Scientific rewards and conflicts of ethical choices in human subjects research.

The primary responsibility of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Committee on Standards in Research (CSR) is to advise the APA on issues and standards related to the protection of human participants in psychological research. A related goal is to enhance the use of good ethical practices by APA members. The purpose of this article is to foster the view of research ethics not as an affront to the integrity of sound research, but as opportunities for scientific rewards, including increased understanding of the meaning of data, enhanced recruitment, and the inclusion of more representative samples. Three ethical practices are discussed as examples of this general premise: respect for confidentiality, use of debriefing, and assurance that participants are noncoerced volunteers. The Committee's intent is to promote consideration of these issues, not to promulgate specific guidelines or procedures.     

Injury control. A promising field for psychologists.

Injury is the fourth leading cause of death for all Americans and the most frequent cause of death for those from age 1 to 45. Moreover, injury is associated with higher treatment costs and with greater lost life-years than the other three leading causes of death. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of severe brain injury, including most paraplegic and quadriplegic cases. Because injury control is essentially psychological, there are many opportunities for psychologists to contribute, both to scientific research on the causes of injury and to clinical interventions for injury control.     

Redefining the science-practice relationship and professional training.

A revised conception of the relationship between psychological science and professional practice is proposed in the light of postmodern changes in perspectives on knowledge. Positivistic science, which has dominated the traditional interpretation of scientist-practitioner training, is considered from a constructivist point of view to be only one possible foundation of psychological knowledge. It is argued that the knowledge base of the profession should be derived with diverse methods and from multiple sources, including the knowledge of practice. The mutuality of science and practice is emphasized. An evolving framework for understanding the epistemology of practice, based on cognitive psychology, is presented. Emphasis on broadened choices of research methods, the development of reflective skills, and better linkage between teaching in the domains of research and practice are urged. Suggestions for research related to scientific training and the knowledge processes of practice are offered.     

Avoidant personality disorder and the generalized subtype of social phobia.

Social phobia and avoidant personality disorder (APD) may be given as comorbid diagnoses. However, it is not known if the labels provide independent, useful diagnostic information. We classified social phobics by social phobia subtype and presence of APD. Generalized social phobics with and without APD (ns = 10 and 10) and nongeneralized social phobics without APD (n = 10) were distinguished on measures of phobic severity. The generalized groups also showed earlier age at onset and higher scores on measures of depression, fear of negative evaluation, and social anxiety and avoidance than did the nongeneralized group. APD criteria of general timidity and risk aversion were more frequently endorsed by social phobics with APD. The data suggest that both the generalized subtype of social phobia and the presence of APD do provide useful diagnostic information but the additional diagnosis of APD may simply identify a severe subgroup of social phobics.     

Effects of alcohol intoxication on risk taking, strategy, and error rate in visuomotor performance.

Adult men (N = 44) participated for 2 days (alcohol vs. placebo treatment) in a double-blind, crossover experiment. Performance on the Digit Symbol Substitution Task (DSST) and a visuomotor (VM) task was measured 4 times each day. On the alcohol-treatment day, data were obtained once during ascending breath alcohol levels (BALs), once during maximal BALs (0.05 or 0.10), and twice during descending BALs. Data were collected at the same time points on the placebo-treatment day. Limited evidence for acute tolerance was obtained with the DSST, but error rates on the VM task were higher during maximal and descending BALs. Error rates remained near placebo values, and participants displayed slightly greater caution, while BALs were ascending. Strategy scores on the VM task exceeded placebo scores during maximal intoxication. Data interpretation is focused on individuals in higher level (e.g., professional) positions.     

Infants' responsiveness to the auditory and visual attributes of a sounding/moving stimulus.

Responses to unimodal and multimodal attributes of a compound auditory/visual stimulus were investigated in 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-month-old infants. First, infants were habituated to a compound stimulus consisting of a visual stimulus that moved up and down on a video monitor and a sound that occurred each time the visual stimulus reversed direction at the bottom. Once each infant met a habituation criterion, a series of test trials was administered to assess responsiveness to the components of the compound stimulus. Response was defined as the total duration of visual fixation in each trial. In the two unimodal test trials, the rate at which the component was presented was changed while the rate of the other component remained the same, whereas in the bimodal test trial the rate of both components was changed simultaneously. Results indicated that infants at each age successfully discriminated the bimodal and the two unimodal changes and that regression to the mean did not account for the results. Results also showed that disruption of the temporal relationship that accompanied the change in rate in the two unimodal test trials was also discriminable, but rate changes appeared to play a greater role in responsiveness than did synchrony changes. Considered together with results from similar prior studies, the current results are consistent with the modality appropriateness hypothesis in showing that discrimination of temporal changes in the auditory and visual modalities is dependent on the specialization of the sensory modalities.     

Spatial attention in Ponzo-like patterns.

A variant of Ponzo's pattern was devised by drawing converging oblique lines at the ends of each of two horizontal lines that were located directly one above the other. Pairs of converging or diverging fins (either between or outside the horizontal shafts) were systematically removed. The results showed that, as predicted by integrative field theory, oblique lines between the shafts produced more distortion than did oblique lines outside the shafts. Also, it was shown that the attentive field construct in integrative field theory was crucial for predicting patterns of means and variances in this experiment. The modified Ponzo effect was shown to have much in common with the classical Müller-Lyer illusion. The subtle differences between the two were explained by proposing that the size of the optimum attentive field was larger in the Ponzo tasks than in the Müller-Lyer tasks because expansion fins are found on both shafts in the Ponzo-like figure.     

Adaptation to auditory motion in the horizontal plane: effect of prior exposure to motion on motion detectability.

Thresholds for auditory motion detectability were measured in a darkened anechoic chamber while subjects were adapted to horizontally moving sound sources of various velocities. All stimuli were 500-Hz lowpass noises presented at a level of 55 dBA. The threshold measure employed was the minimum audible movement angle (MAMA)--that is, the minimum angle a horizontally moving sound must traverse to be just discriminable from a stationary sound. In an adaptive, two-interval forced-choice procedure, trials occurred every 2-5 sec (Experiment 1) or every 10-12 sec (Experiment 2). Intertrial time was "filled" with exposure to the adaptor--a stimulus that repeatedly traversed the subject's front hemifield at ear level (distance: 1.7 m) at a constant velocity (-150 degrees/sec to +150 degrees/sec) during a run. Average MAMAs in the control condition, in which the adaptor was stationary (0 degrees/sec,) were 2.4 degrees (Experiment 1) and 3.0 degrees (Experiment 2). Three out of 4 subjects in each experiment showed significantly elevated MAMAs (by up to 60%), with some adaptors relative to the control condition. However, there were large intersubject differences in the shape of the MAMA versus adaptor velocity functions. This loss of sensitivity to motion that most subjects show after exposure to moving signals is probably one component underlying the auditory motion aftereffect (Grantham, 1989), in which judgments of the direction of moving sounds are biased in the direction opposite to that of a previously presented adaptor.