Psychiatric patient- and informant-reported personality: predicting concurrent and future behavior

The authors investigated the criterion and incremental validity of personality reports from psychiatric patients and knowledgeable informants in predicting patient substance use, social and risky behaviors, and psychological distress. Patient and informant reports of patient personality and behavior were collected from an adult psychiatric sample (N = 94). Hierarchical regressions indicated that patient reports of personality accounted for significant variance in both concurrent (17%-42%) and future behavior assessed 1 year later (17%-40%). Informant reports contributed significantly to the prediction of several behaviors and most strongly to social behaviors. Behaviors were predicted equally well by self-reports and informant reports in prospective as in concurrent regressions. Thus, both patient and informant reports of personality contribute importantly to prediction of behavior, and predictive ability is stable across time.     

Courtesy stigma in mothers of children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: a preliminary investigation

Mothers of children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder face an increased risk for depression, anxiety, and social isolation. In addition to stress due to children's behavior, mothers of children with ADHD may also feel stigmatized by their children's diagnosis. Fifty-one mothers participated in a study to assess attitudes toward ADHD. Although mothers of children with ADHD expected that parents of children without ADHD would hold harsh views of the disorder, this was not generally the case. This difference between perception and the actual self-reported views of mothers of children without ADHD supports the idea that mothers feel stigmatized but suggests that increased awareness might help mothers of children with ADHD feel less isolated.     

Comparison of the Trail Making and Color Trails Tests in a Chinese context: a preliminary report

The Color Trails Test developed as a culturally fair analogue of the Trail Making Test, was used to examine the relationship between the two tests with 35 undergraduate Chinese in Hong Kong recruited as the subjects. The scores on these two tests of the 12 men and 23 women were significantly correlated .71. The equivalence of the Trail Making and Color Trails Tests when applied to Chinese in Hong Kong was discussed.     

The importance of the convex hull for human performance on the traveling salesman problem: a comment on MacGregor and Ormerod (1996)

MacGregor and Ormerod (1996) have presented results purporting to show that human performance on visually presented traveling salesman problems, as indexed by a measure of response uncertainty, is strongly determined by the number of points in the stimulus array falling inside the convex hull, as distinct from the total number of points. It is argued that this conclusion is artifactually determined by their constrained procedure for stimulus construction, and, even if true, would be limited to arrays with fewer than around 50 points.     

Preference and resistance to change with constant-duration schedule components

Previous research on preference between variable-interval terminal links in concurrent chains has most often used variable-duration terminal links ending with a single reinforcer. By contrast, most research on resistance to change in multiple schedules has used constant-duration components that include variable numbers of reinforcers in each presentation. Grace and Nevin (1997) examined both preference and resistance in variable-duration components; here, preference and resistance were examined in constant-duration components. Reinforcer rates were varied across eight conditions, and a generalized-matching-law analysis showed that initial-link preference strongly over-matched terminal-link reinforcer ratios. In multiple schedules, baseline response rates were unaffected by reinforcer rates, but resistance to intercomponent food, to extinction, and to intercomponent food plus extinction was greater in the richer component. The between-component difference in resistance to change exhibited additive effects for the three resistance tests, and was systematically related to reinforcer ratios. However, resistance was less sensitive to reinforcer ratios than was preference. Resistance to intercomponent food and to intercomponent food plus extinction was more sensitive to reinforcer ratios in the present study than in Grace and Nevin (1997). Thus, relative to variable-duration components, constant-duration components increased the sensitivity of both preference and relative resistance, supporting the proposition that these are independent and convergent measures of the effects of a history of reinforcement.     

Levels-of-processing effects on Chinese character completion: The importance of lexical processing and test cue

The levels of processing (LoP) effect was studied in Chinese character completion tasks. The same stem cue, either graphemically or semantically related to the target character, was used to generate either a perceptual or a conceptual test. Participants received either direct or indirect instructions, so that the same stem cue also produced either an explicit or an implicit test of memory. This allowed us to examine simultaneously the roles of perceptual versus conceptual test and retrieval intentionality in the LoP effect. No LoP effects were found when the memory test was implicit. LoP effects were also not found for stems and characters related graphemically (perceptually), but were found for stems and characters related semantically (conceptually) when the memory test was explicit. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of lexical processing for character completion tests and the importance of reinstatement of the study process during retrieval for explicit memory tests.     

Temporal context and conditioned reinforcement value

The effectiveness of a stimulus as a conditioned reinforcer depends on the temporal context of reinforcement, that is, the overall rate of reinforcement in the situation. The dominant view has been that context determines the learned value of a stimulus directly, according to delay-reduction theory. By contrast, the contextual choice model (CCM) maintains that value is independent of context and incorporates the effects of context on choice in the framework of the matching law. The authors report 2 experiments with pigeons as subjects that use transfer tests to assess the value of stimuli in the concurrent-chains procedure. Results strongly support the assumption of CCM that pigeons learn the temporal relations between events independently of context but that context modulates the expression of that learning as choice.     

The Factor Structure of the Beavers Interactional Scales

Confirmatory factor analysis and regression analyses of the Beavers Interactional Scales did not appear to support the model offered by its developers, namely, several specified family attributes contributing respectively to two global factors of Family Competence and Family Style. Moreover, regression analysis indicated that only three of 12 items predicted raters' assessments of Global Family Health, and one of seven items predicted Global Family Style. Individuals interested in the family dynamic centripetal/centrifugal might best think of that as a unitary entity and rate it accordingly.     

Efficiency of multiple-choice tests as a function of spread of item difficulties

The validity of a univocal multiple-choice test is determined for varying distributions of item difficulty and varying degrees of item precision. Validity is a function of _d ² + _v ² , where _d measures item unreliability and _v measures the spread of item difficulties. When this variance is very small, validity is high for one optimum cutting score, but the test gives relatively little valid information for other cutting scores. As this variance increases, eta increases up to a certain point, and then begins to decrease. Screening validity at the optimum cutting score declines as this variance increases, but the test becomes much more flexible, maintaining the same validity for a wide range of cutting scores. For items of the type ordinarily used in psychological tests, the test with uniform item difficulty gives greater over-all validity, and superior validity for most cutting scores, compared to a test with a range of item difficulties. When a multiple-choice test is intended to reject the poorestF per cent of the men tested, items should on the average be located at or above the threshold for men whose true ability is at theFth percentile.This research was performed under contract Nop 536 with the Bureau of Naval Personnel, and received additional support from the Bureau of Research and Service, College of Education, University of Illinois.