Familial transmission of Continuous Performance Test behavior: attentional and impulsive response characteristics

Continuous Performance Tests (CPTs) provide information on attentional processing and impulsive behavior. The results of previous research that used self-report measures have provided evidence for familial transmission (through genetic and/or environmental influences) of impulsive characteristics. The authors of the present study examined whether the impulsive behavioral parameters that are measured by the CPT also share familial relationships. The researchers asked 26 healthy parent-adolescent pairs to complete the Immediate and Delayed Memory Tasks (IMT/DMT; D. M. Dougherty, 1999; D. M. Dougherty, D. M. Marsh, & C. W. Mathias, 2002), a modified CPT (B. A. Cornblatt, N. J. Risch, G. Faris, D. Friedman, & L. Erlenmeyer-Kimling, 1988; H. E. Rosvold, A. Mirsky, I. Sarason, E. D. Breansome, Jr., & L. H. Beck, 1956), and the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS; J. H. Patton, M. S. Stanford, & E. S. Barratt, 1995), a self-report measure. The main findings can be summarized as follows: (a) commission errors (but not correct detections) on the IMT and DMT were correlated between parents and their adolescent children, (b) adolescents emitted a higher proportion of commission errors than did their parents, and (c) self-reported impulsivity (i.e., BIS) was correlated with commission errors for parents, but not for adolescents. The findings of this study support the use of an objective behavioral measure of impulsivity to assess familial relationships of impulsivity.     

Chiarugi and Pinel considered: Soul's brain/person's mind

Pinel and Chiarugi enter the standard histories of psychiatry under the rubric of “psychiatric reformers.” True enough, but insufficient in terms of the complexity and breadth of their thought. Despite Pinel's fame for the “moral,” i.e. psychological treatment of the mentally ill, previous scholarship on Chiarugi and his work would lead one to expect a richer humanity and warmer personal investment in the vagaries of the mentally ill under Chiarugi's auspices. A careful study of Chiarugi's Della Pazzìa and Pinel's Traitésuggest a different portrait. Though conjoined in their humanitarian ideals, these foundational figures in modern psychiatry voiced disparate ideas on the nature, etiology, and treatment of mental disorders, Chiarugi in the context of a biologic or “organicist” theory, Pinel in a psychosocial framework. Their reasoning in support of their opposing perspectives about the centrality of “biologic vs. psychological” determinants and interventions in psychiatry is remarkably congruent with those expressed today. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Dynamic Testing in Selection for an Educational Programme: Assessing South African Performance on the Raven Progressive Matrices

This article describes the research results of an investigation into the use of dynamic testing for the selection of candidates for an educational programme. The selection of students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds for mathematics‐, science‐, and technology‐based programmes is a problem for which most South African higher education institutions still have to find adequate solutions. Dynamic testing procedures are often seen as more fair to use for selection than single‐session tests in situations of unequal educational opportunity. The possibility that a selection instrument using a dynamic testing process could add significantly to the selection effectiveness already achieved in a South African mathematics and science foundation year using single‐session tests was investigated. The performance of a group of educationally disadvantaged black South African students on the Raven Progressive Matrices is compared to that of other groups reported in research literature. Considering the disadvantaged nature of the South African group, the group performed well on the Raven test when compared with data from other countries.     

The Guild Speaks Again

Books reviewed in this article:
A. D. H. Mayes (ed), Text in Context: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study     

MERLOT: A faculty-focused Web site of educational resources

The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a community of academic institutions, professional discipline organizations, and individual people building a collection of Web-based teaching and learning resources where faculty can easily find peer-reviewed materials for use in their classes. The MERLOT project is currently supported by 23 systems and institutions of higher education and by the National Science Foundation. MERLOT is developing collections of learning materials from many academic disciplines, including psychology.     

Do consumers ever learn? Analysis of segment behavior in experimental markets

Economists argue that, despite cognitive limitations, economic agents arrive at optimal choice rules by learning. The assumption is that consumers, for example, are adaptively rational. Adaptive rationality raises a host of issues. We address three of these in the context of experimental markets: do consumers differ on the basis of learning; how do these differences, when aggregated, affect market efficiency; and how do consumers learn? Analysis of our experimental data reveals the following. First, multiple segments of consumers exist on the basis of learning. Second, the largest segment consists of subjects who do not learn despite timely feedback and motivation. Third, although some consumers do learn to make optimal choices, the effect of this segment on market efficiency is cancelled by an equal number of subjects who ‘learn' false relations. Finally, although subjects do not learn strict rationality even with experience, they are in the aggregate not so irrational as to allow highly suboptimal brands to survive. Further analysis of how consumers learn, specifically on the cues (signals) and the rules consumers employ in making choices over time leads to the following two conclusions. First, some signals make learning more easy than others: for example, providing market share information improves learning but not as much as providing quality information does. Second, people employ different rules depending upon the type of information they have. For example, consumers making decisions based only on price information are more likely to use a heuristic like ‘buy a medium‐priced product provided it has not failed in the past'. Consumers making decisions based on price and quality information may employ a heuristic such as ‘buy top quality products regardless of price'. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reward sensitivity in depression: a biobehavioral study

The approach-withdrawal model posits 2 neural systems of motivation and emotion and hypothesizes that these systems are responsible for individual differences in emotional reactivity, or affective styles. The model also proposes that depression is characterized by a deficit in reward-seeking behavior (i.e., approach motivation) and is associated with a relative decrease in left frontal brain activity. The authors tested aspects of this model by comparing the electroencephalogram alpha power of depressed and nondepressed individuals during a task that manipulated approach motivation. The study found that control participants and individuals with late-onset depression exhibited the hypothesized increase in left frontal activity during the approach task but individuals with early-onset depression did not. This suggests that early-onset depression may be associated with a deficit in the hypothesized approach motivation system.     

The development of collective efficacy in teams: a multilevel and longitudinal perspective

The authors developed and tested a longitudinal multilevel model of collective efficacy formation. In 50 self-managing student teams, they investigated the effects of individual-level and team-level factors on observed behaviors and the subsequent development of collective efficacy for mastering a complex team task. Self-efficacy for teamwork, task-relevant knowledge, and collective efficacy predicted individual teamwork behaviors (rated by peers). Aggregated measures of teamwork behavior were related to subsequent collective efficacy, which was significantly related to final team performance.