Mentorship behaviors and mentorship quality associated with formal mentoring programs: closing the gap between research and practice

Formal mentoring programs continue to gain popularity within organizations despite limited empirical research regarding how these programs should be designed to achieve maximum effectiveness. The present study examined perceived design features of formal mentoring programs and outcomes from both mentor and protégé perspectives. The outcomes examined were career and psychosocial mentoring, role modeling, and mentorship quality. In general, the results indicated that perceived input into the mentoring process and training perceived as high in quality were consistently related to the outcome variables. Implications for the design of formal mentoring programs and future theory development are discussed.     

Tactile spatial acuity differs between fingers: a study comparing two testing paradigms

Tactile spatial acuity (TSA) is a reliable and reproducible measure of somatosensory system function that has been used to study abroad range of subject populations. Although TSA is most often assessed at the fingertip, published studies employing identical stimuli disagree on whether TSA differs between the fingers of neurologically normal subjects. Using a validated grating orientation discrimination task, we determined TSA bilaterally at the index and ring fingers of 16 healthy young adults. Motivated by earlier work, we utilized two stimulus presentation paradigms, the method of constant stimuli (MCS) and a staircase (SC) method. We found that TSA was significantly higher (the discrimination threshold was lower) at the index than at the ring finger, which was consistent with a prior study. Although mean thresholds at both fingers were higher when measured with the SC than with the MCS paradigm, this difference did not reach statistical significance (p = .14). These findings should facilitate both design and interpretation of future studies investigating TSA.     

Measures of effect size for chi-squared and likelihood-ratio goodness-of-fit tests

A fundamental shift in editorial policy for psychological journals was initiated when the fourth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (1994) placed emphasis on reporting measures of effect size. This paper presents measures of effect size for the chi-squared and the likelihood-ratio goodness-of-fit statistic tests.     

The effects of root frequency, word frequency, and length on the processing of prefixed English words during reading

Two experiments were performed to investigate the roles of root morpheme frequency and word frequency in the encoding of prefixed words in sentence context. Two alternative words, which were equated on other indices but differed with respect to either root morpheme frequency or word frequency, were embedded in the same sentence frame. In Experiment 1, there was a significant root morpheme frequency effect on gaze duration but only a marginal word frequency effect. Post hoc analyses indicated that word length influenced both effects, with word frequency effects predominating for shorter words and root morpheme effects predominating for longer words. In Experiment 2, word length was also manipulated. There was a significant root frequency effect for longer prefixed words and a significant word frequency effect for shorter prefixed words. The results were best explained by a dual-route model (with competing whole-word access and compositional routes), in which increasing word length inhibited the whole-word process, relative to the compositional route.     

Coping in adolescent children of HIV-positive and HIV-negative substance-abusing fathers

The authors examined coping in the adolescent children of drug-abusing fathers who have, or are at risk for contracting, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The ability to cope is an important factor in the adolescent's own risk behaviors, including drug use and associated problems. Each father and his adolescent child were separately administered a structured interview regarding personality, drug use, relationships, coping, and other behaviors. Adolescent adaptive coping was found to be related to greater conventionality, less marijuana use, fewer intra- and interpersonal problems, paternal adaptive coping, and a close father-child bond. Moreover, analysis using a risk factor index indicated an exponential increase in adolescent maladaptive coping with each additional psychosocial risk. Implications for policy and intervention are also discussed.     

Prospective and retrospective memory in normal aging and dementia: an experimental study

Two experiments investigated the effects of normal aging and dementia on laboratory-based prospective memory (PM) tasks. Participants viewed a film for a later recognition memory task. In Experiment 1, they were also required either to say "animal" when an animal appeared in the film (event-based PM task) or to stop a clock every 3 min (time-based PM task). In both tasks, young participants were more successful than older participants, who were, in turn, more successful than patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). For successful remembering in the time-based task, older participants and AD patients checked the clock more often than did young participants. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to reset a clock either when an animal appeared in the film (unrelated cue-action) or when a clock appeared in the film (related cue-action). Responses were faster in the related condition than in the unrelated condition. Again, there were differences in PM performance between young and older participants, and between older participants and AD patients. The observed deficits were not due to the forgetting of the PM task instructions in either experiment. Retrospective memory (RM) tasks (digit span, sentence span, free recall, and recognition) were more impaired by AD than were the PM tasks. Factor analysis revealed separate factors corresponding to RM and PM.