Defendants' age and severity of punishment for two crimes in a mock scenario: further data

95 undergraduates read a simulated crime vignette about either murder or theft in which the perpetrator was a 20-, 40-, or 60-yr.-old man, then gave recommendations about sentence and parole. Subsequently, they made a second set of recommendations for the other crime and another age. For combined sets of judgments, punishment was harsher for the murder than for the theft. For murder, the 60-yr.-old and the 20-yr.-old were both treated more leniently than the 40-yr.-old, but the difference was greater for the older than for the younger offender. Researchers should examine age in relation to judgments for different crimes with participants exposed to all experimental conditions.     

A two-stage logistic regression model for analyzing inter-rater agreement

Studies of agreement commonly occur in psychiatric research. For example, researchers are often interested in the agreement among radiologists in their review of brain scans of elderly patients with dementia or in the agreement among multiple informant reports of psychopathology in children. In this paper, we consider the agreement between two raters when rating a dichotomous outcome (e.g., presence or absence of psychopathology). In particular, we consider logistic regression models that allow agreement to depend on both rater- and subject-level covariates. Logistic regression has been proposed as a simple method for identifying covariates that are predictive of agreement (Coughlin et al., 1992). However, this approach is problematic since it does not take account of agreement due to chance alone. As a result, a spurious association between the probability (or odds) of agreement and a covariate could arise due entirely to chance agreement. That is, if the prevalence of the dichotomous outcome varies among subgroups of the population, then covariates that identify the subgroups may appear to be predictive of agreement. In this paper we propose a modification to the standard logistic regression model in order to take proper account of chance agreement. An attractive feature of the proposed method is that it can be easily implemented using existing statistical software for logistic regression. The proposed method is motivated by data from the Connecticut Child Study (Zahner et al., 1992) on the agreement among parent and teacher reports of psychopathology in children. In this study, parents and teachers provide dichotomous assessments of a child's psychopathology and it is of interest to examine whether agreement among the parent and teacher reports is related to the age and gender of the child and to the time elapsed between parent and teacher assessments of the child.The authors thank the Associate Editor and the referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Gwen Zahner for use of data from the Connecticut Child Study, which was conducted under contract to the Connecticut Department of Children and Youth Services. This research was supported by grants HL 69800, AHRQ 10871, HL52329, HL61769, GM 29745, MH 54693 and MH 17119 from the National Institutes of Health.     

The utility of psychological testing in assessing emotional damages in personal injury litigation

Psychological testing and assessment instruments frequently play a small but important role when psychologists assist the courts as emotional damage experts in personal injury matters. However, examiners frequently, if sometimes inadvertently, mislead the court with test interpretations that are based on clinical rather than forensic populations and that fail to appreciate the lack of robustness of clinical measures in this forensic context. Whereas published computerized interpretations repeatedly remind experts that personality test results should only be used as a method to generate hypotheses about the examinee that are to be subjected to further investigation and consideration, experts all too often inform the courts of test interpretations as if the test results were measures of clinical constructs rather than plaintiffs' self-reports of symptoms.     

Assessing the Experience of Autonomy in New Cultures and Contexts

This research demonstrates the usefulness of the technique of Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) in the construction of indices of the experience of autonomy, a central construct in Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory of motivation and personality (SDT, 2000) and a construct central to recent controversies on socialization in different cultures. We propose that SSA has two advantages in comparison to correlation tables in the assessment of the experience of autonomy. First, it allows easy identification of items that best capture the various motivations along the relative autonomy continuum postulated by SDT. Second, and more important, it can reveal data patterns that might contribute to theoretical refinement that otherwise might remain unnoticed. These advantages were demonstrated in three Israeli samples: two samples of elementary school children (n = 697 and n = 417), and one sample of high school students (n = 317). Discussion considers ways in which SSA can contribute to the development and refinement of measures and theory pertaining to the experience of autonomy in cultures and contexts not examined so far.

