MMPI-2 assessment of malingered emotional distress related to a workplace injury: a mixed group validation

In this study, we examined the capacity of MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 2001) validity indexes to identify malingered depression associated with a workplace injury. We compared 27 graduate students simulating depression with archival records of 33 inpatients diagnosed with major depressive disorder. We employed a mixed-group validation design to generate true positive rates (TPR) and false positive rates (FPR) for the various MMPI-2 validity scales [F, FB, F(p), FBS, F - K, Ds2] while we accounted for base rates of malingering in each sample. The Fake Bad scale (FBS) was the only validity measure that produced acceptable TPR and FPR or a significant correlation with malingering status.     

Reexamining personal, social, and cultural influences on compliance behavior in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong

Researchers have extended the literature on strategies of gaining compliance with a request to incorporate cultural variations into the analytic framework. In the present investigation, the authors sought to go beyond previous studies of the factors increasing compliance rates by reexamining how researchers conceptualize and measure personal, social, and cultural influences on compliance behavior in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong. The authors found that different levels of compliance were affected by culture, principles of influence, and the individual's personal orientation of idiocentrism/allocentrism (I/A). In the present study, the authors extended previous cross-cultural work by decomposing the I/A into 2 separate individual difference variables: normative perceptions and evaluative perceptions. The interaction of person and situation on compliance showed the power of situational demands and the strength of different aspects of personal collectivism. Different patterns of compliance at the culture level revealed the importance of culture in shaping this behavioral tendency. Thus, the authors' integration of personal, social, and cultural influences provided an interactive model to help researchers explain compliance more comprehensively.     

The effectiveness of early head start for 3-year-old children and their parents: lessons for policy and programs

Early Head Start, a federal program begun in 1995 for low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers, was evaluated through a randomized trial of 3,001 families in 17 programs. Interviews with primary caregivers, child assessments, and observations of parent-child interactions were completed when children were 3 years old. Caregivers were diverse in race-ethnicity, language, and other characteristics. Regression-adjusted impact analyses showed that 3-year-old program children performed better than did control children in cognitive and language development, displayed higher emotional engagement of the parent and sustained attention with play objects, and were lower in aggressive behavior. Compared with controls, Early Head Start parents were more emotionally supportive, provided more language and learning stimulation, read to their children more, and spanked less. The strongest and most numerous impacts were for programs that offered a mix of home-visiting and center-based services and that fully implemented the performance standards early.     

Conflict in relational treatments

Various features of relational perspectives on conflict are outlined. Points of contact and difference between relational and modern conflict theory are discussed. Five approaches to considering conflict are examined: countertransference conflict as the site of interfaces between the social and the intrapsychic; conflict within the register of speech; conflict within a theory of multiple identifications; conflict as the site of psychic change; and conflict in the context of intersubjectivity. Clinical vignettes are introduced to illustrate the scope and function of conflict within one relational perspective.     

Ordinal judgments and summation of nonvisible sets of food items by two chimpanzees and a rhesus macaque

Two chimpanzees and a rhesus macaque rapidly learned the ordinal relations between 5 colors of containers (plastic eggs) when all containers of a given color contained a specific number of identical food items. All 3 animals also performed at high levels when comparing sets of containers with sets of visible food items. This indicates that the animals learned the approximate quantity of food items in containers of a given color. However, all animals failed in a summation task, in which a single container was compared with a set of 2 containers of a lesser individual quantity but a greater combined quantity. This difficulty was not overcome by sequential presentation of containers into opaque receptacles, but performance improved if the quantitative difference between sizes was very large.     

Self-affirmation and the biased processing of threatening health-risk information

Self-affirming before reading about the link between alcohol and breast cancer promoted increased message acceptance among young women at higher risk. Differences were maintained on variables measured up to 1 month later. Relative to their nonaffirmed counterparts, higher risk, self-affirmed participants had higher ratings of risk, imagination, intention to reduce alcohol consumption, and negative affect, such as fear, while reading the leaflet. In contrast, there were no differences between the groups on measures of broader message acceptance (belief in the link, evidence strength). Thus, self-affirmation promoted acceptance of the personal relevance of the message, a critical step in the precaution adoption process. Overall, the findings support the view that self-affirmation in an unrelated domain can offset defensive processing of a threatening health message, promoting central route persuasion and producing consequential and durable increases in message acceptance.     

Global versus local image expansion in estimating time-to-contact from complex optic flow

Previous work (Harris and Giachritsis 2000, Vision Research 40 601-611) has shown that, when global and local image expansion are placed in conflict, estimates of time-to-contact (TTC) are based almost exclusively upon global expansion. Here we extend this finding by demonstrating that global image expansion continues to predominate even under conditions that seem more favourable to a local analysis. We added a global rotation to the stimulus so that the global pattern of expansion was distorted while leaving the local expansion unaffected. Even under relatively high rotation rates (30 degrees s(-1)), local expansion continued to have little systematic effect upon estimates of TTC.     

Disability as diversity in Fortune 100 companies

To investigate the inclusion of people with disabilities in the diversity policies of the most successful businesses in the United States, we examined the publicly available workforce and supplier diversity policies of the top 100 companies on Fortune Magazine's 2003 list of the 500 most profitable companies in the nation. The majority of these companies have extensive information about their diversity policies and practices available on their corporate website. The information was used to categorize the policies into those that include people with disabilities, do not define diversity, and enumerate what is meant by diversity (e.g. in terms of race or gender) but do not expressly mention disability. In addition, we looked beyond the diversity policies to information available on corporate websites relating to a variety of diversity initiatives. Findings suggest that the majority of the companies that top the Fortune 500 list have developed and implemented diversity policies. Of these, 42% have diversity policies that include people with disabilities in the definition of a diverse workforce. Furthermore, 47% of companies with workplace diversity policies discuss diversity in a way that neither expressly includes nor excludes people with disabilities. Far fewer (15%) supplier diversity policies include disability in the definition of diversity, but a significant number of companies use criteria that allow a business owner with a disability to benefit from the company's supplier diversity program.     

Reasoning from unfamiliar premises: a study with unschooled adults

A long tradition of research initiated by Luria in the 1930s has established that unschooled adults perform poorly on reasoning tasks. Particularly when the premises are unfamiliar, they adopt an inappropriate empirical bias. However, recent findings show that young children with little or no schooling reason competently if prompted to think of the unfamiliar premises as pertaining to a distant planet. We tested two groups of adults: illiterate, unschooled adults and adults with limited schooling. Both groups received problems that included either a premise with unknown content or a premise contradicting their everyday experience. When given a minimal prompt, both groups manifested the customary empirical bias. By contrast, when explicitly prompted to think of the unfamiliar premises as pertaining to a distant planet, they reasoned accurately and appropriately justified their conclusions in terms of the supplied premises.