Assessing Hypochondriasis: Findings on the Survey of Health Concerns

We describe a brief self-report measure for assessing hypochondriacal fears in adults. Called the Survey of Health Concerns (SHC), the measure was developed using DSM IV criteria for diagnosing hypochondriacal disorder as a guide. The measure was standardized on a sample of 188 college students. It was shown to have good internal and temporal reliability over a 2-week period. Moreover, scores on the SHC correlated significantly with worry proneness as measured by the Penn State Worry Questionnaire, and with the Hs scale of the MMPI-2, which together support the convergent validity of the measure. While men and women scored the same, participants who were being treated for a medical condition scored higher than those who were not being treated. Men who were under a doctor's care scored especially high, although this was based on a small sample of men and the effect could be spurious. A principal component factor analysis revealed two primary factors: one that described participants who felt poorly, made frequent trips to the doctor, and were fearful of illness and dying, and another that described participants who were particularly fearful of infectious diseases and took active steps to avoid becoming sick. Relatively little is known about hypochondriacal disorder. One reason for the dearth of knowledge in this area is that there has been no practical and reliable way to assess hypochondriacal fears, or more generally speaking, people's tendency to worry about their health. The SHC may help to fill this void. Results are admittedly preliminary and further study in medical settings is needed.     

THE IMPACT OF AUDITION ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL ATTENTION

Interactions between audition and vision were investigated in two experiments In the first experiment, school-age hearing children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and deaf children without implants participated in a task in which they were to respond to some visual signals and not others This task did not involve sound at all Deaf children without implants performed much more poorly than hearing children Deaf children with cochlear implants performed considerably better than deaf children without implants The second experiment employed a longitudinal design and showed that the rate of development in visual selective attention was faster for deaf children with cochlear implants than deaf children without implants Moreover, the gams were rapid–occurring within 2 years post-implant surgery The results suggest that a history of experience with sounds matters in the development of visual attention The results are discussed in terms of multimodal developmental processes     

Information dissemination in early childhood education

Trends and issues in the dissemination of knowledge are discussed in terms of current trends. The general trends include the rapid rate at which new journals and documents are produced and increasing specialization in the field. Among the issues discussed are the optimum information hypothesis, optimum conceptual size of information, vividness and propitiousness of the information, and orientations to knowledge of subcultures within a professional field. The field of early childhood education is used as the example of each trend and issue. Lilian G. Katz is Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) where she is also Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education. She is currently President of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Professor Katz is author of more than one hundred articles, chapters, and books about early childhood, teacher education, and parenting. Her most recent book isEngaging Children’s Minds: The Project Approach (with Sylvia Chard).     

Effects of a persuasive communication on beliefs, attitudes, and career choice

Fishbein's Theory of Reasoned Action was used to formulate a persuasive communication in an attempt to influence unclassified American college students' beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors regarding signing up for a career as a registered nurse. A two-stage cluster sample was used to assign 90 male and female students to either an experimental or control group. After persuasive communication exposure, the experimental group showed a significantly more positive change in beliefs, attitudes, and intentions than did the control group exposed to a neutral message. Sign-up rate was also statistically significant for the experimental group. With the Fishbein model to predict sign-up behavior, no other scores were found to add to the prediction once behavioral intention was entered into the model. Change in behavioral intention explained 49% of the variation in behavior. Normative belief scores did not approach statistical significance.     

Followup of psychoanalysis five to ten years after termination: II. Development of the self-analytic function

Thirteen of seventeen patients in followup interviews five to ten years after the termination of analysis reported the development or refinement of a self-analytic capacity. According to the accounts of these patients, there did not appear to be a direct relation between the attainment of a self-analytic function and the extent of resolution of the transference neurosis or the maintenance of therapeutic gains after treatment.     

Cocaine and food as reinforcers: effects of reinforcer magnitude and response requirement under second-order fixed-ratio and progressive-ratio schedules.

Reinforcer magnitude and fixed-ratio requirement were varied under two second-order schedules. Under one, the first sequence of a fixed number of responses completed after the lapse of a 10-min fixed interval produced reinforcement. Under the second, a second-order progressive-ratio schedule, the fixed number of responses increased after each reinforcement. Either cocaine (0 to 300 micrograms/kg/inj) or food (0 to 5,700 mg/delivery) reinforcers were delivered. Under some conditions, a 2-s illumination of stimulus lights occurred on completion of each ratio sequence. Under the second-order schedule, as cocaine dose or amount of food increased, rates of responding increased; at the highest values, rates of responding decreased. Increases in the ratio requirement from 10 to 170 responses minimally decreased overall response rates. Under the second-order progressive-ratio schedule, increases in dose of cocaine or amount of food increased rates of responding; at the highest amounts of food, rates of responding decreased but response rates at the highest dose of cocaine remained relatively high. The highest ratio requirement that was completed (breaking point) depended on the dose of cocaine but was less dependent on the amount of food. Removing brief-stimulus presentations had a greater effect on completion of ratio requirements with cocaine compared to food.     

