Construct validity of the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART): associations with psychopathy and impulsivity

To continue research assessing the validity of the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART) as a measure of risk taking, the BART was administered to a nonforensic sample of individuals with varying levels of psychopathic characteristics. Construct validity of the BART was evaluated by measuring risk-taking behavior in relation to self-reported psychopathy, anxiety, psychophysiological data, and demographic variables. Supporting the construct validity of the BART, while controlling for variance accounted for by interrelated variables in the context of hierarchical regression analyses, higher self-reported psychopathy was significantly predictive of increased risk taking on the BART. Findings also revealed interesting gender differences in self-reported psychopathy and a trend for men to engage in riskier behavior. Limitations and research directions are presented.     

Enhancement of auditory fear conditioning after housing in a complex environment is attenuated by prior treatment with amphetamine

Prior exposure to drugs of abuse has been shown to occlude the structural plasticity associated with living in a complex environment. Amphetamine treatment may also occlude some cognitive advantages normally associated with living in a complex environment. To test this hypothesis we examined the influence of prior exposure to amphetamine on fear conditioning in rats housed in either a standard or complex environment. Housing in a complex environment facilitated fear learning to an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS), but not to the training context, relative to animals housed singly or in a social group. Prior treatment with amphetamine eliminated this effect. These results indicate that living in a complex environment facilitates conditional freezing to an auditory CS, and that this effect is abolished by pretreatment with amphetamine.     

Cognitive behaviour therapy for panic disorder: long-term follow-up

This paper describes a long-term follow-up of patients with panic disorder who received cognitive behaviour therapy within a randomized controlled trial. Of 89 patients eligible for follow-up, 28 (31.5%) were reassessed 6-8 years after commencement of treatment in the trial. No differences were found between those who were followed up and those lost to follow-up on most baseline measures including measures of panic-related psychopathology, or depression. Outcomes at long-term follow-up were significantly better than baseline measures of panic, avoidance and depression. In this sub-sample the effect of cognitive behaviour therapy for panic disorder appears to maintain over the long-term.     

Impact of recent findings on study design of future autism clinical trials

There are specific challenges to studying the design of pharmacologic trials in child/adolescent and adult autism, such as subject stratification and parallel versus crossover designs. This article describes how optimal study design is influenced by subject selection and outcome measures chosen. Lessons learned in study design from the Research Units on Pediatric Psychopharmacology Autism Network trial with risperidone, Seaver Center trials with fluoxetine and valproate, Dartmouth trials with amantadine, and National Institutes of Health secretin trials are highlighted. The Internet System for Assessing Autistic Children system for managing multicenter clinical trials in autism and statistical issues in autism research are also described.     

About the Contributors

Note

About the Contributors     

Characterizing the time course of an implicature: an evoked potentials study

This work employs Evoked Potential techniques as 19 participants are confronted with sentences that have the potential to produce scalar implicatures, like in Some elephants have trunks. Such an Underinformative utterance is of interest to pragmatists because it can be considered to have two different truth values. It can be considered true when taken at face value but false if one were to treat Some with the implicature Not All. Two accounts of implicature production are compared. The neo-Gricean approach (e.g., Levinson, 2000) assumes that implicatures intrude automatically on the semantics of a term like Some. Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1985/1996) assumes that implicatures are effortful and not automatic. In this experiment, the participants are presented with 25 Underinformative sentences along with 25 sentences that are Patently True (e.g. Some houses have bricks) and 25 that are Patently False (e.g. Some crows have radios). As reported in an earlier study (Noveck, 2001), Underinformative sentences prompt strong individual differences. Seven participants here responded true to all (or nearly all) of the Underinformative sentences and the remaining 12 responded false to all (or nearly all) of them. The present study showed that those who responded false to the Underinformative sentences took significantly longer to do so that those who responded true. The ERP data indicate that: (a) the Patently True and Patently False sentences prompt steeper N400's--indicating greater semantic integration--than the Underinformative sentences and that (b) regardless of one's ultimate response to the Underinformative sentences, the N400's were remarkably flat, indicating no particular reaction to these sentences. Collectively, the data are taken to show that implicatures are part of a late-arriving, effort-demanding decision process.     

Children's difficulties handling dual identity

Thirty-nine 6-year-old children participated in a longitudinal study using tasks that required handling of dual identity. Pre- and posttest sessions employed tasks involving a protagonist who was partially informed about an object or person; for example, he knew an item as a ball but not as a present. Children who judged correctly that the protagonist did not know the ball was a present (thereby demonstrating some understanding of the consequences of limited information access), often judged incorrectly (1) that he knew that there was a present in the box, and (2) that he would search as if fully informed. Intervening sessions added contextual support and tried to clarify the experimenter's communicative intentions in a range of ways. Despite signs of general improvement, the distinctive pattern of errors persisted in every case. These findings go beyond previous studies of children's handling of limited information access, and are hard to accommodate within existing accounts of developing understanding of the mind.