Concordance Between Parent Reports of Children's Mental Health Services and Service Records: The Services Assessment for Children and Adolescents (SACA)

The concordance between parent reports of children's mental health services and medical and administrative service records were assessed in a field test of the Services Assessment for Children and Adolescents (SACA) interview instrument. Service use reports from primary caregivers, usually mothers, for their child's emotional or behavioral problems were compared against inpatient, outpatient, and school records in St. Louis, one of the pilot sites for the Multi-Site Study of Service Use, Need, Outcomes and Costs in Child and Adolescent Populations (UNOCCAP). A global any use service variable, comprised of inpatient, outpatient, and school reports, yielded an overall service use concordance kappa of .76 between parent reports and records. Parent reports of inpatient hospitalization services using the SACA yielded the highest agreement with medical records, with kappa statistics of 1.00 for use of any inpatient hospital care and for medication use. Parent reports of specific inpatient services concurred with medical records more moderately, yielding kappas from .50 to .66. Reports of any outpatient mental health services yielded variable rates of agreement, with kappas ranging from .67 for any use of outpatient care, to .66 for medication use, to negligible kappas for specific treatments. Parent reports of school services were weakly related to records for most services, except for moderate agreement (.48) on placement in special classrooms for emotional or behavioral problems. Family burden or impact discriminated more powerfully than other variables between respondents who concurred with records and those who did not.     

Spiritual Coping, Family History, and Perceived Risk for Breast Cancer—Can We Make Sense of it?

Differences in spiritual beliefs and practices could influence perceptions of the role of genetic risk factors on personal cancer risk. We explored spiritual coping and breast cancer risk perceptions among women with and without a reported family history of breast cancer. Analyses were conducted on data from 899 women in primary care clinics who did not have breast cancer. Structural equation modeling (SEM), linear, and logistic modeling tested an interaction of family history of breast cancer on the relationship between spiritual coping and risk perceptions. Overall analyses demonstrated an inverse relationship between spiritual coping and breast cancer risk perceptions and a modifying effect of family history. More frequent spiritual coping was associated with lower risk perceptions for women with positive family histories, but not for those with negative family histories. Results support further research in this area that could influence communication of risk information to cancer genetic counseling patients.     

The development of area discrimination and its implications for number representation in infancy

This paper investigates the ability of infants to attend to continuous stimulus variables and how this capacity relates to the representation of number. We examined the change in area needed by 6-month-old infants to detect a difference in the size of a single element (Elmo face). Infants successfully discriminated a 1:4, 1:3 and 1:2 change in the area of the Elmo face but failed to discriminate a 2:3 change. In addition, the novelty preference was linearly related to the ratio difference between the novel and familiar area. Results suggest that Weber's Law holds for area discriminations in infancy and also reveal that at 6 months of age infants are equally sensitive to number, time and area.     

Dissonance and importance: attitude change effects of personal relevance and race of the beneficiary of a counterattitudinal advocacy

The authors asked or instructed White college students to write an essay advocating a large tuition hike to increase scholarships for either students in general or Black students (yielding low or high racial symbolism, respectively) that would take effect in the near or far future (yielding high or low personal relevance, respectively). Especially when high-choice participants wrote highly compliant (i.e., unqualified) essays, attitude change was greater when the advocacy had either high (vs. low) personal relevance or high (vs. low) racial symbolism. Yet there was no attitude change when both symbolism and relevance were high. They may increase dissonance by making the dissonant elements more important and numerous. The coupling of relevance and symbolism, however, may link the attitude so strongly to personal values and self-concept that attitude change becomes untenable as a mode of dissonance reduction.     

The influence of provocateurs' emotion displays on the social information processing of children varying in social adjustment and age

This study examined the effect of provocateurs' emotion displays on first through fourth graders' social information processing (SIP). Rating and nomination sociometric techniques were used to identify rejected-aggressive, rejected-nonaggressive, average-nonaggressive, and popular-nonaggressive groups. Children viewed videotaped ambiguous provocation situations in which provocateurs' emotion displays were varied systematically. After each vignette, children's recall of story details, attribution of intent, and problem-solving responses were obtained. Half of the children were randomly assigned to a condition where they were asked directly about provocateurs' emotions, and the remaining children were not asked about provocateurs' feelings. Results revealed both developmental and social adjustment differences in SIP. In addition, provocateurs' emotion displays and asking versus not asking about those displays influenced multiple aspects of SIP.     

College students, tattoos, and sexual activity

This research examined the association of having a tattoo and engaging in premarital sexual intercourse. Data gathered from a convenience sample of 450 college students indicated that tattooed respondents were substantively and significantly more likely to be sexually active than nontattooed college students. Tattooed men became sexually active at a significantly earlier age than nontattooed men but no such difference was found between tattooed and nontattooed college women.     

The role of the GABA(A) agonist muscimol on memory performance: reward contingencies determine the nature of the deficit

A matching-to-position (MTP) paradigm was altered to influence the type of associations a rat would use to solve the task. Our main behavioral manipulation was the application of the differential outcomes procedure (DOP). The DOP involves correlating each to-be-remembered event with a distinct reward condition. This procedure results in the development of unique reward expectancies that enhance and guide choice behavior. Such distinct reward expectancies are not formed when either a common or random assignment of reward is used (a non-differential outcomes procedure [NOP]). Intracerebroventricular infusions of the amnestic agent muscimol (GABA(A) agonist) or aCSF were delivered to male rats trained on a delayed MTP task that implemented either the DOP or the NOP. Muscimol impaired performance in a dose dependent fashion in both groups--but the nature of the deficit differed as a function of reinforcement contingencies. Rats trained with the DOP displayed a non-mnemonic delay-independent impairment: performance at all delay intervals was disrupted. In contrast, NOP-trained rats displayed a delay-dependent impairment demonstrating that muscimol can also have memory-disrupting effects. The difference in pattern of impairment appears to be a function of the associations formed during training and the type of cognitive strategies involved in maintaining behavior on a conditional delayed discrimination task when reinforcement contingencies are varied. Thus, these results demonstrate that increasing GABA(A) receptor activation impairs a range of associative and memory functions.     

Instant of chair-rise lift-off can be predicted by foot-floor reaction forces

OBJECTIVE: To develop a predictive model of the lift-off event during chair rise in healthy subjects, using foot-floor reaction forces. BACKGROUND: An important event during chair rise is lift-off from the seat: the transition from the inherently stable three-point contact to the unstable two-point contact. There is no consistent or generally agreed upon method for estimating the time of lift-off when an instrumented seat is unavailable. METHODS: Twenty healthy volunteers were divided into a testing set and training set. Each subject performed repeated chair rise trials at different speeds. Seat-floor and foot-floor forces, recorded with two force platforms, were used to develop a model of the lift-off event. RESULTS: The magnitude of the vertical foot-floor reaction at lift-off (F0VF) was linearly related (R2 = 0.71, P < 0.001) to the peak vertical foot-floor reaction force (FMVF). A linear model was developed for the training group, which enabled prediction of lift-off time for the testing group with an absolute average error of 6 ms (about 1 data frame at 150 Hz). The linear model derived for the entire sample was: F0VF = 28.14 + FMVF * (0.6434). CONCLUSIONS: The lift-off event for healthy subjects performing chair rise can be accurately predicted from foot-floor reaction forces, without requiring an instrumented seat.