An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music

Musicologists and linguists have often suggested that the prosody of a culture's spoken language can influence the structure of its instrumental music. However, empirical data supporting this idea have been lacking. This has been partly due to the difficulty of developing and applying comparable quantitative measures to melody and rhythm in speech and music. This study uses a recently-developed measure for the study of speech rhythm to compare rhythmic patterns in English and French language and classical music. We find that English and French musical themes are significantly different in this measure of rhythm, which also differentiates the rhythm of spoken English and French. Thus, there is an empirical basis for the claim that spoken prosody leaves an imprint on the music of a culture.     

Itemmetric and scale analysis of a new computer-assisted competency assessment instrument (CADCOMP)

Male defendants (n = 99) who had been court ordered to a forensic treatment facility as incompetent to stand trial were tested using the Computer-Assisted Determination of Competency to Proceed (CADCOMP) instrument soon after admission (median days = 15). Shortly thereafter, competency was assessed by a forensic psychiatrist and by a majority decision of three mental health professionals who viewed a videotape of the forensic psychiatrist's interview. From the CADCOMP item pool, 18 scales were constructed on conceptual grounds. Internal consistency analyses revealed that most scales had reasonable item homogeneity and scale reliability. In addition, item and scale analyses, with few exceptions, followed predicted patterns of intercorrelation and association with competency as determined by both criteria. Scales and items measuring serious psychopathology, psycholegal ability, and criminal history demonstrated the strongest associations with competency. These findings suggest that additional research on CADCOMP is warranted. The instrument shows promise for use in forensic research and assessment.     

Multisystemic therapy treatment of substance abusing or dependent adolescent offenders: Costs of reducing incarceration,inpatient, and residential placement

The development of more effective and less costly family- and community-based services to serve as alternatives to out-of-home placements of children is an important priority in the reform of mental health services for children and adolescents. Within the context of a randomized trial with 118 substance abusing or dependent juvenile offenders, we examined the incremental costs of multisystemic therapy (MST) and related these costs to observed reductions in days of incarceration, hospitalization, and residential treatment at approximately 1 year postreferral. Results showed that the incremental costs of MST were nearly offset by the savings incurred as a result of reductions in days of out-of-home placement during the year. The need to validate effective treatments for youth with serious clinical problems and to link the costs of treatment     

How experts' adaptations to representative task demands account for the expertise effect in memory recall: comment on Vicente and Wang (1998)

K. A. Ericsson and W. Kintsch's (1995) theoretical framework of long-term working memory (LTWM) accounts for how experts acquire encoding and retrieval mechanisms to adapt to real-time demands of working memory during representative interactions with their natural environments. The transfer of the same LTWM mechanisms is shown to account for the expertise effect in unrepresentative "contrived" memory tests. Therefore, K. J. Vicente and J. H. Wang's (1998) critique of the generalizability of the LTWM framework is rejected. Their proposed refutation of LTWM accounts is found to be based on misrepresented facts. The process-based framework of LTWM is shown to be superior to their product theory because it can explain interactions of the expertise effect in "contrived" recall under several testing conditions differing in presentation rate, instructions, and memory procedures.     

Integrating Exposure and Response Prevention With a Mobile App to Treat Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Feasibility,Acceptability, and Preliminary Effects

Many individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) do not receive evidence-based care (specifically exposure and ritual prevention; EX/RP) due to barriers such as a lack of EX/RP-trained clinicians, geographic obstacles, and the cost and time associated with the treatment. Offering an integrated treatment model consisting of brief in-person therapy coupled with a mobile application (app) might be one way to increase access to and reduce the time burden (to clinicians and patients) of EX/RP. This pilot trial evaluated the feasibility, acceptability, and clinical effects of such a treatment program for adults with OCD. Thirty-three participants enrolled in the 8-week open trial. The integrated treatment program consisted of 3 to 5 in-person sessions followed by weekly phone calls supported by a mobile app (nOCD). Participants were evaluated by trained raters and completed self-report measures at baseline, midtreatment, posttreatment and 2-month follow-up; the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) was the primary outcome. This integrated treatment program was feasible and acceptable to participants. Of the 33 study entrants, 14 (42%) responded to treatment (Y-BOCS decrease ≥ 35% with CGI- of 1 or 2), and 8 (24%) achieved minimal symptoms (i.e., Y-BOCS ≤ 12). At 2-month follow-up (n = 20), 7/20 (35%) met criteria for treatment response, and 3/20 (15.0%) met criteria for treatment remission. Although preliminary, this model warrants further study as an efficacious and resource-efficient way to deliver EX/RP for some patients with OCD.     

Ethnic differences in endorsement of the Protestant work ethic: the role of ethnic identity and perceptions of social class

The authors examined ethnic differences in endorsement of the Protestant work ethic (PWE; M. Weber, 1905) among Black (n = 96) and White (n = 149) college students and tested whether differences in ethnic identity and perceptions of social class mediated the relationship between ethnicity and the endorsement of PWE values. Blacks were higher in levels of ethnic identity, more likely to see themselves as working or middle class, and less likely to endorse the PWE. Only perceptions of social class partially mediated the relationship between ethnicity and PWE values. The authors concluded that perception of social class is an important construct that might influence the cultural psychology of different ethnic groups. The authors recommended further research involving PWE and other cultural variables.     

Making psycholinguistics musical: Self-paced reading time evidence for shared processing of linguistic and musical syntax

Linguistic processing, especially syntactic processing, is often considered a hallmark of human cognition; thus, the domain specificity or domain generality of syntactic processing has attracted considerable debate. The present experiments address this issue by simultaneously manipulating syntactic processing demands in language and music. Participants performed self-paced reading of garden path sentences, in which structurally unexpected words cause temporary syntactic processing difficulty. A musical chord accompanied each sentence segment, with the resulting sequence forming a coherent chord progression. When structurally unexpected words were paired with harmonically unexpected chords, participants showed substantially enhanced garden path effects. No such interaction was observed when the critical words violated semantic expectancy or when the critical chords violated timbral expectancy. These results support a prediction of the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (Patel, 2003), which suggests that music and language draw on a common pool of limited processing resources for integrating incoming elements into syntactic structures. Notations of the stimuli from this study may be downloaded from pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Attitudes Toward Abortion in a Sample of South African Female University Students

This study examines the structure of abortion attitudes in a sample of 124 full-time female university residence students, the relationship between self-rated religiosity and abortion attitudes, as well as their knowledge of the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act passed in South Africa in 1996. The data provide evidence for the existence of an underlying structure of abortion attitudes, which is complex and multifaceted. Almost 76% of the students described themselves as religious to very religious , and a pronounced trend toward pro-life is evident.