Scientific rewards and conflicts of ethical choices in human subjects research.

The primary responsibility of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Committee on Standards in Research (CSR) is to advise the APA on issues and standards related to the protection of human participants in psychological research. A related goal is to enhance the use of good ethical practices by APA members. The purpose of this article is to foster the view of research ethics not as an affront to the integrity of sound research, but as opportunities for scientific rewards, including increased understanding of the meaning of data, enhanced recruitment, and the inclusion of more representative samples. Three ethical practices are discussed as examples of this general premise: respect for confidentiality, use of debriefing, and assurance that participants are noncoerced volunteers. The Committee's intent is to promote consideration of these issues, not to promulgate specific guidelines or procedures.     

Injury control. A promising field for psychologists.

Injury is the fourth leading cause of death for all Americans and the most frequent cause of death for those from age 1 to 45. Moreover, injury is associated with higher treatment costs and with greater lost life-years than the other three leading causes of death. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of severe brain injury, including most paraplegic and quadriplegic cases. Because injury control is essentially psychological, there are many opportunities for psychologists to contribute, both to scientific research on the causes of injury and to clinical interventions for injury control.     

FADING TEACHER PROMPTS PROM PEER-INITIATION INTERVENTIONS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES

This study examined a system for fading teacher prompts to children who served as peers in peer-initiation interventions for young children with disabilities. A teacher taught peers to direct social initiations to children with disabilities, provided verbal prompts for those initiations, and introduced a system that provided peers with visual feedback about the social interactions of the children with disabilities. She then systematically withdrew the verbal prompts to peers, and subsequently faded the visual feedback system. Peer initiations increased when the intervention began and resulted in increases in social interaction for the children with disabilities. As the teacher systematically faded the prompts and visual feedback to the peers, social interaction continued at the levels found during intervention and was maintained during a short maintenance period.     

PROMOTING LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR CHILD PROTECTION: A COMMUNITY ANALYSIS

The Colorado Occupant Protection Project (COPP) intervention provided police with brief instruction concerning the importance of citations for drivers' failure to use child safety seats and special coupons to accompany citations. Coupons were exchangeable by drivers for a safety seat and brief training in its use, plus a waiver of the $50 citation fine. Over 4.5 years of archival records were employed, using an ABA design and a comparison community to evaluate the program. Few tickets were issued for nonuse of safety seats during the 3-year baseline in either community. Citations for nonuse of safety seats increased to over 50 per month during the intervention period at the test site, whereas rates remained essentially zero at the comparison site. After the COPP intervention was removed at the intervention site, citation rates for nonuse of safety seats decreased to about 15 per month. Differences between intervention conditions and settings were statistically significant. During the intervention, officers were 44 times more likely to write citations than were controls. Results suggested that a behavioral program can increase police citation writing for child protection purposes.     

Effects of alcohol intoxication on risk taking, strategy, and error rate in visuomotor performance.

Adult men (N = 44) participated for 2 days (alcohol vs. placebo treatment) in a double-blind, crossover experiment. Performance on the Digit Symbol Substitution Task (DSST) and a visuomotor (VM) task was measured 4 times each day. On the alcohol-treatment day, data were obtained once during ascending breath alcohol levels (BALs), once during maximal BALs (0.05 or 0.10), and twice during descending BALs. Data were collected at the same time points on the placebo-treatment day. Limited evidence for acute tolerance was obtained with the DSST, but error rates on the VM task were higher during maximal and descending BALs. Error rates remained near placebo values, and participants displayed slightly greater caution, while BALs were ascending. Strategy scores on the VM task exceeded placebo scores during maximal intoxication. Data interpretation is focused on individuals in higher level (e.g., professional) positions.     

Categorical time production: evidence for discrete timing in motor control.

Subjects performed a repetitive manual tapping task, attempting to match a given rate of auditory stimulus pulses, first with the pulses audible (synchronization) and then with the pulses turned off (continuation). In different sessions, the interstimulus interval (ISI) was selected from the range 175 to 825 msec in steps of 25 msec, with different ISI values presented in a random order. Across this range of ISI conditions, interresponse intervals (IRIs) exhibited alternating positive bias (too slow) and negative bias (too fast). We interpret this pattern of bias in terms of a discrete, or categorical, timing mechanism in motor timing. Categorical time production can be viewed as extending our conception of the timekeeper in Wing's (Wing & Kristofferson, 1973a, 1973b) two-process model of motor timing and may be related to the system of multiple clocks proposed by Kristofferson (1980) to explain a categorical pattern of variability measures in duration discrimination.     

Weekends and holidays and acting-out behavior of developmentally delayed women: a reply to Dr. Mark Flynn.

A previous report on the effect of the day of the full moon on the acting-out behavior of 20 developmentally delayed, institutionalized women showed that on the day of the full moon there were significantly more misbehaviors than on any other day during the lunar period. The records were re-evaluated to assess the frequency of acting-out behaviors on weekends and holidays as contrasted with the balance of the month. This re-evaluation indicated there was no significant difference between the weekends and holidays and the balance of the month (t = 1.14). The results were taken as support of the previous findings that on the day of the full moon there were significantly more misbehaviors than on any other day of the lunar period.     

Self-perceived information needs and concerns of elderly persons.

The research was intended to identify the dimensions underlying self-perceived information needs and concerns of an elderly population. The spontaneously mentioned needs and concerns expressed in 271 letters from a sample of the population were extracted and a multidimensional scaling procedure was used to represent the 58 most frequently mentioned items in configurations of varying dimensionality. To interpret the multidimensional spaces, another sample of 176 elderly subjects was asked to rate the 58 concerns on eight properties. These ratings were then regressed onto the multidimensional configurations. The results indicate that the most frequently mentioned information needs and concerns of elderly persons can be parsimoniously understood in terms of three underlying dimensions: (1) Improving the Quality of Life vs Securing the Necessities of Life, (2) Health-related vs Not Health-related, and (3) Individual vs Societal Responsibility.     

A novel contact-lens system to assess visual hemispheric asymmetries.

A soft contact-lens system for achieving unilateral visual stimulation in a free vision format is described. Initial testing with light transmittance and visual perimetry indicated that the lenses created artificial visual-field deficits. The efficacy of the lenses as a technique for lateralizing visual input was evaluated by examining within-subject differences in performance on two visuospatial tasks. Speed and accuracy of performance were greater with visual input directed to the right hemisphere. These data support the lens design as a useful alternative to tachistoscopic procedures and previous lens systems.