Effects of object complexity and type on the gaze behavior of children with pervasive developmental disorder

The looking behavior of children with pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) and age- and IQ-matched normal control children was studied using infrared oculography. Stimuli varying in complexity and topic were presented to test whether children with PDD have specific abnormalities in looking behavior to complex stimuli and/or to faces. All children showed more and longer fixations on the complex objects than on the simple objects, especially the complex nonsense figure, but group differences were not found. The results show no evidence for specific abnormalities in looking behavior to either faces or to complex stimuli in high functioning children with PDD.     

Effect of colour pop-out on the recognition of letters in crowding conditions

The crowding effect of adjacent objects on the recognition of a target can be reduced when target and flankers differ in some feature, that is irrelevant to the recognition task. In this study, the mechanisms of this effect were explored using targets and flankers of the same and different colours. It was found that facilitation nearly equal to that of differently coloured targets and flankers can be observed with a differently coloured background blob in the location of the target. The different-colour effect does not require advance knowledge of the target and flanker colours, but the effect increases in the course of three trials with constant mapping of colours. The results are consistent with the notion of exogenous attention that facilitates the processing at the most salient locations in the visual field.     

What Research Has to Say About Gender-Linked Differences in CMC and Does Elementary School Children’s E-mail Use Fit This Picture?

This paper first reviews the literature on computer mediated communication (CMC) to examine whether claims about gender-linked differences in specific attitudes, styles and content in CMC have been validated. Empirical studies were limited, with considerable variation in audiences, tasks, and contexts that was related to varied outcomes. The paper next describes an empirical study on the e-mail communication of elementary school children from ten Dutch classrooms. No gender-linked preference for a person or task-oriented attitude was found. Girls significantly more often employed an elaborate style. Differences between boys and girls on content of communication were subtle rather than robust. The conclusion discusses the functional embedding of CMC and the need to examine jointly antecedents, language acts and consequences.     

Fibromyalgie und Leistungseinschränkung

Interdisciplinary guidelines allowed for new quality standards in pain appraisal. Simultaneously, the scientific notion of fibromyalgia changed from a subjectively overvalued malaise to a central disturbance of coping with stress, which is neurobiologically determined. Therefore, in this article a psychosomatics-based guide is given for the socio-medical appraisal of fibromyalgia with reference to the new International Classification for Functioning and Disability (ICF) of the World Health Organization (WHO). As illustration a case study is presented.     

Posttraumatische Belastungssymptome als Spätfolge von Kindheiten im Zweiten Weltkrieg

Psychological late-life sequelae of war childhood have rarely been examined. The study evaluated posttraumatic symptoms and current psychopathology in a sample of former German war children of which 10.8% reported significant posttraumatic symptoms indicating a possible posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The presence of PTSD symptoms was significantly associated with current psychopathological distress, even 6 decades after World War II. Our data underline the urgent need for research in this field. Clinical implications for a psychotherapeutic approach are discussed.     

How writing system and age influence spatial representations of actions: a developmental, cross-linguistic study

Recently, researchers reported a bias for placing agents predominantly on the left side of pictures. Both hemispheric specialization and cultural preferences have been hypothesized to be the origin of this bias. To evaluate these hypotheses, we conducted a study with participants exposed to different reading and writing systems: Germans, who use a left-to-right system, and Israelis, who use a right-to-left system. In addition, we manipulated the degree of exposure to the writing systems by testing preschoolers and adults. Participants heard agent-first or recipient-first sentences and were asked to draw the content of the sentences or to arrange transparencies of protagonists and objects such that their arrangement depicted the sentences. Although preschool-age children in both countries showed no directional bias, adults manifested a bias that was consistent with the writing system of their language. These results support the cultural hypothesis regarding the origin of spatial-representational biases.     

