Influence of Racial/Ethnic Membership and “Therapist Culture” on Therapists' Worldview

The authors investigated 2 competing hypotheses related to therapists' worldview and therapists' race/ethnicity: (a) whether therapists of different racial/ethnic groups differed on worldview reflecting group membership, and (b) whether therapists were similar to each other on worldview reflecting membership in a “therapist culture.” Results indicated that therapists shared similar worldviews regardless of group membership, and differences found between therapists based on racial/ethnic membership were minimal.     

Individual and developmental differences in working memory across the life span

The effects of secondary tasks on verbal and spatial working memory were examined in multiple child, young adult, and older adult samples. Although memory span increased with age in the child samples and decreased with age in the adult samples, there was little evidence of systematic change in the magnitude of interference effects. Surprisingly, individuals who had larger memory spans when there was no secondary task showed greater interference effects than their age-mates. These findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that age and individual differences in working memory are due to differences in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, at least as this hypothesis is currently formulated. Moreover, our results suggest that different mechanisms underlie developmental and individual differences in susceptibility to interference across the life span. A model is proposed in which memory span and processing speed both increase with development but are relatively independent abilities within age groups.     

A matter of time: novel nouns mark object categories when delays are imposed

In previous work, preschool-aged children have revealed a specific expectation that novel count nouns (but not adjectives) will refer to object categories (but not to object properties or to thematic relations). However, in these tasks, children have been permitted to extend a novel word immediately after it has been introduced. The current experiments test the hypothesis that the noun-category bias is sufficiently robust to hold up even when a delay is imposed between a naming episode and the child’s opportunity for extension. To capture this phenomenon experimentally, we imposed delays of 30 s (Experiment 1) and 1 h (Experiment 2). Across both delay conditions, children in a ‘novel noun’ condition revealed a strong inclination to consistently choose other members of the same object category as the (previously named) target. Children in either a ‘novel adjective’ or ‘no word’ condition revealed no taxonomic inclination. These results establish the power of the noun-category bias in situations that more closely approximate some of the very real challenges that children face in mapping and extending novel words.     

Evaluation of an islandwide screening,assessment and treatment program

This article reports on the effectiveness of the Islandwide Screening, Assessment, and Treatment Program of the Child Development Project in Bermuda. From 1982 to 1984, approximately 1100 families with 2-year-old children were screened for children's cognitive and language delay, for behaviour management problems and for other home characteristics that put children at risk for later school failure. Children who failed the screening and subsequent assessment procedures (of whom random samples received treatment) and samples of others who passed screening and assessment were evaluated from 1984 to 1986 at 4 years of age. This article focuses on the results of the cognitive and language programs; the more problematic behaviour management analyses were reported elsewhere (Miller and Scarr, 1988). The screening procedures and assessment measures developed for this project were themselves evaluated and adjusted to maximize efficiency and costeffectiveness. The screening and assessment procedures proved effective in bringing to the attention of the Child Development Project those families and children who need developmental services, and in not overidentifying normal children as potentially delayed in development. Two kinds of treatment services were compared: The Mother-Child Home Program (MCHP), administered by paraprofessional toy demonstrators, and other interventions tailored by professionals to the language and cognitive problems of the child (called ‘tailored programs’). Children who were not extremely delayed or disturbed were randomly assigned either to the MCHP or to a tailored program. Neither intervention program was preferable to the other. Even though improved, the 4-year-olds identified as developmentally delayed at 24 months still lagged behind children who passed all parts of screening and those who failed screening but passed assessment 2 years earlier. The screening and assessment procedures were very effective in the early identification of children with developmental problems, but the treatment programs failed to bring most children to normal levels of cognitive and language functioning.     

Psychological impact of breast cancer on the patient and the family: A clinical perspective

Breast cancer is the most frequently occurring cancer in women, with 182,000 new cases diagnosed in 1993. Breast cancer will strike a sizable percentage of women during the child-rearing years impacting, therefore, not only on the woman, but on the significant others in her life. This article explores the impact of breast cancer for the patient's life partner, parents, and children. A model intervention program for cancer patients with young children, piloted at the Derner Institute and developed in conjunction with the American Cancer Society, is also discussed.     

Lack of early child care effects on school-age children's social competence and academic achievement

Teacher ratings of social competence and academic achievement were obtained from a sample of 127 Bermudian children at ages 5, 6, 7 and 8 years. The children were studied first during their pre-school years, when they had been exposed to various amounts and qualities of day care. Quality of care was found to be important to the children's intellectual and social development while they were in the day care settings but not after 1–4 years of primary schooling. In hierarchical and simultaneous regressions, family background characteristics, not child care amounts or qualities, were found to be predictive of social competence and academic achievement in the primary grades. By school age, the effects of infant and preschool child care experiences were no longer influential in children's development, but family background continued to be important. These findings and their implications for child care are discussed.     

Key membership and implied harmony in Western tonal music: Developmental perspectives

In three experiments on the psychophysical measurement of pain, electrocutaneous currents were applied to the volar surface of the forearm. In the first experiment, a conventional category scaling method was compared with the rating method of signal detection. The results of both methods were analyzed in detection-theory terms to derive receiver operating characteric curves and measures of the discriminability of adjacent currents. The rating method yielded larger discriminability values than the category scale did, and that method was therefore used in the subsequent experiments to examine the effect of a topical anesthetic on discriminability. When the stimuli were applied through surface electrodes, no effect of the topical anesthetic on discriminability was found, but when the stimuli were applied to a more localized area by intradermal needle electrodes, a dose-dependent effect of the anesthetic on discriminability occurred. For this experiment, the slope of the cumulative sensitivity function increased with increasing elapsed time since the removal of the anesthetic. This result is congruent with the theory that discriminability can serve as a measure of sensitivity to painful stimuli.     

How one gambles if one must: Effects of differing return rates on multistage betting decisions

In the multistage betting game (MBG), a decision maker (DM) is provided with some capital x which he is required to bet over m (m > 1) mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive alternatives, each of which occurs with probability p_i (p_i > 0, i = 1,…, m; Σ_{i = 1}^mp_i = 1). If y_i is bet on alternative i (y_i ≥ 0, Σ_{i = 1}^my_i = x) and alternative i obtains, the DM's capital for the next stage is y_ir_i, (r_i > 0). The MBG lasts until either the DM loses his capital or N stages elapse, whichever comes first. Each of six subjects participated in six sessions consisting of several hundred 3-alternative MBG stages. A within-subject design assigned negative expected value (EV) bets to the first three sessions and positive EV bets to three more sessions. Significant effects were found due to return rate, capital size, homogeneous runs of either wins or losses, and individual differences. Four maximization of expected utility and two minimization of risk models were presented and tested. A modified logarithmic utility model is proposed, which provides the best fit to the data. The implications of the results and directions for further research are briefly discussed.     

Sex differences in graduate student ambition: Do men publish while women perish?

This paper compares men and women graduate students at one university and identifies conditions under which women students equal or surpass men in ambition. Men and women were broadly similar in background characteristics, though different in current family status. They studied different subjects, aimed for different degrees, and were concentrated in different years in the university. If women were to equal the most highly ambitious men on ambition to publish and engage in related behaviors, they had to aspire to a doctorate, survive past the second year of study, and have nontraditional attitudes toward women's role. The results are discussed in terms of differential student careers and barriers to the development of ambition in student women.The research upon which this paper is based was carried out with the assistance of a Lena Lake Forrest Fellowship from the Business and Professional Women's Foundation, Washington, D.C.The author wishes to thank G. L. Millerson and C. T. Husbands for comments on the draft, and Beryl Collins and Bryn Saunders for help with the typing.