If the boy loves the girl and the girl loves the dog,does the boy love the dog?: The overgeneralization of verbal transitive inference skills

Two studies investigated 4- to 10-year-old children's capacity to make verbal transitive inferences. The results of the two studies suggest that the development of transitive inference skills follows a specific to general developmental path, and that children overgeneralize their verbal transitive inference skills to inappropriate relational terms prior to determining the general principle that underlies the use of relational terms in transitive sentences.     

On the locus of the semantic satiation effect: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

The present study sought to determine whether semantic satiation is merely a by-product of adaptation or satiation of upstream, nonsemantic perceptual processes or whether the effect can have a locus in semantic memory. This was done by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in a semantic word-detection task involving multiple presentations of primes and critical related and unrelated words in three experiments involving visual (Experiment 1) and auditory (Experiments 2A and 2B) stimuli. Primes varied in their type case (Experiment 1) or pitch (Experiment 2B) in order to discourage sensory adaptation. Prime satiation and relatedness of the primes to the critical word had interacting effects on ERP amplitude to critical words, particularly within the time-window of the N400 component. Because numerous studies have indicated a role for the N400 in semantic processing, modulation of the N400 relatedness effect by prime satiation (with little or no contribution from perceptual adaptation) suggests that semantic memory can be directly satiated, rather than the cost to semantic processing necessarily resulting from impoverishment of perceptual inputs.     

Job Insecurity Spillover to Key Account Management: Negative Effects on Performance,Effectiveness, Adaptiveness,and Esprit De Corps

Most of the existing research on outcomes of job insecurity has identified individual-level burdens such as reduced attitudinal attachments toward work and well being. Far fewer studies have examined work-related outcomes that are of substantial concern to organizational success. In this paper, we investigated four new work-related outcomes of job insecurity that are part of the literature on key account management (KAM): customer performance, effectiveness with customers, adaptiveness to changing competitive conditions, and esprit de corps. A total of 353 U.S. based employees participated. The findings of this research suggest that job insecure workers perceive their organizations to be ineffective in delivering on all four KAM outcomes.     

Significance of Childhood Conduct Problems to Later Development of Conduct Disorder Among Children With ADHD: A Prospective Follow-Up Study

This study investigates whether low to moderate levels of childhood oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD) behaviors contribute to the development of clinically diagnosed CD in adolescence, in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Participants were 207 White boys (ages 6-12) with ADHD free of conduct disorder diagnoses. Parent and teacher ratings were obtained. Participants were assessed at mean age 18 by clinicians blind to childhood status. A non-ADHD group (recruited in adolescence) was also studied. ODD behavior ratings did not predict CD in adolescence, whereas CD behavior ratings did. No single ODD or CD behavior predicted adolescent outcome. ADHD probands with very low ratings (Not at all, Just a little) by parents and teachers on all CD behaviors were still at significantly increased risk for CD in adolescence, compared to non-ADHD controls. The same relationships were found between childhood ODD and CD behaviors, and antisocial personality disorder in adulthood (mean age, 25). We conclude that childhood ADHD is a developmental precursor of later antisocial disorder, even in the absence of comorbid ODD or CD in childhood. However, low levels of CD-type problems are not innocuous, because they predict later CD among children with ADHD without comorbid CD.     

Family transactions and relapse in bipolar disorder

This study examined whether patient symptoms and relatives' affective behavior, when expressed during directly observed family interactions, are associated with the short-term course of bipolar disorder. Twenty-seven bipolar patients and their relatives participated in two 10-minute family interactions when patients were discharged after a manic episode. Results indicated that patients who showed high levels of odd and grandiose thinking during the interactions were more likely to relapse during a 9-month followup period than patients who did not show these symptoms during the family discussions. Relapse was also associated with high rates of harshly critical and directly supportive statements by relatives. Patients' odd thinking and relatives' harsh criticism were significantly more likely to be correlated when patients relapsed (r = .53) than when they did not relapse (r = .12). Results suggest that bipolar patients who show increased signs of residual symptomatology during family transactions during the post-hospital period are at increased relapse risk. The data also suggest that relatives of relapsing patients cope with these symptoms by increasing both positive and negative affective behaviors. Moreover, a bidirectional, interactional relationship between patients' symptoms and relatives' coping style seems to capture best the role of the family in predicting relapse in bipolar disorder.     

Culture Is More than a Static Residual: Introduction to the Special Section on Culture and Foreign Policy

The literature on international relations frequently refers to culture in broad, macro-level ways to explain what cannot be explained by economic or military power. The assumptions that culture is simple, uniform and the opposite of power are, in the view of the authors, erroneous. Also, the authors note that there is a lack of scholarly interaction among psychologists interested in cross-cultural phenomena and international relations specialists interested in questions of identity and foreign policy. As an introduction to a special section on culture and foreign policy, this article calls for more communication among these scholarly communities; provides a set of observations about foreign policy and culture understood as a complex, dynamic concept; and calls for specific kinds of studies to better understand foreign policy in the context of cultural complexity and richness.     

Discovering the Alphabetic Principle: A Lost Opportunity for Educational Reform

We review the recently published report by the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children from a behavior analytic perspective. The authors prescribe what children should learn to be successful readers based on the correlates of reading and the developmental progression of reading errors. The report offers no discussion of theoretical models that can be used by teachers and parents to reform reading instruction or specific procedures that have been shown to be effective at promoting various reading skills. We discuss these omissions in terms of the level of research included in the review, the authors' structural approach to synthesizing this research, and the constructivist orientation common to many early childhood educators. The paper concludes by identifying models and strategies from the behavior analysis literature that can be used to guide instruction and offers a modest suggestion for future reviews of reading research.     

Anxiety Symptomatology in Mexican-American Adolescents

Mexican-American adults and adolescents in general have been reported to have high levels of anxiety symptomatology. In our study of a tri-ethnic sample of 2528 junior and senior high school students, the Youth Self Report (YSR) version of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and a sociodemographic questionnaire was used to assess the anxiety symptoms of Hispanic youth. We compared the ratings on anxiety symptoms, using Achenbach's anxiety subscale on the YSR, between two populations. The anxiety levels of youth in coastal southeast Texas (Galveston County) were compared to the anxiety levels of youth in the lower Rio Grande Valley. We found that Mexican-Americans of the Lower Rio Grande Valley scored higher on anxiety symptoms than the tri-ethnic population of Galveston County. Other factors associated with higher anxiety scores for Mexican-American youths included being born outside the US, linguistic fluency, father absent from the home, mother's education, and household size. Multiple regression analyses showed that socio-economic status (SES), family composition, and linguistic fluency had a greater relative impact on anxiety symptomatology than all other factors, both for the total sample as well as for the Mexican-American sample. These results parallel previous findings, with Mexican-American adults, which suggest either higher risk for anxiety symptomatology or a culturally related bias in the reporting of such symptoms.