The incidence,prevalence, and severity of behavior disorders among preschool-aged children in day care

This study examined the incidence, prevalence, and severity of 14 empirically derived externalizing (unsocialized aggressive) and internalizing (socially withdrawn) behaviors among 2- through 5-year-olds attending day care. Teacher ratings were obtained for 558 children in the incidence sample and 709 children in the expanded prevalence sample. Within each age, data were cross-tabulated by sex of child and severity of behavior, and chi-square analyses were computed. Results indicated that a substantial proportion of children in the normal preschool population exhibit relatively high severities of selected externalizing and internalizing behaviors; this proportion varied with the age of the child and the behavior rated. Preschool-aged boys were consistently rated as demonstrating greater frequencies of externalizing behaviors than preschool-aged girls. The diagnostic and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Personality, Self-Disclosure and Friendship Between Chinese University Roommates

The present study examined the relations among personality perceptions, self-disclosing behavior, and friendship strength between Chinese roommates. These variables are rarely measured together and, when jointly assessed, allow for the disentanglment of personality factors from the social behavior of self-disclosure, making it possible to assess the role of self-disclosure behavior in the nexus of personality perceptions relating to friendship. One hundred and thirty-one university students rated their own and their roommate's personality, their self-disclosing behavior, and the strength of their friendship six months after being assigned to room together. It was found that self-ratings on the personality dimension of application were related both to one's friendship ratings and one's self-disclosing behavior, suggesting that personality variation is responsible for some of the well-established (Collins and Miller, 1994) links between self-disclosure and friendship strength. After controlling for self-rated application, it was found that both the respondent's and the roommate's self-disclosing behavior contributed separately to increasing the respondent's friendship ratings, as has also been found in Western research. Surprisingly, respondent self-disclosure was unrelated to how respondents perceived their roommates. However, the perceived roommate qualities of helpfulness and intellect were associated with the respondent's friendship ratings, suggesting that other, unmeasured social behaviors are being exchanged between roommates to enhance their friendship. Future research should examine these other behavioral mediators of friendship, so that we can develop a behavioral topology for this important social relationship and link these behaviors to dimensions of interpersonal perception.     

Locus of control and the age difference in free recall from episodic memory.

The authors investigated the relation of locus of control (LOC) to age differences in free-recall memory performance. Older and younger participants completed P. C. Duttweiler's (1984) Internal Control Index (ICI) and subsequently performed free-recall memory tasks. Compared with the younger participants, the older participants exhibited poorer recall with more intrusions and uncorrected repetition errors as well as reduced categorical clustering. For the older participants with less internal LOC, recall proportion and item-pair associative recall clustering were lower than for the older participants with more internal LOC. By contrast, the younger participants did not exhibit any LOC effects in their recall performance. The results suggest that a differential memory organization deficit may underlie the age differences in free recall among individuals varying in LOC when they are performing an intentional learning task. This deficit is discussed in terms of a reduced-inhibition account of cognitive aging.     

Assertive community treatment: Correcting some misconceptions

Conclusions Except for Mowbray, the commentators approach the issue of mental health services quite differently than we do, a fact which may have contributed to some of their misconceptions. Although not stressed in our original report, our view of mental health services is eclectic and pragmatic, encompassing a wide range of psychosocial approaches. We agree with Salem that a range of options needs to be developed and maintained. The motivation for the development of both the ACT and DIC programs was to address the needs of a population neglected by existing mental health services. By contrast, the commentators' agendas converged on the promotion of nonprofessional forms of help-giving. Like the commentators, we have long advocated for consumer choice, self-help groups, and the use of natural supports. Where we part company with them is what we hypothesize would be a minimally sufficient response to over 2 million persons with SMI in the United States. For us, it is not enough to assert that self-help groups might be a partial answer. For us, the self-selection into self-help groups and drop-in centers (which all of the commentators readily acknowledge) leaves open some troubling questions from apolicy standpoint about what happens to those who do not self-select into such groups, especially because we believe that those who select themselves out are likely to include some of the most vulnerable segments of the SMI population. Editor's Note. This paper is an invited reply to several commentaries on an earlier paper by the authors.Preparation of this report was supported in part by Research Scientist Development Award MH 00842-01 from the National Institute of Mental Health to the first author. Our thanks to Debra Pavick for her help in preparing the drop-in center statistics cited in the report.     

Subjective phrase structure: An empirical investigation

The present study represents an attempt to investigate the basis of subjective groupings of words in sentences, employing Edwin Martin's subjective phrase structure technique. Results indicate that subjects base their judgments not only on grammatical structure but also on constituent length and on stress and intonation patterns.A shorter version of this paper was presented to the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association at McGill University, Montreal, May 1972.     

