Abstracting Psychological Literature,Especially Non-English,in the 1990s

The cessation of non-English materials in Psychological Abstracts in 1988 resulted in a crisis, yet to be resolved, in the international exchange of information. As a long-term solution we favour founding International Psychological Abstracts, with the responsibility for preparation of the abstracts to be shared by the international psychological community. It is hoped that the compact-disc versions of the databases will become affordable to institutions around the world. In this communication, in addition to the abstract system of the American Psychological Association, attention will be given to other abstract journals in English as well as in French, German, and Russian.     

The Effect of Research with Teenage Mothers on the Development of Their Infants1

Mother-infant interaction of 14 teenage mothers and 12 women 20 years or older was observed and recorded in the laboratory or the home when the infants were 16, 20, 24, and 52 weeks of age. In order to assess the possible effect of the research intervention on the maternal behavior and on the infants' development, a control group of teenage mothers and their infants was seen only at the end of the study when the infant was 52 weeks old. At 12 months the Home Observation Measure of the Environment Inventory (HOME) was administered and infants were assessed with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (motor and mental scales) and the Ainsworth Strange Situation procedure. On all measures the observation groups scored significantly higher than the control group. The significant aspects of the research intervention are discussed.     

How to support learning from multiple hypertext sources

In the present study, we investigated three factors that were assumed to have a significant influence on the success of learning from multiple hypertexts, and on the construction of a documents model in particular. These factors were task (argumentative vs. narrative), available text material (with vs. without primary sources), and presentation format (active vs. static). The study was conducted with the help of the combination of three tools (DEWEX, Chemnitz LogAnalyzer, and SummTool) developed for Web-based experimenting. The results show that the task is the most important factor for successful learning from multiple hypertexts. Depending on the task, the participants were either able or unable to apply adequate strategies, such as considering the source information. It was also observed that argumentative tasks were supported by an active hypertext presentation format, whereas performance on narrative tasks increased with a passive presentation format. No effect was shown for the type of texts available.     

The effects of receptive and expressive instructional sequences on varied conditional discriminations

Many Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI) curricula recommend teaching receptive responding before targeting expressive responding (Leaf & McEachin, 1999; Lovaas, 2003). However, a small literature base suggests that teaching expressive responses first may be more efficient when teaching children with ASD and other developmental disabilities (Petursdottir & Carr, 2011). The present study employed an alternating treatments design to compare the effects of three instructional sequences to teach feature, function, and class to three children diagnosed with ASD: (a) receptive–expressive, (b) expressive–receptive, and (c) mixed. The results suggested that expressive–receptive was the most efficient training sequence for all three participants. Additionally, greater emergent responding was observed with the expressive–receptive training sequence.     

Detection costs and contingent attentional capture

Peripheral cues reduce reaction times (RTs) to targets at the cued location with short cue-target SOAs (cueing benefits) but increase RTs at long SOAs (cueing costs or inhibition of return). In detection tasks, cueing costs occur at shorter SOAs and are larger compared with identification tasks. To account for effects of task, detection cost theory claims that the integration of cue and target into an object file makes it more difficult to detect the target as a new event, which is the principal task-requirement in detection tasks. The integration of cue and target is expected to increase when cue and target are similar. We provided evidence for detection cost theory in the modified spatial cueing paradigm. Two types of cues (onset, color) were paired with two types of targets (onset, color) in separate blocks of trials. In the identification task, we found cueing benefits with matching (i.e., similar) cue-target pairs (onset-onset, color-color) and no cueing effects with nonmatching cue-target pairs (onset-color, color-onset), which replicates previous work. In the detection task, cueing effects with matching cues were reduced and even turned into cueing costs for onset cues with onset targets, suggesting that cue-target integration made it more difficult to detect targets at the cued location as new events. In contrast, the results for nonmatching cue-target pairs were not affected by task. Furthermore, the pattern of false alarms in the detection task provides a measure of similarity that may explain the size of cueing benefits and costs.     

Training and primary prevention: Clinical experience with infants and their families as an obligatory part of the child psychiatrist's training

This article reports on a clinical program that has been an obligatory part of the training of child psychiatrists since 1976. It consists of following infant and parent development through the first postnatal year. Although the families who volunteer to participate are not selected on the basis of identified problems or risks, intervention was indicated on several occasions. This training experience has been highly valued by child psychiatrists. It also performed functions of primary prevention. It is suggested that if such training programs were established at other institutions and in other clinical fields, the primary prevention of emotional disorders would significantly be promoted.