Psychometric Properties and Clinical Utility of the Scale for Suicide Ideation with Inpatient Children

The purpose of the current study was to examine the psychometric properties and clinical utility of the Scale for Suicide Ideation (SSI) for children. The SSI was administered to 100 children who were hospitalized. Data were not used from 13 subjects due to the presence of a psychotic disorder or IQ less than 70, leaving 87 participants. The SSI was examined regarding its internal consistency, concurrent validity, construct validity, and factor structure when used with children. Based on the findings, the SSI appears to have adequate psychometric properties and can be used by clinicians and researchers examining children in an inpatient setting. Recommendations for clinicians are included to help make the SSI more functional in use for children.     

Inside the Beltway again: a sheep of a different feather

The appearance of a sheep named Dolly, the first clone of an adult mammal, dramatically affected the agenda, pace of work, and visibility of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. The Commission's approach to its task and some of the issues it considered in responding to President Clinton's request for review and recommendations within 90 days are described.     

The Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine of the Council of Europe

The Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine developed by the Council of Europe, now undergoing ratification, is the first international treaty focused on bioethics. This article describes the background of the Convention's development and its general provisions and provides a comparison of its requirements with those of federal regulations governing research with human subjects. Although most provisions are comparable, there are significant differences in scope and applicability, for example, in the areas of compensation for injury, research participation by persons with limited capacity to consent, assisted reproduction, organ transplantation, and research in emergency situations. The Convention represents a milestone in international bioethics and protection of human rights that will probably be referred to with increasing frequency.     

Religion and the use of animals in research: some first thoughts

Religious traditions can be drawn on in a number of ways to illuminate discussions of the moral standing of animals and the ethical use of animals in scientific research. I begin with some general comments about relevant points in the history of major religions. I then briefly describe American civil religion, including the cult of health, and its relation to scientific research. Finally, I offer a critique of American civil religion from a Christian perspective.     

The specific action of different personality risk factors on cancer of the breast, cervix, corpus uteri and other types of cancer: A prospective investigation

We report the results of a prospective study of a random sample of 1353 elderly but healthy men and women who were followed up for a period of 10 yr, when mortality and cause of death were ascertained. Overall results have been reported elsewhere for mortality from cancer, coronary heart disease and other causes; here we are concerned with the personality factors predicting breast cancer, cervical cancer, cancer of the corpus uteri specifically, as well as other types of cancer in women. Ten specific hypotheses were tested, using specially constructed questionnaires for the purpose, and for most of these statistically significant support was obtained. The results justify belief that specific types of cancer may be related to specific stress/personality factors.     

Changing Sensitivity to Duration in Human Scalar Timing: An Experiment, a Review, and Some Possible Explanations

Evidence from a number of studies of human timing, using temporal generalization and bisection tasks, suggests more sensitive behavioural adjustment to presented durations under conditions in which the timing task demands discriminations between more closely spaced stimuli. An experiment using temporal generalization demonstrated this effect, as discrimination between a 600-msec standard duration and non-standard stimuli both shorter and longer than 600 msec was better when non-standard stimuli were more closely spaced around 600 msec. A review showed similar effects in other temporal generalization tasks and in a number of bisection studies, where time discrimination improved as the ratio of the long and short standards on the bisection task decreased. A standard model of human temporal generalization explained the experimental data in terms of a decrease in the response threshold under more difficult conditions, rather than changes in the representation of the standard duration. On the other hand, data from bisection could be modelled by assuming the contrary; that representations of the short and long standards of the task were more precise under the more difficult conditions. Explanations of some of these effects in terms of attention to duration and/or arousal-induced changes in the speed of an internal clock were discussed.     

The dimensionality of the flanker compatibility effect: A psychophysiological analysis

The psychophysiological approach was used to evaluate the effects of feature similarity and intrinsic response mapping on the flanker compatibility effect. Symbol (e.g., < > < and < / <) and letter arrays (e.g., HCH and SCS) were used. Results showed that delays in stimulus evaluation and both peripheral and central response competition contributed to the compatibility effect, with the contribution of these processes depending on feature similarity and the intrinsic response mapping of the stimuli. For letter stimuli, the difference in the size of the compatibility effect for similar and dissimilar arrays could be accounted for in terms of stimulus evaluation. For symbol arrays, differences in size of the compatibility effect could be accounted for by response competition. Thus, symbol and letter arrays do not appear to be processed differently; what is different is the degree to which stimulus and response-related processes are affected by incompatibility.     

TO WHAT EXTENT DO UNIQUE PARTS INFLUENCE RECOGNITION ACROSS CHANGES IN VIEWPOINT?

Abstract— We investigated how varying the number of unique pans within an object influences recognition across changes in viewpoint The stimuli were shaded objects composed of five three-dimensional volumes tinted end to end with varying connection angles Of the five volumes, zero, one, three, or jive were qualitatively distinct (e g, brick vs cone), the rest being tubes Sequential-matching and naming tasks depth Three major results stand out First, regardless of the number of distinct parts, there was increasingly poorer recognition performance viewpoint change for objects with one unique part was less than that for the other objects Third, additional pans beyond a single unique part produced strong viewpoint dependency comparable to that ob representations encode both quantitative and qualitative features     

Adjusting Social Inferences in Familiar and Unfamiliar Domains: The Generality of Response to Situational Pragmatics

Two experiments investigated the influence of situational pragmatics on the selective use of specific instances and generalized knowledge structures to make social inferences. In Experiment 1, social inferences were made in an unfamiliar domain similar in structure to a typical situation of social greetings and address, but devoid of useful cues to social schemas. Participants were told that either one or another of the features of the situation was more pragmatically important for deriving inferences about appropriate social behaviour; consistent with predictions from a computational model of analogical mapping (ACME), they made reliable inferences based on analogies to specific instances, with the situational importance of relations guiding the selection of the optimal analogue. In Experiment 2, social inferences were examined in the more familiar domain of predicting social behavior between low and high status persons and between members of an ingroup and an outgroup in Japan. The availability of specific examples was varied, as was the perceived importance of status and group membership. The situation was isomorphic to that in the first experiment, except for the availability of generalized knowledge structures to guide inferences. Participants made relatively veridical inferences that were sensitive to variations in the pragmatic importance of dimensions. Provision of specific analogues had little impact on inferences, suggesting that participants were relying instead on more general and cross-culturally applicable knowledge about adjusting social relations according to situational pragmatics.