Rhythmic heart rate variability (sinus arrhythmia) related to stages of sleep

Evidence that the excursion of rhythmic heart rate variability (sinus arrhythmia) may be manipulated by altering the subject’s state of concentration, prompted a study of effects associated with different stages of sleep. There were 9 healthy subjects, ages 16–69, and one 55-year-old subject (C.P.) with a myocardial infarction history. Awake and during sleep the excursion of heart rate variability was greatest among the younger subjects, decreasing progressively with age. C.P. displayed rhythmic heart rate variability only when asleep. In light sleep (Stages 1 and 2) all subjects, with the exception of the 69-year-old, whose rate remained almost fixed throughout the night, displayed rhythmic heart rate variability, roughly synchronous with respiration. Neither the elderly subjeot nor C.P. entered into deep sleep (Stages 3 and 4). Among the other subjects, deep sleep was marked by a precise correlation between the frequency of respiration and heart rate variability. In REM sleep, however, in all subjects, there was often a total dissociation between respiration and rhythmic heart rate variability. There were periods of no heart rate variability with continuing regular respiration and of rhythmic heart rate variability with spontaneous breath holding. In the presence of heart rate variability during REM, C.P. displayed frequent ectopic beats, but ectopic beats were nearly absent in REM periods characterized by a steady, unvarying heart rate. The range of heart rate variability at rest and during sleep (sinus arrhythmia) reflects the manner in which autonomic activity is brought to bear in regulating the heart beat. The study of the behavior of sinus arrhythmia may offer a way to anticipate the occurrence of dangerous cardiac dysarrhythmias and sudden death, especially during sleep.     

Titration of schedule parameters by pigeons

Pigeons were tested in a computer-controlled two-key chamber. A standard (nonchanging) schedule of reinforcement was in force on one key, and an adjusting schedule on the other. The schedules were available concurrently after each reinforcement, but after the first peck on either key (the choice peck), the schedule on the other key was made inoperative. The parameter of the adjusting schedule was decreased when the standard schedule was chosen and increased when the adjusting schedule was chosen. The standard schedule was changed only between sessions. Fixed intervals and fixed ratios were used as standard schedules, and intervals and ratios were used as adjusting schedules. When standard and adjusting schedules were of the same type, median parameters on the adjusting key equalled those of the standard schedules, at four values of each standard schedule. For four of five birds, and for the group median, similar curves could be plotted through the indifference points obtained from a standard ratio with an adjusting interval, and from a standard interval with an adjusting ratio. These points showed consistent individual differences, but they could be predicted by assuming that the median time from the choice peck to reinforcement should be the same on both keys. This is equivalent to treating the schedule as a concurrent chain and assuming that Herrnstein's quantitative law of effect applies.     

Discrimination of polymorphous stimulus sets by pigeons

Pigeons were trained to perform a visual discrimination between stimulus sets in which the presence of any two of three positive features made a stimulus positive, while any two of three negative features made it negative (there were thus three different positive and three different negative stimuli). After training, the birds were exposed to test stimuli that contained either all three positive or all three negative features. In Experiment I three pigeons were successfully trained by a successive method, and subsequently responded to the test stimuli as though they were positive or negative respectively. In Experiment II four pigeons were trained by a simultaneous method. Three learned the discrimination and generalized appropriately to the test stimuli, but they showed no preference between positive test and positive training stimuli, nor any consistent difference in speed of response to them; and similar results were found for negative stimuli. It is argued from this that the pigeons learned to respond to the stimuli as patterns (configurations of features) rather than to the constituent features, but that they generalized to the test stimuli by using the common features. The experiments show that pigeons could in principle learn to discriminate natural polymorphous classes (such as “pigeon” or “person”) without using any single feature, but neither the present experiments nor earlier ones demonstrating discriminations of such natural classes establish that pigeons make use of polymorphous concepts in the same way as people.     

Reexamining personal, social, and cultural influences on compliance behavior in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong

Researchers have extended the literature on strategies of gaining compliance with a request to incorporate cultural variations into the analytic framework. In the present investigation, the authors sought to go beyond previous studies of the factors increasing compliance rates by reexamining how researchers conceptualize and measure personal, social, and cultural influences on compliance behavior in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong. The authors found that different levels of compliance were affected by culture, principles of influence, and the individual's personal orientation of idiocentrism/allocentrism (I/A). In the present study, the authors extended previous cross-cultural work by decomposing the I/A into 2 separate individual difference variables: normative perceptions and evaluative perceptions. The interaction of person and situation on compliance showed the power of situational demands and the strength of different aspects of personal collectivism. Different patterns of compliance at the culture level revealed the importance of culture in shaping this behavioral tendency. Thus, the authors' integration of personal, social, and cultural influences provided an interactive model to help researchers explain compliance more comprehensively.