The processing of inflected words

Summary Is an inflected word identified by first decomposing it into stem plus suffix or, instead, is it recognized as a whole? Several lexical decision experiments studied the recognition of inflected words in English (a language with few inflections) and Serbo-Croatian (a heavily inflected language). If recognition depended on decomposition, preceding the inflection with a brief exposure of the stem (<100 ms) should have primed the lexical entry for the stem and, therefore, facilitated recognition of the whole inflected word that followed. It did not. It was also found that the speed of recognizing an inflected word was more strongly associated with the frequency of the whole inflected form than with the frequency of its stem. The results suggested that in word recognition, lexical contact is first made with the whole word form. Nevertheless, morphological decomposition may still occur in subsequent processing.     

多媒体学习的图文整合:空间邻近效应的元分析

多媒体学习中的空间邻近效应认为,当书页或屏幕上的对应的图像和文本邻近呈现时,要比图文远离呈现更加有利于学习者的学习。本元分析针对Ginns（2006）的不足,增加了近10年最新的研究,以保持测验、迁移测验和主观认知负荷作为结果变量,考察多媒体学习中空间邻近效应的稳定性,以及学习材料特征、学习及测验环境和学习者教育水平等的调节作用。经文献搜索与筛选,有53项研究符合元分析要求,在保持测验、迁移测验、主观认知负荷上分别生成了45个（2000人）、43个（1935人）、11个（645人）独立效应量。主效应检验发现：空间邻近组在保持测验（d_保持=0.48）和迁移测验（d_迁移=0.39）成绩上均显著高于空间远离组,在主观认知负荷上显著低于空间远离组（d_认知负荷=-0.24）。调节效应检验发现：在高交互性材料（d_高交互=0.42）、系统步调（d_系统步调=0.52）、短时学习（d_短时=0.55）等条件下,空间邻近效应对学习的深层理解（迁移测验）能发挥更大的作用;对中小学生学习者（d_中小学=0.71）,空间邻近效应促进学习识记（保持测验）的效果更好;相对于电子环境,纸质学习环境下（d_保持=0.66,d_迁移=0.52）的空间邻近效应对保持和迁移测验的促进都更加显著;在主观认知负荷上,学习材料特征、学习及测验环境以及学习者教育水平对空间邻近效应均不存在调节作用。     

青少年核心信念挑战对创伤后成长的影响：反刍与社会支持的作用

采用核心信念问卷、反刍问卷、社会支持问卷和创伤后成长问卷, 以汶川地震4年半后的354名中学生为被试, 考察其核心信念挑战、侵入性反刍、主动反刍、社会支持与创伤后成长之间的关系。结果发现, 地震4年半后青少年创伤后成长的整体水平较高, 其中女生高于男生, 初二学生相对低于高年级学生。结构方程模型的结果显示, 侵入性反刍和主动反刍在核心信念挑战与创伤后成长之间起部分中介作用, 核心信念挑战可以直接正向预测创伤后成长, 也可以通过侵入性反刍对创伤后成长起负向预测作用、通过主动反刍对创伤后成长起正向预测作用、通过侵入性反刍经主动反刍正向预测创伤后成长; 社会支持在侵入性反刍影响创伤后成长的直接路径上不起调节作用, 但在侵入性反刍经主动反刍对创伤后成长的间接路径上起调节作用, 具体表现为侵入性反刍对主动反刍的正向预测作用随着社会支持的增加而降低。     

Religiosity, Personality, and Happiness: A Study among Israeli Male Undergraduates

A sample of 203 male Hebrew speaking undergraduate students completed the Hebrew translation of the Oxford Happiness Inventory together with the Katz–Francis Scale of Attitude toward Judaism and the short form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. The data demonstrate that Eysenck's dimensional model of personality provides significant prediction of individual differences in both attitude toward Judaism and happiness. After taking personality into account there is a small but statistically significant positive correlation between religiosity and happiness.