The equivalence of the Child Behavior Checklist/1 1/2-5 across parent race/ethnicity, income level, and language

This study examined the equivalence of the Child Behavior Checklist/1 1/2-5 (CBCL/1 1/2-5) in 682 parents of 2- to 4-year-old children stratified by parent race/ethnicity (African American, Latino, and non-Latino White), family income (low vs. middle-upper), and language version (Spanish vs. English). Externalizing Scale means differed by income and child gender. Internalizing Scale means differed by income and parent race/ethnicity. Differential item analyses showed that few items functioned differently by racial/ethnic, language, and income group. A confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the Externalizing Scale provided a good fit with the data across racial/ethnic and income groups. However, model fit was improved for the Internalizing Scale when factor weights were allowed to vary. Findings support the equivalence of the CBCL/1 1/2-5 when used with parents of low-income preschool children from African American and Latino backgrounds, although further study of the factor structure for the Internalizing Scale is recommended.     

The effect of perceptual load on attention-induced motion blindness: the efficiency of selective inhibition

Recent visual marking studies have shown that the carry-over of distractor inhibition can impair the ability of singletons to capture attention if the singleton and distractors share features. The current study extends this finding to first-order motion targets and distractors, clearly separated in time by a visual cue (the letter X). Target motion discrimination was significantly impaired, a result attributed to the carry-over of distractor inhibition. Increasing the difficulty of cue detection increased the motion target impairment, as distractor inhibition is thought to increase under demanding (high load) conditions in order to maximize selection efficiency. The apparent conflict with studies reporting reduced distractor inhibition under high load conditions was resolved by distinguishing between the effects of "cognitive" and "perceptual" load.     

Folkbiology of freshwater fish

Cross-cultural comparisons of categorization often confound cultural factors with expertise. This paper reports four experiments on the conceptual behavior of Native American and majority-culture fish experts. The two groups live in the same general area and engage in essentially the same set of fishing-related behaviors. Nonetheless, cultural differences were consistently observed. Majority-culture fish experts tended to sort fish into taxonomic and goal-related categories. They also showed an influence of goals on probes of ecological relations, tending to answer in terms of relations involving adult fish. Native American fish experts, in contrast, were more likely to sort ecologically. They were also more likely to see positive and reciprocal ecological relations, tending to answer in terms of relations involving the full life cycle of fish. Further experiments support the view that the cultural differences do not reflect different knowledge bases but rather differences in the organization and accessibility of knowledge. At a minimum the results suggest that similar activities within a well-structured domain do not necessarily lead to common conceptualizations.     

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) use a physical marker to locate hidden food

Dogs can use the placement of an arbitrary marker to locate hidden food in an object-choice situation. We tested domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) in three studies aimed at pinning down the relative contributions of the human’s hand and the marker itself. We baited one of two cups (outside of the dogs’ view) and gave the dog a communicative cue to find the food. Study 1 systematically varied dogs’ perceptual access to the marker placing event, so that dogs saw either the whole human, the hand only, the marker only, or nothing. Follow-up trials investigated the effect of removing the marker before the dog’s choice. Dogs used the marker as a communicative cue even when it had been removed prior to the dog’s choice and attached more importance to this cue than to the hand that placed it although the presence of the hand boosted performance when it appeared together with the marker. Study 2 directly contrasted the importance of the hand and the marker and revealed that the effect of the marker diminished if it had been associated with both cups. In contrast touching both cups with the hand had no effect on performance. Study 3 investigated whether the means of marker placement (intentional or accidental) had an effect on dogs’ choices. Results showed that dogs did not differentiate intentional and accidental placing of the marker. These results suggest that dogs use the marker as a genuine communicative cue quite independently from the experimenter’s actions.     

Anterior temporal cortex and semantic memory: Reconciling findings from neuropsychology and functional imaging

Studies of semantic impairment arising from brain disease suggest that the anterior temporal lobes are critical for semantic abilities in humans; yet activation of these regions is rarely reported in functional imaging studies of healthy controls performing semantic tasks. Here, we combined neuropsychological and PE T functional imaging data to show that when healthy subjects identify concepts at a specific level, the regions activated correspond to the site of maximal atrophy in patients with relatively pure semantic impairment. The stimuli were color photographs of common animals or vehicles, and the task was category verification at specific (e.g., robin), intermediate (e.g., bird), or general (e.g., animal) levels. Specific, relative to general, categorization activated the antero-lateral temporal cortices bilaterally, despite matching of these experimental conditions for difficulty. Critically, in patients with atrophy in precisely these areas, the most pronounced deficit was in the retrieval of specific semantic information.     