Strategy use in the reading span test: an analysis of eye movements and reported encoding strategies

Strategy use in the traditional reading span test was examined by recording participants' eye movements during the task (Experiment 1) and by interviewing participants about their strategy use (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, no differences between individuals with a low, medium, and high span were observed in how they distributed processing time between task elements. In all three groups, fixation times on words up to the to-be-remembered (TBR) word became shorter and the time spent on the TBR longer as memory load in the task increased. The results of Experiment 2, however, show that span groups differ in the use of memory encoding strategies: individuals with a low span use mainly rehearsal, whereas individuals with a high span use almost exclusively semantic elaboration. The results indicate that the use of elaborative strategies may enhance span performance but that not all individuals are necessarily able to use such strategies efficiently.     

An open clinical trial of cognitive-behaviour therapy in children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder administered in regular outpatient clinics

The aim of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of manual-guided cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) for childhood obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) administered within three regular, i.e., non-academic, Norwegian outpatient child psychiatric clinics. METHODS: A total of 28 youngsters, aged 8-17 with primary OCD entered the study. Assessment at intake included Norwegian versions of the K-SADS-PL, Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (CY-BOCS), and a measure of OCD-specific functional impairment (Child OCD Impact Scale (COIS)). Therapy consisted of 12 manual-guided sessions with combined individual and family CBT-based interventions and was conducted by psychologists and physicians under training and supervision. Outcome was assessed after treatment and at 3- and 6-month follow-ups by means of the CY-BOCS, the Clinical Global Impression (CGI) and the CGI-Improvement scales, and the COIS. RESULTS: Twenty-four youngsters (86%) completed treatment and were available for the follow-up assessments. Significant improvements were found on all outcome measures after treatment, including a mean symptom reduction on the CY-BOCS of 60.6%, increasing to 68.8% at the 6-month follow-up. Estimates of within-group effect sizes showed strong effects of treatment. CONCLUSION: The results of the present study suggest that manual-guided CBT for childhood OCD can be successfully implemented in non-academic community child psychiatric settings with outcomes in accordance with previous findings from highly specialised university clinics.     

Nonnormality and divergence in posttreatment alcohol use: reexamining the Project MATCH data "another way."

Alcohol lapses are the modal outcome following treatment for alcohol use disorders, yet many alcohol researchers have encountered limited success in the prediction and prevention of relapse. One hypothesis is that lapses are unpredictable, but another possibility is the complexity of the relapse process is not captured by traditional statistical methods. Data from Project Matching Alcohol Treatments to Client Heterogeneity (Project MATCH), a multisite alcohol treatment study, were reanalyzed with 2 statistical methodologies: catastrophe and 2-part growth mixture modeling. Drawing on previous investigations of self-efficacy as a dynamic predictor of relapse, the current study revisits the self-efficacy matching hypothesis, which was not statistically supported in Project MATCH. Results from both the catastrophe and growth mixture analyses demonstrated a dynamic relationship between self-efficacy and drinking outcomes. The growth mixture analyses provided evidence in support of the original matching hypothesis: Individuals with lower self-efficacy who received cognitive behavior therapy drank far less frequently than did those with low self-efficacy who received motivational therapy. These results highlight the dynamical nature of the relapse process and the importance of the use of methodologies that accommodate this complexity when evaluating treatment outcomes.     

Towards better computational models of the balance scale task: a reply to Shultz and Takane

In contrast to Shultz and Takane [Shultz, T.R., & Takane, Y. (2007). Rule following and rule use in the balance-scale task. Cognition, in press, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.12.004.] we do not accept that the traditional Rule Assessment Method (RAM) of scoring responses on the balance scale task has advantages over latent class analysis (LCA): RAM is similar to a very restricted form of LCA. The apparent shortcomings of LCA are also less severe than they suggest. Via new simulations we show that LCA detects small classes reliably. We also counter their concerns regarding the torque difference effect and we underline the problems connectionist models have with correctly responding to balance items. Despite these differences in opinion we agree with Shultz and Takane on the possible avenues for future research.