Association of Behavioral Self-Regulation with Concurrent Functional Capacity Among Stroke Rehabilitation Patients

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that the Behavioral Dyscontrol Scale (BDS), a measure of the executive cognitive capacity to use an intention to guide purposeful, goal-directed activity would be strongly associated with concurrent functional status after controlling for age, sex, education, severity of pain, medical comorbidity, depression, and general mental status, in a sample of 246 elderly inpatients receiving rehabilitation services following hospitalization for stroke. Functional status was assessed by rehabilitation nurses' ratings of patients on 11 ADL items and on the Barthel Index. The BDS was the strongest predictor for 11 of the 12 dependent variables. Although it correlated significantly with all outcomes, the MMSE entered only one of the regression models. Of the other covariates, only age and severity of pain made an additional contribution to the prediction of functional ability for more than 1 dependent variable. Consistent with prior results in several other samples, the ability to use intentions to guide purposeful behavior appears to be an important contributor to everyday functioning among older adults.     

Psychoanalytic patients in the U.S., Canada,and Australia: II. A DSM-III-R validation study

A study was conducted to validate our previous work on the DSM-III-R disorders diagnosed in patients in psychoanalysis in the U.S., Canada, and Australia and to determine which specific mood, anxiety, and personality disorders were the most common in these patients. The earlier study consisted of three surveys of psychoanalytic practice that together obtained data on 1,718 patients, through extensive mail surveys to analysts in the three countries. In the validation study, 206 patients were diagnosed using a different technique. Analysts similar in important respects to those who participated in the original surveys rated patients diagnostically before and after DSM-III-R training. After training, no significant changes appeared in the rates for any of the specific mood disorders. For the thirty disorders examined, training effects decreased the identification of the generalized anxiety disorder, and increased the identification of three personality disorders: avoidant, dependent, and personality disorder not otherwise specified. Thus, analysts slightly underdiagnosed the number of personality disorders, and some "anxious" patients appear to have qualified for personality disorders. Some limitations of the DSM-III-R notion of narcissistic personality are discussed, as are the importance and stability of the self-defeating (masochistic) personality disorder. The most common Axis I disorder in psychoanalytic patients was dysthymia, followed by major depression, recurrent. This study reinforces the findings of the original three surveys. Minor corrections were developed to adjust the original three surveys.     

A temporally dynamic context effect that disrupts voice onset time discrimination of rapidly successive stimuli

Across three experiments, voice onset time discrimination along a /ba/-/pa/ continuum was found to be influenced by the order of presentation of rapidly successive stimuli. Specifically, discrimination was disrupted when a relatively unambiguous /pa/ syllable was presented before, rather than after, a more ambiguous /pa/ or /ba/ syllable. In Experiments 1 and 2, for between-category discrimination, this order effect was significant at interstimulus intervals (ISIs) below 250 msec, but not at 250 or 1,000 msec. In Experiments 2 and 3, the order effect was also significant for within-category discrimination at ISIs below 250 msec. In addition, in Experiment 3 this order effect was not diminished by provision of performance feedback across eight testing sessions. These findings reveal a particular vulnerability of phonological processing in response to rapidly successive stimuli and may have implications for mathematical and neural models of speech processing of normal and impaired populations.     

Effects of Diversity Management on Attachment

The theoretical underpinnings of this paper explain the process of organizational transformation to value differences and the attitudinal transformation of minority and majority individuals to appreciate diversity. As an empirical test of these theories, the research investigated absenteeism and psychological attachment in 2 Fortune 100 conglomerates in different stages of managing their diversity. Cox (1991) suggests that organizations evolve toward multiculturalism, a state in which employee differences are valued and appreciated. Analyses of 284 respondents reveal that majority and minority employees in a more multicultural firm experienced greater attitudinal attachment. Study results suggest that a culture that stresses inclusion of all individuals will have a positive impact on the demographic majority.     

