Lessons from the aftermath of Flight 232. Practical considerations for the mental health profession's response to air disasters

The fiery crash of a DC-10 at Sioux City, Iowa, on July 19, 1989, caused a crisis of major proportions, with attendant mental health needs. Various articles have described the need for psychological response teams in such crises. The present article provides practical guidelines for the preparation of a mental health disaster plan and for the coordination of a mental health team responding to a major air disaster. Such disasters can occur in any part of the country at any time. It is hoped that the suggestions in the present article will help teams that respond to future air disasters provide more rapid, effective, and efficient delivery of services to the survivors and their families, and the families of those who are killed.     

Residential environment and self-directedness among older people

Research on the environmental psychology of later life has produced data and theoretical advances that have been incorporated into the design of nursing homes and housing, neighborhood planning, housing policy, and housing-related services for older people. The applications of knowledge have been particularly useful in compensating for behaviors impaired by the physical illnesses that become more prevalent with aging. Some research has also documented environmental transactions made with the intent of choosing, creating, or shaping environments that increase need fulfillment. These two directions of the transactions between the older person and the environment have been characterized as environmental docility and environmental proactivity. The need for more research on promoting opportunities for proactivity in an attempt to raise environmental quality is discussed.     

The old homeless and the new homelessness in historical perspective

In the 1950s and 1960s homelessness declined to the point that researchers were predicting its virtual disappearance in the 1970s. Instead, in the 1980s, homelessness increased rapidly and drastically changed in composition. The "old homeless" of the 1950s were mainly old men living in cheap hotels on skid rows. The new homeless were much younger, more likely to be minority group members, suffering from greater poverty, and with access to poorer sleeping quarters. In addition, homeless women and families appeared in significant numbers. However, there were also points of similarity, especially high levels of mental illness and substance abuse.     

Wordshape errors in language production

Errors in natural speech that crucially involve the shape of the target word, i.e. interact in some way with the number of consonants and vowels in the word and their relative positioning, are examined in detail. It is shown that context highly constrains the rate of such errors. The data implicate a distinction between a segment level that encodes fine phonemic distinctions and a wordshape level with a course encoding. Implications for the representation of language and cognitive processing in language production are explored.     

The relationship between underpredicted pain and escape

Escape and avoidance that are disproportional to the danger of the pertinent stimulus are important clinical problems that are often related to inaccurate (catastrophic) expectations. One possible source of such expectations is a prior, underestimated aversive experience. In the present experiment the hypotheses that underestimated pain leads to escape and that it leads to avoidance were tested. In order to control for the effect of the intensity of the pain stimulus, a control group that received 20 pain stimuli of high intensity was formed. Subjects in the experimental condition received 17 pain stimuli of low intensity and 3 of (unexpectedly) high intensity (experimentally induced underprediction). Underprediction of the high intensity stimulus was significantly related to escape, but not to avoidance. The results suggest that the way in which avoidance was operationalized accounts for this. The strong support of the hypothesized relationship between underpredicted pain and escape is an important finding, however.     

Towards a theory of algorithm-determined cognitive test construction

A rationale for, and data from, a trial of a theory of item generation by algorithms whose origins are cognitive models of task performance are presented. Since Spearman (1904), intelligence has been operationally defined and assessed in human subjects by administering identical test items whose content and order have been fixed only after empirical iterations. In our approach, intelligence is ostensively defined by theoretically determined algorithms used for item construction and presentation. Knowledge of what cognitive factors limit human performance makes it possible to vary within tightly specified parameters those features of the tasks that contribute to difficulty, which we call radicals, to let those components of the tasks that do not contribute to difficulty vary randomly, and to counterbalance aspects of answer production that might induce biases of response. Empirical data are based on the generation of five different short tests demanding only functional literacy as a prerequisite for their execution. Four parallel forms of each test were administered to young male Army recruits whose scores were collated with their Army Entrance Test results, which were not previously known to us. Results show that the parallel, algorithm-generated item sets are statistically invariant, which item generation theory demands; and that the individual tests differentially predict Army Entrance Test scores. We conclude that IQ test performances are parsimoniously explained by individual differences in encoding, comparison and reconstructive memory processes.     

Numerical abstraction by human infants

Across several experiments, 6- to 8-month-old human infants were found to detect numerical correspondences between sets of entities presented in different sensory modalities and bearing no natural relation to one another. At the basis of this ability, we argue, is a sensitivity to numerosity, an abstract property of collections of objects and events. Our findings provide evidence that the emergence of the earliest numerical abilities does not depend upon the development of language or complex actions, or upon cultural experience with number.