Intact emotion-induced recognition bias in neuropsychological patients with executive control deficits

In recognition memory tasks, emotionally negative words are judged more often as "old" relative to emotionally neutral words, suggesting a shift in response bias. We wondered whether this bias shift was due to the flexible regulation of executive control during memory retrieval. To address this question, we investigated individuals with high variability in executive control functions. As expected, we observed that emotional word meaning did indeed have a strong influence on the bias toward responding "old," independent of recognition accuracy and overall response bias. However, these effects were uncorrelated with executive control, as measured by the Trail Making Test, and were fully intact, even in a sample of hospitalized neurological patients with severe executive dysfunctions, some of whom had marked damage in fronto-thalamo-striatal networks. Having concluded that the emotion-induced bias must develop on different grounds, we went on to discuss alternative explanations.     

A sex difference in visual influence on heard speech

Reports of sex differences in language processing are inconsistent and are thought to vary by task type and difficulty. In two experiments, we investigated a sex difference in visual influence onheard speech (the McGurk effect). First, incongruent consonant-vowel stimuli were presented where the visual portion of the signal was brief (100 msec) or full (temporally equivalent to the auditory). Second, to determine whether men and women differed in their ability to extract visual speech information from these brief stimuli, the same stimuli were presented to new participants with an additional visual-only (lipread) condition. In both experiments, women showed a significantly greater visual influence on heard speech than did men for the brief visual stimuli. No sex differences for the full stimuli or in the ability to lipread were found. These findings indicate that the more challenging brief visual stimuli elicit sex differences in the processing of audiovisual speech.     

The effect of midazolam on conscious,controlled processing: Evidence from the process-dissociation procedure

The benzodiazepine midazolam produces a dense anterograde amnesia. Recent findings (see, e.g., Hirshman, Passannante, & Arndt, 2001) have demonstrated that midazolam produces larger impairments on explicit memory tests such as free recall and recognition memory than on implicit memory tests such as perceptual identification and free association. Such findings suggest that midazolam impairs conscious, controlled memory processes. In the present experiments, we used Jacoby's (1991, 1998) process-dissociation procedure to examine this hypothesis. Our results demonstrate that midazolam increases the production of old items on the exclusion task and reduces the production of old items on the inclusion task. Moreover, generation effects, hypothesized to arise from conscious processes, are reduced by midazolam on both tasks. Analyses using both independence and redundancy models of the process-dissociation procedure confirm the conclusion that midazolam impairs conscious memory processes.     

An evaluation of the quantity and quality of empirical research in three pastoral care and counseling journals, 1990-1999: has anything changed?

This article summarizes a review of all articles published in Pastoral Psychology, The Journal of Rleigion and Health, and The Journal of Pastoral Care between 1900 and 1999, identifying a total of 737 scholarly articles, of which 165 (22.4%) were research studies. The proportion of research studies, especially quantitative studies, increased significantly between the first and second half of the study period (p < .05). There was a significant positive correlation between compliance with three out of four criteria of internal validity. Three of five criteria of external validity were also positively related to one another. Compared to previous research using identical criteria to assess quantitative studies in the same journals in 1980-1989, the 1990-1999 sample showed improved compliance with respect to specifying the sampling method (p < .001), reporting the response rate (p < .05), and discussing the limitations of research studies (p < .001). However, the overall findings suggest that many researchers in the field do not have a sophisticated knowledge of statistical sampling, statistical analysis, or research design. Several recommendations for increasing the quality of quantitative research are offered.     

"Living with" the past: coping and patterns in families of Holocaust survivors

This exploratory study looks at how families of Holocaust survivors work through the traumatic past by considering the coping patterns adapted by family members. Life-story interviews (Rosenthal, 1993) with 57 individuals from 20 families, in which there were two to three generations, were used in order to learn about the significance they attach to the Holocaust past. The interviews were analyzed using Rosenthal's methods and Danieli's (1988) typology of post-war adaptation (victim families, fighter families, those who made it, and numb families). Results showed that in order to differentiate between the coping styles exhibited by the families, two new categories had to be added to Danieli's typology. These were entitled "life goes on" and "split families." It was concluded that survivor families exhibit heterogeneity in the ways in which they cope with the Holocaust past.