which scales are elevated but requires computer administration. This article describes the development of a short form representing a compromise approach. The short form was derived using 800 psychiatric inpatients and cross-validated with samples of 658 inpatients and 266 outpatients. It is briefer than the computerized short form but does not achieve perfect congruence with the full inventory. It is longer than earlier noncomputerized short forms but demonstrates greater scale elevation congruence with the full inventory and allows estimates of more scales. The short form offers a reasonable alternative when the full inventory is impractical.     

The Tourette's Disorder Scale (TODS): development, reliability, and validity

To address the lack of a simple and standardized instrument to assess overall illness severity of Tourette's disorder (TD), the authors developed and tested a 15-item scale to measure a broad range of common symptoms including tics, inattention, hyperactivity, obsessions, compulsions, aggression, and emotional symptoms. Independent investigators used the 15-item Tourette's Disorder Scale (TODS) to assess 60 TD patients who were taking part in a double-blind placebo-controlled multicenter 8-week treatment study. Interrater reliability, internal consistency, convergent and discriminant validity, and sensitivity to change were examined. The TODS was associated with good interrater reliability, excellent internal consistency, and favorable levels of validity and sensitivity to change. Individual TODS items showed good convergent and discriminant validity against other measures. The TODS is a simple, efficient way for clinicians and parents to rate the severity of multiple symptoms commonly found in patients with Tourette's disorder.     

Holistic thinking is not the whole story: alternative or adjunct approaches for increasing the accuracy of legal evaluations

There are a number of very helpful, but often underutilized, principles and procedures that can augment decision making in clinical and legal settings. Psychologists often restrict their range of decision-making strategies and options--at the cost of maximizing diagnostic and predictive accuracy--in part as the result of "ontological-epistemological one-worldedness" (O-E O-W). However, no philosophical, logical, or scientific necessity demands strict consistency between views regarding the nature of psychological phenomena and views about how to best assess or learn about those phenomena. Relaxing this unnecessary and largely psychologically-based O-E O-W may promote greater comfort with and utilization of the methods that are discussed in this article for increasing judgmental accuracy.     

Cell phone-induced failures of visual attention during simulated driving

This research examined the effects of hands-free cell phone conversations on simulated driving. The authors found that these conversations impaired driver's reactions to vehicles braking in front of them. The authors assessed whether this impairment could be attributed to a withdrawal of attention from the visual scene, yielding a form of inattention blindness. Cell phone conversations impaired explicit recognition memory for roadside billboards. Eye-tracking data indicated that this was due to reduced attention to foveal information. This interpretation was bolstered by data showing that cell phone conversations impaired implicit perceptual memory for items presented at fixation. The data suggest that the impairment of driving performance produced by cell phone conversations is mediated, at least in part, by reduced attention to visual inputs.     

Treatment of bipolar depression

Bipolar disorder is underdiagnosed and often mistaken for unipolar depression. Bipolar patients spend 33% of their time in a state of depression compared to 11% of time spent in a manic state. Duration of time depressed and severity of depression are associated with increased risk for suicide, which occurs in 10% to 20% of bipolar patients. Antidepressants are increasingly being used as adjuncts in the depressed phase of bipolar disorder, although they provide a moderate risk for switch into mania. Lithium and some antiepileptics and atypical antipsychotics have shown antidepressant effects in the treatment of bipolar disorder. Other adjuncts for treatment-refractory patients include monoamine oxidase inhibitors and electroconvulsive therapy.     

Early maternal availability and prefrontal correlates of reward-related memory

Early emotional experiences affect developing brain systems that subsequently mediate adult learning and memory in rodents. Here we test for similar effects in squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) four years after disruptions in early maternal availability. These conditions were previously shown to generate differences in emotional behavior, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal stress physiology, and right ventral medial prefrontal volumes determined in adulthood by magnetic resonance imaging. This report identifies in the same monkeys variability in reward-related memory on tests with a spatial reversal. Adult monkeys that more often selected locations repeatedly rewarded before each reversal had larger right ventral medial prefrontal volumes, but not hippocampal nor dorsolateral prefrontal volumes on the left or right brain side. Differences in performance were also discerned after each spatial reversal. These findings indicate that maternal availability alters developing ventral medial prefrontal brain regions involved in reward-related memory.     

British female academics and comparative psychology: attempts to establish a research niche in the early 20th century

Why was there a preponderance of women engaged in laboratory-based studies of animal behavior in Britain in the early years of the 20th century? As a new experimental subject with recently neglected potential, animal psychology then represented an opportunity for women to make further inroads into academic science. Because the study of psychology before World War I offered negligible professional opportunities for the application of the subject, the intake of students was restricted. Perhaps this encouraged academic access to it by aspiring female scientists who felt that career prospects, uncertain and socially unexpected of them in any case, were worth chancing for greater long-term rewards. The academic circumstances and contributions of 3 British female pioneers in experimental comparative psychology are discussed.     

The reliability and stability of verbal working memory measures

The psychometric properties of several commonly used verbal working memory measures were assessed. One hundred thirty-nine individuals in five age groups (18–30, 50–59, 60–69, 70–79, and 80+ years) were tested twice (Time I and Time II) on seven working memory span measures (alphabet span, backward digit span, missing digit span, subtract 2 span, running item span, and sentence span for syntactically simple and complex sentences), with an interval of approximately 6 weeks between testing. There were significant effects of age on all but two of the tasks. All the measures had adequate internal consistency. Correlations between performances at Time I and Time II were significant for all the tasks, other than the missing digit span task. The magnitude of the correlations was similar across the age groups and ranged from .52 to .81. Classification of subjects into discrete memory span groups on the basis of a single measure was highly inconsistent across testing sessions and tasks. Classification into upper and lower quartiles was more stable than using a cutoff score for group membership or than classification into high-, medium-, and low-span groups. Correlational analyses showed that there was a moderate relationship between performances on many of the span tasks. Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that six of the seven tasks reflected a common factor. Both test—retest reliability and stability of classification improved when a composite measure reflecting performance on several tasks was used.