Differences in school behavior and achievement between children from intact, reconstituted, and single-parent families.

Differences in school behavior and achievement between students from intact, reconstituted, and single-parent families were analyzed. Students from intact two-parent families had fewer absences and tardies, higher grade point averages, and fewer negative and more positive teacher behavioral ratings than did those from reconstituted and single-parent families.     

Neutrality, interpretation, and therapeutic intent.

Neutrality is a central concept within the theory of psychoanalytic technique. We spell out the major controversies in which the concept has become embroiled, and provide a definition that we believe coincides with actual psychoanalytic practice. We discuss its merits and weaknesses, noting also the negative consequences of relying on older definitions. We relate neutrality to the interpretive process, indicating ways interpretation protects neutrality and is made more effective by it. We discuss the complex and controversial relation between neutrality and the analyst's therapeutic intent.     

The association between teacher attitudes, behavioral intentions, and smoking and the prevalence of smoking among seventh-grade students.

Seventh-grade students and teachers from twenty-three middle and junior high schools were surveyed to determine the association between teacher attitudes, behavioral intentions, and smoking behavior and the prevalence of student smoking. Teacher attitudes toward smoking policies were found to be strongly related to the current smoking behavior of the teacher but not consistently related to student smoking. In addition, teacher likelihood of intervening showed a modest association with teacher smoking status, with current smokers generally indicating being the least likely to intervene for student possession or use of cigarettes. Teacher intentions to intervene were strongly associated with the prevalence of smoking among boys but not girls.     

Sources of stress and coping responses of high school students.

A series of focus group interviews was used to identify major sources of stress and coping responses of Grade 10 students. Relationships with parents and family, work, and lack of money were found to be important sources of stress. Major coping responses included substance use and diversionary activities. Differences between academic streams (tracks) in sources of stress and coping responses were examined.     

Malevolent object representations in borderline personality disorder and major depression.

To study malevolent representations, earliest memories were reliably coded on scales of affect tone. Ss were diagnosed with borderline personality disorder: 31 without and 30 with concurrent major depression. Nonborderline comparison subjects had either major depressive disorder (n = 26) or no psychiatric diagnosis (n = 30). Borderline subjects were discriminated from comparison subjects by their more malevolent representations; they more frequently produced memories involving deliberate injury; and they portrayed potential helpers as less helpful. Results suggest the diagnostic significance of malevolent representations, which need to be explained by any theory of borderline personality disorder.     

Smooth-pursuit eye movement dysfunction and liability for schizophrenia: implications for genetic modeling.

Forty-one nonpsychiatric subjects, 38 probands with schizophrenia, and 99 of their relatives were studied. Oculomotor functioning was bimodally distributed for probands and relatives. Oculomotor dysfunction was not present in all families with a schizophrenic proband. In those families in which it was present, there were significant phenotypic correlations between oculomotor functioning and schizophrenia-related characteristics. The patterns of familial resemblance in the families in whom oculomotor dysfunction was present were consistent with nonadditive genetic variance contributing both to oculomotor dysfunction and to the relationship between oculomotor dysfunction and clinical symptoms. These results suggest that schizophrenia may be etiologically heterogeneous and that oculomotor dysfunction may help to identify nonadditive genetic variance for this disorder.     

Longitudinal relationships among pain, sleep problems, and depression in rheumatoid arthritis.

This research evaluated the relationship between pain and sleep problems, and the role of pain and sleep problems in depression, in a sample of 242 patients who had been diagnosed with definite or classical rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Patients completed the Pain scale of the Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales, the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, and self-reports of sleep disturbance at two data waves over a 2-year interval. Cross-sectional multiple regression analysis revealed that the sleep problems variable was independently associated with depression at Time 1. Longitudinal multiple regression analyses demonstrated that prior pain predicted subsequent adverse changes in sleep problems, whereas sleep problems did not affect pain over time, and prior pain and the interaction of high pain and high sleep problems were independently associated with depression from Time 1 to Time 2. These data suggest that pain may exacerbate sleeping difficulty in RA patients, and that both factors may contribute to depression over time.     

From front line to home front: a study of secondary traumatization.

While the long-term effects of combat trauma on veterans have been studied extensively, its impact on veterans' wives has yet to be investigated. This study examined the implications of combat-induced psychopathology--wartime combat stress reaction (CSR) and current posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)--in a sample of 205 wives of Israeli combat veterans of the 1982 Lebanon war. Results show that both CSR and PTSD were associated with increased psychiatric symptoms in the wives. In addition, current PTSD was particularly found to contribute to impaired social relations among veterans' wives in a broad range of contexts, from inner feelings of loneliness, through impaired marital and family relations, and extending to the wider social network. Implications of these findings for treatment and further research are discussed.     

Some consequences of stimulus variability on speech processing by 2-month-old infants.

The present study explores how stimulus variability in speech production influences the 2-month-old infant's perception and memory for speech sounds. Experiment 1 focuses on the consequences of talker variability for the infant's ability to detect differences between speech sounds. When tested with high-amplitude sucking (HAS) procedure, infants who listened to versions of a syllable, such as [symbol: see text], produced by 6 male and 6 female talkers, detected a change to another syllable, such as [symbol: see text], uttered by the same group of talkers. In fact, infants exposed to multiple talkers performed as well as other infants who heard utterances produced by only a single talker. Moreover, other results showed that infants discriminate the voices of the individual talkers, although discriminating one mixed group of talkers (3 males and 3 females) from another is too difficult for them. Experiment 2 explored the consequences of talker variability on infants' memory for speech sounds. The HAS procedure was modified by introducing a 2-min delay period between the familiarization and test phases of the experiment. Talker variability impeded infants' encoding of speech sounds. Infants who heard versions of the same syllable produced by 12 different talkers did not detect a change to a new syllable produced by the same talkers after the delay period. However, infants who heard the same syllable produced by a single talker were able to detect the phonetic change after the delay. Finally, although infants who heard productions from a single talker retained information about the phonetic structure of the syllable during the delay, they apparently did not retain information about the identity of the talker. Experiment 3 reduced the range of variability across talkers and investigated whether variability interferes with retention of all speech information. Although reducing the range of variability did not lead to retention of phonetic details, infants did recognize a change in the gender of the talkers' voices (from male to female or vice versa) after a 2-min delay. Two additional experiments explored the consequences of limiting the variability to a single talker. In Experiment 4, with an immediate testing procedure, infants exposed to 12 different tokens of one syllable produced by the same talker discriminated these from 12 tokens of another syllable.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)