Parental consent for psychological evaluations: Legal,ethical and practical considerations

This article explores the legal, ethical, and practical considerations underlying the requirement for acquiring parental consent prior to a psychological assessment of children in school settings. Publ. L. 94-142 now mandates that parents for all children potentially labeled as handicapped give permission for a preplacement evaluation. This article reviews in detail specific aspects of that mandate, argues that this procedure be generalized to all situations where psychologists propose to evaluate children by reviewing both current ethical codes and standards for practice and public policy which favors such an undertaking. Finally, the authors indicate methods for implementing the mandate by discussing such issues as who should obtain consent and what information parents should receive prior to giving consent.     

Stimulus encoding selectivity at high degrees of paired-associate learning

Sixty-two Ss learned six CCC trigram-digit pairs by the study-test method; 21 Ss continued the PA acquisition trials to a learning criterion of one errorless trial, while 41 Ss were carded to 300% overlearning or 24 trials, whichever came first. The Ss were then shown individual letters of the trigrams, with position cues provided, and were tested for their ability to provide the digit and produce the additional letters. Digit recall was much better to initial letters than to those in the second or third positions of the trigrams; with oveflearning, digit recall improved to the initial letters but not to letters in second and third positions. Production of additional letters of the trigrams was not appreciably related to either cue position or degree of PA learning. There was some evidence ofincreased selectivity with higher degrees of PA learning.     

The depression proneness rating scale: Reliability, validity, and factor structure

This study describes the development of the Depression Proneness Rating Scale (DPRS), a brief, self-administered measure of the tendency to experience frequent, long-lasting, and severe depressions, and three investigations into the scale’s reliability, validity, and factor structure. Study 1, using 100 university students, found a stability coefficient of .82 for the DPRS over a test-retest interval of nine weeks. Further, Time 1 (T1) DPRS scores predicted Time 2 (T2) symptoms of depression, even after adjusting for Time 1 symptoms (R² Change=.03). Study 2, using 440 university students, found the DPRS to be a better predictor of past depressive episodes (r=.41 to .47) than was the Beck Depression Inventory (r=.32). Study 3, using 1101 university students, found that all 13 items of the DPRS loaded .40 or greater on a single factor for both males and females. Overall, results provide substantial evidence for the DPRS as a valid, unidimensional, and practical measure of depression proneness.     

A follow-up of a media-based,worksite smoking cessation program

Described an examination of data collected 2 years following the onset of a media-based, worksite smoking cessation intervention. Thirty-eight companies in Chicago were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions. In the inital 3-week phase, all participants in both conditions received self-help manuals and were instructed to watch a 20-day televised series designed to accompany the manual. In addition, participants in the group (G) condition received six sessions emphasizing quitting techniques and social support. In the second phase, which continued for 12 months, employees in G participated in monthly peer-led support groups and received incentives, while participants in the nongroup (NG) condition received no further treatment. Twenty-four months after pretest, 30% of employees in G were abstinent compared to only 19.5% in NG. This study is one of the few experimentally controlled worksite smoking cessation interventions to demonstrate significant program differences 2 years following the initial intervention. Our thanks to Lori Klett and Libby Yeager-Turner for their help in data collection. Work on the project was supported in part by National Institute on Drug Abuse grant DA-04406-01 and a grant from the Chicago Lung Association to the second author.     

When “who we are” and “who I desire to be” appear disconnected: Introducing collective/personal self‐discrepancies and investigating their relations with minority students' psychological health

According to Self‐Discrepancy Theory research, perceiving mismatches between personal aspects of the self‐concept is associated with negative psychological consequences, including depression and anxiety. However, the impact of perceiving mismatches between collective and personal self‐aspects is still unknown. In a first step to address this gap, we introduce collective/personal self‐discrepancies—perceived mismatches between a desired self‐aspect and a collective identity. For cultural minority group members (n = 147), collective/personal self‐discrepancies were associated with more severe anxiety and depression symptoms. Bootstrapping analyses suggest that these relations are mediated by self‐discrepancies experienced at the personal level, but only for group members presenting average or high levels of ethnic identification. This study reaffirms the importance of collective identities, especially as potential antecedents of personal aspects of the self‐concept. The findings are further discussed in terms of their significance for cultural minority group members, who often highly identify with their minority groups.     

Examining the Effects of Controlling for Shared Variance among the Dark Triad Using Meta‐analytic Structural Equation Modelling

Multivariate procedures (e.g. structural equation modelling) are essential to personality psychology, but interpretive difficulties can arise when examining the relations between residualized variables (i.e. the residual content of a variable after its overlap with other variables has been statistically controlled for) and outcomes of interest. These issues have been the focus of recent debate within the research literature on the Dark Triad, which is a collection of interrelated but theoretically distinct personality constructs made up of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. The present paper highlights previous work on the issue of partialling and also makes use of recent developments surrounding meta‐analytic structural equation modelling to reliably assess the impact of partialling on the empirical profiles of the Dark Triad components. The results show that numerous interpretive difficulties arise after partialling the overlap among the Dark Triad components, most notably for narcissism and Machiavellianism. The results are discussed in the context of contemporary Dark Triad research in addition to discussing the implications for structural equation modelling methods in personality psychology more generally. Recommendations are made for how future research can mitigate the interpretive difficulties that may arise from partialling. Copyright © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Does emotion help or hinder immediate memory? Arousal versus priority-binding mechanisms

People recall taboo words better than neutral words in many experimental contexts. The present rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) experiments demonstrated this taboo-superiority effect for immediate recall of mixed lists containing taboo and neutral words matched for familiarity, length, and category coherence. Under binding theory (MacKay et al., 2004), taboo superiority reflects an interference effect: Because the emotional reaction system prioritizes binding mechanisms for linking the source of an emotion to its context, taboo words capture the mechanisms for encoding list context in mixed lists, impairing the encoding of adjacent neutral words when RSVP rates are sufficiently rapid. However, for pure or unmixed lists, binding theory predicted no better recall of taboo-only than of neutral-only lists at fast or slow rates. Present results supported this prediction, suggesting that taboo superiority in immediate recall reflects context-specific binding processes, rather than context-free arousal effects, or emotion-linked differences in rehearsal, processing time, output interference, time-based decay, or guessing biases.