A survey of psychological test use patterns among forensic psychologists

Clinical psychologists are frequently called on to testify in court regarding mental health issues in civil or criminal cases. One of the legal criteria by which admissibility of testimony is determined includes whether the testimony is based on methods that have gained "general acceptance" in their field. In this study, we sought to evaluate the psychological tests used in forensic assessments by members of the American Psychology-Law Society Division of the American Psychological Association, and by diplomates in the American Board of Forensic Psychology. We present test results from this survey, based on 152 respondents, for forensic evaluations conducted with adults using multiscale inventories, single-scale tests, unstructured personality tests, cognitive and/or intellectual tests, neuropsychological tests, risk assessment and psychopathy instruments, sex offender risk assessment instruments, competency or sanity-related instruments, and instruments used to evaluate malingering. In addition, we provide findings for psychological testing involving child-related forensic issues.     

Stability of nonlinear principal components analysis: an empirical study using the balanced bootstrap

Principal components analysis (PCA) is used to explore the structure of data sets containing linearly related numeric variables. Alternatively, nonlinear PCA can handle possibly nonlinearly related numeric as well as nonnumeric variables. For linear PCA, the stability of its solution can be established under the assumption of multivariate normality. For nonlinear PCA, however, standard options for establishing stability are not provided. The authors use the nonparametric bootstrap procedure to assess the stability of nonlinear PCA results, applied to empirical data. They use confidence intervals for the variable transformations and confidence ellipses for the eigenvalues, the component loadings, and the person scores. They discuss the balanced version of the bootstrap, bias estimation, and Procrustes rotation. To provide a benchmark, the same bootstrap procedure is applied to linear PCA on the same data. On the basis of the results, the authors advise using at least 1,000 bootstrap samples, using Procrustes rotation on the bootstrap results, examining the bootstrap distributions along with the confidence regions, and merging categories with small marginal frequencies to reduce the variance of the bootstrap results.     

Spiritual development: constructing an inclusive and progressive approach

This article examines the notion of spiritual development as it was conceptualised for state schools in Britain through the Conservative Government’s education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, reforms which also introduced the National Curriculum. The article puts forward the argument that spiritual development was conceptualised in such a way as to attempt to reinstate progressive pedagogical values rejected by the National Curriculum reforms, but that the conceptualisation led to two conservative outcomes. First, spiritual development was not sufficiently robust to counteract the reforms and may have helped ease their passage. Second, education for the development of spiritual beliefs and values continued to be primarily located in Religious Education, even though a first principle of spiritual development was that spirituality should not be synonymous with religion in order that spiritual development should be inclusive. The article recommends that changes to Religious Education should be encouraged to ensure schools can provide opportunities for an inclusive and progressive education for spiritual development.     

Gender Ideology and Motherhood: The Consequences of Race on Earnings

Using a nationally representative US sample, this study explores the relationship between gender ideology and the earnings of African American and white mothers over a 10-year period (1988–1998). We further investigate how factors related to fertility (i.e., age at first birth and the number of children) impact earnings for these mothers. Findings show, that regardless of race, a conservative gender ideology reduces women’s earnings but less so for African Americans compared to whites. With regard to fertility, the number of children is detrimental to the earnings of white mothers, but has no effect on the African American mothers in our sample. However, early childbearing does depress the earnings of African American women more so than for their white counterparts.     

The congruency sequence effect emerges when the distracter precedes the target

The congruency effect in distracter interference tasks is typically smaller when the previous trial was incongruent as compared to congruent, suggesting the operation of a control process that minimizes the influence of irrelevant stimuli on behavior. However, both the conditions under which this congruency sequence effect (CSE) can be most easily observed without the typical learning and memory confounds, and the control process underlying it, remain controversial. We therefore tested a recent hypothesis that the CSE is most easily observed without the typical confounds when the distracter is processed before the target. In line with this “distracter head start” hypothesis, in Experiments 1 and 2 the CSE was larger when the distracter appeared before, relative to with, the target. Further, in Experiment 3, we observed a negative congruency effect after incongruent trials when a long interval separated the distracter from the target, consistent with a modulation of the response engendered by the distracter but not with a shift of attention toward the target. These findings reveal an important determinant of CSE magnitude when the typical learning and memory confounds are absent and new insights into the nature of control processes that contribute to this phenomenon.