Psychosocial risk and resistance factors among children with chronic illness,healthy siblings,and healthy controls

Psychosocial risk and resistance factors within the domains of parental functioning, family Stressors, and family resources were examined as predictors of psychological adjustment and physical problems in juvenile rheumatic disease patients (N=93), their healthy siblings (N=72), and demographically matched healthy controls (N=93). Family socioeconomic status and background variables showed few consistent relationships with child functioning. However, a constellation of risk and resistance factors tended to show comparable associations with functioning for patients, siblings, and controls. Higher parental depression and medical symptoms and more family Stressors, sibling problems, and burden of illness on the family predicted more problems among the patients. These relationships held when disease duration and severity were controlled. For the siblings, increased parental and patient dysfunction, more family Stressors, and less family cohesion and expressiveness were associated with more problems. Although the associations were not as strong, mothers' depression and lack of family cohesion and expressiveness also were related to more adjustment problems among the control children. These findings imply that there may be a general association between certain risk and resistance factors and childhood adaptation.This research was supported in part by NIH Multipurpose Arthritis Center Grant AM20610, NIMH Grant MH16744, and Veterans Administration Medical and Health Services Research and Development Service Research funds. Jan Gottlieb provided valuable help in all phases of the research. We appreciate the help of the staff of the Pediatric Rheumatology Clinic at Children's Hospital at Stanford and the families who participated in this study.     

Teachers' judgments of preschoolers' creativity

This study investigated the relationship of objective measures of preschoolers' ideational fluency and intelligence to teachers' ratings of creativity and desirability. The sample of 60 4-yr.-olds and 39 teachers were from six classrooms. Teachers' ratings of creativity were related to measures of intelligence (r = .46, p less than .001) but not to ideational fluency (r = .10). These findings are discussed in relation to possible halo effects and the ability to discriminate adequately cognitive abilities among preschool children.     

A computer simulation of children’s arithmetic word-problem solving

ARITHPRO is a computer simulation of children’s arithmetic word-problem solving behavior. It is an instantiation of a recently proposed cognitive model of the knowledge and procedures required to solve such problems. The program solves word problems by (1) comprehending the story text in which the problem is embedded, (2) comprehending numerical information as sets of objects, (3) building superstructures from these sets, thereby specifying their logical relations, and (4) using a counting procedure to derive the answer to the problem. This report describes ARITHPRO and its architecture and knowledge base. A few comparisons of ARITHPRO’s performance with that of children are also provided.     

The role of understanding in solving word problems

Word problems are notoriously difficult to solve. We suggest that much of the difficulty children experience with word problems can be attributed to difficulty in comprehending abstract or ambiguous language. We tested this hypothesis by (1) requiring children to recall problems either before or after solving them, (2) requiring them to generate final questions to incomplete word problems, and (3) modeling performance patterns using a computer simulation. Solution performance was found to be systematically related to recall and question generation performance. Correct solutions were associated with accurate recall of the problem structure and with appropriate question generation. Solution “errors” were found to be correct solutions to miscomprehended problems. Word problems that contained abstract or ambiguous language tended to be miscomprehended more often than those using simpler language, and there was a great deal of systematicity in the way these problems were miscomprehended. Solution error patterns were successfully simulated by manipulating a computer model's language comprehension strategies, as opposed to its knowledge of logical set relations.     

Acceptability of behavioral staff management techniques

This study describes an extension of Kazdin's work on acceptability of behavior therapy methods to the assessment of acceptability in the developing field of behavioral staff management. An instrument for assessing acceptability of behavioral staff management techniques was developed and then used to assess staff evaluations of four techniques that have been researched in the staff management literature (instruction, reinforcement, punishment, self-management). The effects on acceptability of problem difficulty and duration of supervisor-staff interaction were also investigated. Staff identified the techniques as having differing degrees of acceptability, with instruction rated most acceptable, followed in order by self-management, reinforcement, and punishment. Ancillary studies supported the reliability and validity of the scale. Results are placed within the context of a recent behavioral supervision model, and discussed in terms of social validity and consumer satisfaction issues. Implications for delivering behavioral staff management interventions are presented.     

Outcome of hospitalization for defendants found incompetent to stand trial

This study assessed the outcome of hospitalization for incompetent criminal defendants admitted to the forensic unit of a state hospital for treatment during a 4-year period. Findings suggested that the overwhelming majority of the defendants were restored to competency. The defendants also showed significant improvement in overall severity of psychopathology during hospitalization. Further, the duration of hospitalization for these defendants was relatively short. Although these results are promising with regard to treatment of incompetent defendants, predicting the outcome of hospitalization for these defendants was problematic. Prediction of competency restoration was precluded because persistent incompetence was so infrequent. Moreover, multiple regression analyses suggested limited predictive ability with regard to defendants' discharge level of functioning or length of hospitalization. These findings are consistent with the view that examiners should exercise caution in making recommendations to the courts concerning treatability of incompetent defendants.     

Six Approaches to the Assessment of Career Maturity

This article discusses the construct of career maturity and briefly reviews research that identifies factors associated with this construct. Brief reviews of 6 instruments designed to measure career maturity are included: The Career Maturity Inventory (Crites, 1978a, 1978b), the Career Development Inventory (Super, Thompson, Lindeman, Jordaan, & Myers, 1988), the Adult Career Concerns Inventory (Super, Thompson, & Lindeman, 1988), the Assessment of Career Decision Making (Harren, 1979; Buck & Daniels, 1985), the Career Beliefs Inventory (Krumboltz, 1994), and the Career Decision Scale (Osipow, Carney, Winer, Yanico, Koschier, 1976). Issues associated with the assessment of career maturity are also discussed.     

Assessing the specific psychopathology of binge eating disorder patients: Interview or self-report?

Research addressing the assessment of binge eating and associated eating disorder psychopathology has steadily increased in recent years. Few studies have examined the relationship between the various assessment methods. This study compared an investigator-based interview, the Eating Disorder Examination (EDE), with a self-report version of that interview, the EDE-Q. Fifty-two individuals (six men and 46 women) with binge eating disorder (BED) completed both instruments. Modest-to-good agreement and significant correlations (P < 0.0001) were found between the two methods on all four subscales assessing specific eating disorder psychopathology (i.e., Restraint, Eating Concern, Weight Concern, and Shape Concern subscales). However, higher levels of disturbance were consistently reported on the EDE-Q than the EDE interview. The two methods were not significantly or reliably related to one another when assessing binge eating. This may be due in part to the difficulty inherent in identifying binges in subjects with BED. Examination of individual item scores suggest that it might be possible to improve the performance of the EDE-Q by clarifying the definitions of certain complex features, although this should not be at the expense of compromising the practical utility of its self-report format.     

Effects of training in rapid decoding on the reading comprehension of adult ESL learners

We report an experimental investigation of the effects on comprehension of increasing the decoding speed of three adult learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Participants were taught to read lists of 25 difficult words in isolation until they could read the entire list at a mean rate of not more than 1.5 secs per word. They were then asked to read passages containing these words. Decoding speed and accuracy measures, for both the word lists and passages, and passage comprehension measures, were obtained. In a temporally contiguous within-subjects repeated trials reversal design, decoding training on isolated words was shown to be associated with significant increases in decoding speed and accuracy both in isolation and context, and improvements in the participants' comprehension. With all participants rate and accuracy gains in context were maintained in the final reversal phase, though the comprehension score gains did not. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for a decoding sufficiency hypothesis.