Peer and teacher ratings of socially neglected and rejected fourth- and fifth-grade boys

Positive and negative sociometric nomination measures were administered to 86 fourth- and fifth-grade boys. Using a combination of these measures, popular (high positive; low negative), neglected (low positive, low negative), and rejected (low positive, high negative) children were identified and peer and teacher ratings of these children were obtained. Rejected children were seen by both peers and teachers as exhibiting more undesirable behaviors than either neglected or popular children. These findings coupled with those from several longitudinal investigations demonstrating that rejected children are at risk for the development of psychopathology during adolescence and adulthood, clearly points toward the importance of developing effective interventions for these children.     

Influence of selected reinforcers on the cardiorespiratory exercise behavior of profoundly mentally retarded youth.

6 profoundly mentally retarded youth were provided a 5-wk. stair-climbing program to improve cardiorespiratory fitness behavior. Three subjects were provided verbal plus food reinforcement and the other three received verbal reinforcement during the intervention phase. Based on the visual inspection of the data, both types of reinforcement increased the number of steps taken and exercise time.     

An anxiety-related bias in semantic activation when processing threat/neutral homographs

Three experiments are reported comparing high and low-trait anxious subjects in terms of their patterns of semantic activation in response to ambiguous primes, with one threat-related and one neutral meaning. Such primes were followed by targets related to either their threat or neutral meaning, or by unrelated targets, in a lexical decision task. Experiments 1 to 3 employed stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 750 msec, 500 msec, and 1250 msec, respectively. At 500-msec SOA all subjects showed facilitation for both meanings. At 750-msec SOA the only significant priming effect was that for the threat-related meaning in the high-anxiety group, and a similar trend was found at 1250-msec SOA. Consideration of the patterns of priming for targets following ambiguous threat/neutral primes suggest that at the longer SOAs, high-anxiety subjects consciously “lock on” to a threatening interpretation if one has been made available by earlier automatic spreading activation.     

Child,mother, and father evaluations of depression in psychiatric inpatient children

The agreement among children and their parents in evaluating the children's depression was examined in 48 families. Newly admitted inpatient children (ages 6–13) and their mothers and fathers independently completed selfreport and interview measures to assess severity and duration of the children's depression. The results indicated that different measures of depression completed by the same rater (child, mother, or father) were highly intercorrelated. Yet there was little or no relationship between childmother and child-father ratings of the children's depression for the same or related measures of depression. Children independently diagnosed (DSM III) as depressed rated themselves and were rated by their parents as more depressed than nondepressed children. Even so, children consistently rated themselves as less depressed across the measures than did their parents. Parent ratings of the children's depression and the correspondence of child-parent ratings varied as a function of several child and family variables, including child IQ, gender, race, and family welfare status.This investigation was supported in part by a Research Scientist Development Award (1 K02 MH00353) to the first author from the National Institute of Mental Health and by a Clinical Research Center Grant for the Study of Affective Disorders (5 P50 MH30915-05) from the National Institute of Mental Health. The authors are grateful to the clinical research team of the Child Psychiatric Treatment Service.     

Constructing comparative sentences: Linguistic marking and affect

Past research has demonstrated a greater naturalness of comparative constructions with the unmarked adjective. Not only do subjects typically create sentences of the form A is longer than B more frequently than B is shorter than A, but such constructions are also more quickly verified. One explanation for this preference is in terms of Linguistic Marking (e.g., Clark, 1969a, b). Because the semantic featural coding hypothesized for unmarked adjectives is simpler than that of marked adjectives, the observed facilitation effects would be expected. However, an equally viable explanation is in terms of the greater positive affect of the unmarked adjective (see Osgood et al., 1957). Since linguistic marking and affect are typically confounded in past research (the unmarked adjective is also the most affectively positive), the present experiment discriminates between these two interpretations by providing also contexts in which linguistic marking and affect are not confounded. Here, analysis of the comparatives constructed by 96 subjects revealed the preference for the unmarked adjective only where it was also the most affectively positive. Where the marked was the more positive, the reverse was observed, as predicted by Osgood (et al., 1957).     

The drug abuse-delinquency connection revisited

Ninety-one delinquent adolescents were interviewed with respect to their personal and family drug use and criminal behavior. No significant gender differences with respect to drug use were found. Females, however, committed more crimes against property than did males. The drug use-delinquency association was explored and findings indicated that subjects saw a stronger causal relationship between drug use and subsequent criminal behavior than was found in the current study or past research. A multifactorial association between drug abuse and delinquency behaviors as part of a spectrum of sociopathic personality development was supported.