Personality diagnostic questionnaire-revised (PDQ-R) personality disorder scores and negative life events independently predict changes in hopkins symptom checklist (SCL-90) Psychopathology Scores

The present study employed a prospective design to investigate whether Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire—Revised (PDQ-R) scores and/or Hassles Scale—Revised (HS-R) scores predict changes in Axis I psychopathology levels over 1 month, in a nonclinical sample of young adults. The PDQ-R, HS-R, and Hopkins Symptom Checklist (SCL-90) were administered to a mixed-sex sample of 100 undergraduate students on two occasions separated by 1 month. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that (1) time 1 PDQ-R composite scores predicted changes in scores on 11 SLC-90 scales; (2) time 1 PDQ-R impairment/distress index scores predicted changes in SCL-90 general symptom index scores; (3) only one of the individual PDQ-R personality disorder subscales—the schizotypal personality disorder subscale—predicted changes in SCL-90 general symptom index scores; (4) HS-R scores predicted changes in scores on 9 SCL-90 scales; and (5) in only 3 of the 27 analyses conducted did the statistical interaction between PDQ-R and HS-R scores predict changes in SCL-90 scores. These findings indicate that personality disorder symptomatology and negative life events may independently predict changes in Axis I psychopathology levels and, thus, support the continued inclusion of Axis II and Axis IV in future versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.     

Issues and options in literacy training

When was the last time you saw a job application with no spelling or grammatical errors? Basic skill deficiencies among people at all levels of business are forcing companies to develop innovative ways of compensating for and correcting the problem. What follows is a summary of literacy training strategies and suggestions for implementation.     

A new typology of health behaviours for personality-health predictions: The case of locus of control

Psychological investigations of the impact of personality on health behaviours have tended to emphasize fine distinctions among personality variables while failing to distinguish among different kinds of behaviours. For example, theoretical treatments of perceived personal control are quite sophisticated; in contrast, only one well-known analysis of health behaviours exists. We propose four categories of health-enhancing behaviours, which take into account contemporary views of the shift in health care from acute and physician-directed actions to long-term and patient-directed efforts. In addition, we suggest that perceived control (we emphasize locus of control because of its generality and parsimony) is an important predictor variable when combined with other factors common to current models of health behaviour.     

The philosophical works of wilfrid sellars

Expanded bibliography fromThe Metaphysics of Epistemology. Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars, edited by Pedro V. Amaral, Ridgeview Publ. Co., Atascadero, Calif. 1989, pp. 343–353, with addenda and corrigeda.     

The fear potentiated startle effect

A differential conditioning study examined whether an acoustic startle probe, presented during extinction of an aversively conditioned visual stimulus, potentiated the reflex eyeblink response in humans and whether this potentiation varied with the change in affective valence of the conditioned stimulus. Sixty college students were randomly assigned to view a series of two slides, depicting either unpleasant/highly arousing, unpleasant/moderate arousing, neutral/calm, pleasant/moderate arousing or pleasant/highly arousing scenes and objects (duration: 8 sec). During preconditioning (8 trials) and extinction (24 trials) acoustic startle probes (white noise bursts [50 ms; 95 dBA] were administered during and between slide presentation). During acquisition (16 trials) CS+ was reinforced by an electric shock. Startle response magnitudes significantly increased from preconditioning to extinction and were substantially larger to CS+. Conditioned startle reflex augmentation linearly increased with the pleasantness of the slides. Furthermore, subjects showed a greater post-conditioning increase of judged aversiveness to slides that they had previously reported to be more pleasant, exactly paralleling the startle reflex results.

     

Human adults and human infants show a “perceptual magnet effect” for the prototypes of speech categories,monkeys do not

Many perceptual categories exhibit internal structure in which category prototypes play an important role. In the four experiments reported here, the internal structure of phonetic categories was explored in studies involving adults, infants, and monkeys. In Experiment 1, adults rated the category goodness of 64 variants of the vowel /i/ on a scale from 1 to 7. The results showed that there was a certain location in vowel space where listeners rated the /i/ vowels as best instances, or prototypes. The perceived goodness of Iii vowels declined systematically as stimuli were further removed from the prototypic Iii vowel. Experiment 2 went beyond this initial demonstration and examined the effect of speech prototypes on perception. Either the prototypic or a nonprototypic IM vowel was used as the referent stimulus and adults’ generalization to other members of the category was examined. Results showed that the typicality of the speech stimulus strongly affected perception. When the prototype of the category served as the referent vowel, there was significantly greater generalization to other /i/ vowels, relative to the situation in which the nonprototype served as the referent. The notion of aperceptual magnet was introduced. The prototype of the category functioned like a perceptual magnet for other category members; it assimilated neighboring stimuli, effectively pulling them toward the prototype. In Experiment 3, the ontogenetic origins of the perceptual magnet effect were explored by testing 6-month-old infants. The results showed that infants’ perception of vowels was also strongly affected by speech prototypes. Infants showed significantly greater generalization when the prototype of the vowel category served as the referent; moreover, their responses were highly correlated with those of adults. In Experiment 4, Rhesus monkeys were tested to examine whether or not the prototype’s magnet effect was unique to humans. The animals did not provide any evidence of speech prototypes; they did not exhibit the magnet effect. It is suggested that the internal organization of phonetic categories around prototypic members is an ontogenetically early, species-specific, aspect of the speech code     

The acquisition of observing.

Pigeons were exposed to stimuli correlated with the presence or absence of a variable-interval 60-second schedule of reinforcement only while they depressed a crossbar or "perch." In the first experiment, the stimuli were different tilts of a line displayed on the key. When the difference in brightness between the line and the background (salience) was maximal, seven of eight birds acquired the discrimination, but when the difference was reduced by 50%, only one succeeded. In the second experiment, wavelength of chamber illumination served as the relevant dimension. Neither experiment showed a large effect attributable to the magnitude of the difference (disparity) between the positive and the negative stimulus. Individual differences in time spent observing were positively correlated with level of discrimination in the presence of the stimuli. All birds produced the positive stimulus for a greater proportion of the available time than they did the negative stimulus. This may be the mechanism that provides selective reinforcement of observing. Finally, the formation of a discrimination was analyzed in terms of changes in the proportion of time spent in contact with the discriminative stimuli.     

Regression analyses as a tool for studying reading processes: Comment on Just and Carpenters eye fixation theory

Just and Carpenter (1980) presented a theory of reading based on eye fixations wherein their “psycholinguistic” variables accounted for 72% of the variance in word gaze durations. This comment raises some statistical and theoretical problems with their use of simultaneous regression analysis of gaze duration measures and with the resulting theory of reading. A major problem was the confounding of perceptual with psycholinguistic factors. New eye fixation data are presented to support these criticisms. Analysis of fixations within words revealed that most gaze duration variance was contributed by number of fixations rather than by fixation duration.