A New Self-Report Scale for Assessment of Adolescent Psychopathology: Factor Structure, Reliability, Validity, and Diagnostic Sensitivity

This paper describes four studies on self-reported problems in 2,243 adolescent males and females, 12 to 17 years of age. In Study 1, principal-axis factoring of 102 items covering 11 problem domains revealed six factors comprising 49.5% of the variance. Study 2 used confirmatory factor analysis of a 64-item reduced set on a new sample of 408 adolescents. Goodness-of-fit indicators suggested that the six-factor model had excellent fit to the data. Study 3 used data from the 2,157 adolescents used in the first two studies. Coefficient alphas ranged from .83 to .92. Median test-retest reliability for the six factors was .86. There was a consistent structure of the correlation matrix across age and gender. Study 4 was a study of criterion validity, using an additional sample of 86 children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sensitivity and specificity were high, with an overall diagnostic efficiency of 83%. This new self-report scale, the Conners/Wells Adolescent Self-Report of Symptoms (CASS), may provide a useful component of a multimodal assessment of adolescent psychopathology.     

Personality characteristics of highly generative adults as assessed in Q-sort ratings of life stories

The present study compared the personality characteristics assessed in life stories of 40 highly generative adults to those in the life stories of a contrasting sample of 30 less generative adults. Life-story interviews of all 70 subjects were rated with the California Adult Q-Sort (CAQ; Block, 1961). The results were compared to the “expert” generativity CAQ profile compiled by Peterson and Klohnen (1995). The results indicated that highly generative adults were more likely to construct life stories indicative of such positive generativity characteristics as “behaves in a giving way toward others” and “is turned to for advice and reassurance” compared to adults low in generativity. Furthermore, the highly generative adults related life-story accounts in which negative generativity qualities such as “has hostility toward others” and “is self-indulgent” were more uncharacteristic than those expressed in the low-generativity adults' stories. The study adds to a growing empirical literature on the meaning and manifestations of generativity in adult lives and suggests that the CAQ is a useful tool for uncovering personality characteristics expressed in the life-story accounts generated by adults.     

Amount of surround and test-inducing separation in simultaneous brightness contrast

Simultaneous brightness contrast is investigated in the fovea as a function of (1) amount of surround of the inducing field (Experiment 1) and (2) separation between the test and inducing fields (Experiment 2). Circular test and match fields subtending 14 min (radius) are used throughout. The inducing field, held constant in area, is a circular annulus (615 sq min) varying from a quadrant on one side of the test circle to an annulus completely surrounding the test circle. Test-field apparent brightness is not significantly affected by amount of inducing-field surround when the separation between centers of the test and inducing fields is held constant (Experiment 1). Experiment 2, though, shows that apparent brightness increases significantly as the separation between the centers of the test and inducing fields is increased.     

Development of voice recognition: parallels with face recognition.

Encoding and subsequent recognition of unfamiliar voices was examined in children, aged 6 to 16, and in adults. Performance changed markedly with age, improving sharply between ages 6 and 10, with 10-year-olds approaching adult levels. After age 10 accuracy declined significantly but returned to the adult level by age 14. The course of development closely matches that recently documented for the ability to encode and recognize unfamiliar faces. Several parallels between voice recognition and face recognition are discussed.