A cross-cultural comparison of the developmental items of five ethnic groups in the southwest

A population of 3,067 Mexican-American, Pueblo Indian, Navajo Indian, Black, and Anglo elementary children were administered the Draw-A-Person for norming and comparison against the existing Koppitz scoring procedure. A significant number of items for each of the five ethnic groups changed categories with final score interpretation affected. A significant difference in percentage of items drawn by the five ethnic groups was also found, as were regional differences on certain items.     

The Narcissistic Injury and Psychopathology of Migration: The Case of a Nicaraguan Man

Cultural and ethnic issues commonly surface as important therapeutic themes among many minority patients. Identity formation, self-concept, perception, and the effects of migration on the aetiology of psychiatric symptomatology are reviewed. Trauma resulting from migration, stress, and prolonged affect-laden situations in the precipitation and onset of physical disease and illness is discussed. A clinical presentation of a 68-year-old Nicaraguan man is presented to highlight the aforementioned issues, i.e., traumatization, the development of psychopathology, and the onset of physical illness as a result of forced migration.     

Training of conversational skills with institutionalized elderly: a preliminary study

16 residents in a Residential Care Home for elderly people volunteered and were trained in a social skills program aimed at increasing conversational skills. Subjects were assigned randomly to three groups, one experimental and two control groups (placebo and waiting list). The techniques used in the experimental group were behavior rehearsal, feedback, modeling, discriminative reinforcement, verbal instructions, and homework. Relative to control groups, experimental subjects showed significant increases in conversational skills, such as receiving information, speaking-up, and giving information. They also showed a significant decrease in their scores on Zung's Self-rating Scale of Depression compared with the two control groups. They showed an increase in assertive responses and a decrease in aggressive and inhibited responses. These changes remained when follow-up was made 3 mo. later, suggesting the potential utility of this training program with elderly persons residing in old people's homes.     

Association between dyads and correct responses on the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT)

The sensitivity of the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT) to working memory deficits may be enhanced by examining "dyads" (i.e., correct responses immediately preceded by a correct response) as a complement to the traditional total correct summary score. In a sample of 397 mostly African American (79%) healthy adults, total dyad and total correct scores were highly correlated (r = .96, p < .001); however, the magnitude of this association diminished in faster stimulus presentation trials, particularly among participants with impaired working memory abilities.     

A cognitive approach to game usability and design: mental model development in novice real-time strategy gamers.

We developed a technique to observe and characterize a novice real-time-strategy (RTS) player's mental model as it shifts with experience. We then tested this technique using an off-the-shelf RTS game, EA Games Generals. Norman defined mental models as, "an internal representation of a target system that provides predictive and explanatory power to the operator." In the case of RTS games, the operator is the player and the target system is expressed by the relationships within the game. We studied five novice participants in laboratory-controlled conditions playing a RTS game. They played Command and Conquer Generals for 2 h per day over the course of 5 days. A mental model analysis was generated using player dissimilarity-ratings of the game's artificial intelligence (AI) agents analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS) statistical methods. We hypothesized that novices would begin with an impoverished model based on the visible physical characteristics of the game system. As they gained experience and insight, their mental models would shift and accommodate the functional characteristics of the AI agents. We found that all five of the novice participants began with the predicted physical-based mental model. However, while their models did qualitatively shift with experience, they did not necessarily change to the predicted functional-based model. This research presents an opportunity for the design of games that are guided by shifts in a player's mental model as opposed to the typical progression through successive performance levels.     

Forecasting one's future based on fleeting subjective experiences

When we forecast our futures, to what extent do we rely on explicit and concrete facts versus implicit and fleeting subjective experiences? Results from two studies reveal that forecasting judgments hinge on at least two fleeting experiences: the specific incidental emotions one happens to feel at the time of forming a judgment and the subjective ease-of-thought-generation. Results also reveal that imposing accountability for the accuracy of one's forecast provides no simple remedy. Incidental emotions, the ease-of-thought-generation, and accountability combine multiplicatively in a three-way interaction. Although accountability attenuates the respective effects of incidental fear and incidental anger, doing so has the undesirable effect of amplifying the ease-of-thought-generation effects that fear otherwise suppresses. In no instance does accountability completely eliminate the unintended effects of these fleeting subjective experiences. Discussion addresses implications for theories of affect and social cognition as well as for applications to risk perception.     

Inconsistent probability estimates of a hypothesis: the role of contrasting support

This paper studies consistency in the judged probability of a target hypothesis in lists of mutually exclusive nonexhaustive hypotheses. Specifically, it controls the role played by the support of displayed competing hypotheses and the relatedness between the target hypothesis and its alternatives. Three experiments are reported. In all experiments, groups of people were presented with a list of mutually exclusive nonexhaustive causes of a person's death. In the first two experiments, they were asked to judge the probability of each cause as that of the person's decease. In the third experiment, people were asked for a frequency estimation task. Target causes were presented in all lists. Several other alternative causes to the target ones differed across the lists. Findings show that the judged probability/frequency of a target cause changes as a function of the support of the displayed competing causes. Specifically, it is higher when its competing displayed causes have low rather than high support. Findings are consistent with the contrastive support hypothesis within the support theory.     

A further study of partial reinforcement in the turtle

Two matched groups of mature painted turtles, Chrysemys picta picta, were trained in a simple runway, one with partial and the other with consistent reinforcement, following which both groups were extinguished. The partially reinforced animals ran more slowly in acquisition, but showed somewhat greater resistance to extinction. The results are compared with those obtained in analogous experiments with other animals.     

‘The system is unfair’: Uncontrollable attributions for inequality predict more equitable giving in adolescents

Socioeconomic position is often determined by uncontrollable, structural factors, yet people from the United States tend to attribute wealth and poverty to individual control. However, information about behavioural correlates of such beliefs across development is relatively lacking. Thus, we examined adolescents' reasoning about the causes of inequality in a sample of 599 adolescents from a socioeconomically, ethnically, and racially diverse middle school (grades 6–8). Additionally, early adolescents were presented with two novel groups with an unexplained wealth disparity and given a task in which they could perpetuate or rectify inequality. We found that while adolescents tended to give equitably and rectify the inequality, this outcome was predicted by the type of explanation they gave for societal inequality. Furthermore, participants' socioeconomic status and sexual identity predicted their inequality explanations. These results add to our knowledge of adolescent reasoning about inequality by demonstrating a potential link between attributions for inequality and giving behaviour.     

Contingency table testing for categorical data: SAS implementation

Nonparametric and distribution-free tests of categorical data provide an evaluation of statistical significance between groups of subjects differing in their assignment to a set of categories. This paper describes an implementation in the SAS programming language of three tests to evaluate categorical data. One of these tests, the Contingency Table Test for Ordered Categories evaluates data assessed on at least an ordinal scale where the categories are in ascending or descending rank order. The remaining two tests, Fisher’s Fourfold-Table Test for Variables with Two Categories and Fisher’s Contingency Table Test for Variables with More than Two Categories, evaluate data assessed on either a nominal or an ordinal scale. The program described completes analysis of a 2°C categorical contingency table as would be obtained from the application of a multiple-level rating scale to the behavior of a treatment and a control group.