Sooner versus later: factors associated with temporal sequencing of suicide

There are few (if any) population-based prospective studies that provide information on factors associated with temporal sequencing of suicide. In this prospective population-based study, the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), 1986-1994, was linked to the National Death Index (NDI), 1986-1997, to assess factors that predict recent (within 12 months of interview, termed sooner) suicide versus suicide further in the future (more than 12 months after interview, termed later). Of the 653 completed suicides in the NHIS cohort, 13.4 percent completed suicide within a year of interview, and 86.6 percent did so after a year. Sooner decedents were more likely to be White, less educated, unemployed, and to use firearms than any other method compared with later decedents. Surprisingly, sooner decedents had higher levels of self-rated health at baseline. These results have substantial implications for clinicians and other professionals who interact with people at highest risk of suicide. Unfortunately, it may be unrealistic to expect that health care providers can modify the behavior of individuals at highest risk of suicide.     

Background stripes affect apparent speed of rotation

A gray line that rotated about its own center against a stationary background of vertical stripes appeared to double in perceptual speed as it rotated through the vertical position and thus momentarily aligned with the background. Four factors may contribute to this speed-up: (i) landmarks, in which the tip of the moving vertical line moves horizontally across the maximum number of stationary stripes; (ii) orientation repulsion of the moving line by the vertical stripes, which may distort the line's perceived position and hence its perceived speed; (iii) the orientation of an induced brightness pattern along the line; and (iv) the motion of the induced brightness pattern, which moves physically most rapidly along the line when the line is near vertical. To test these possibilities, an annulus display provided landmarks but no intersections, and this almost abolished the effect. A rotating-slit display provided an oriented, moving pattern that mimicked the induced brightness but had no landmarks, and this increased the effect. We conclude that the motion, but not the orientation, of the intersections [option (iv)] was responsible for the illusion. The fact that this motion along the length of the line affected the perceived speed of the line orthogonal to its own length indicates a failure on the part of the visual system to fully decouple tangential from radial motion.     

A poor metabolizer for cytochromes P450 2D6 and 2C19: a case report on antidepressant treatment

Scientific literature has never described a poor metabolizer for both the cytochrome P450 (CYP) 2D6 and the CYP 2C19. They are expected to be rare (<1% in different ethnic groups) and prone to adverse drug reactions with many antidepressants. In an ongoing pharmacogenetic study, after genotyping 1,576 subjects in three Kentucky state hospitals we have found one poor metabolizer for both CYP 2D6 and CYP 2C19, which corresponds to a prevalence of 0.06% (95% CI 0.01 to 0.36). The naturalistic antidepressant treatment of this poor metabolizer for both enzymes is described in this article. As genotyping reaches clinical practice, it will be interesting to prospectively establish whether mirtazapine is a reasonable choice as an antidepressant for these patients, as the data and this case suggest.     

Culture and Personal Epistemology: U.S. and Middle Eastern Students’ beliefs about Scientific Knowledge and Knowing

Middle Eastern (Omani) and Western (U.S.) students’ beliefs about knowledge and knowing in the sciences were compared on four dimensions of personal epistemology proposed by Hofer and Pintrich (Review of Educational Research (1997), 67, 88–140). As predicted, given their experiences with comparatively traditional political and religious institutions, Omani more so than U.S. college students were more likely to accept scientific authorities as the basis of scientific truth. Furthermore, Omani men were more accepting of authorities than were Omani women, but there was no gender difference among U.S. students. Omani more than U.S. students also believed that knowledge in the sciences was simpler and more certain, which is consistent with comparisons between U.S. and Asian students (e.g., Qian & Pan, 2002, A comparision of epistemological beliefs and learning from science text between American and Chinese high school students. In B. K. Hofer & P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Personal epistomology: The psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing (pp. 365–385), Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum). Students in the two countries did not differ, however, in whether their beliefs were based on personal opinions versus systematic evidence. Suggestions for further research included directly assessing experiences with, and attitudes toward, authorities in academic and other areas of students’ lives.