Scientific Integrity Principles and Best Practices: Recommendations from a Scientific Integrity Consortium

Science and Engineering Ethics - A Scientific Integrity Consortium developed a set of recommended principles and best practices that can be used broadly across scientific disciplines as a mechanism...     

Contributions of emotion understanding to narrative comprehension in children and adults

This study examined to what extent children and adults differ in how they process negative emotions during reading, and how they rate their own and protagonists’ emotional states. Results show that both children’s and adults’ processing of target sentences was facilitated when they described negative emotions. Processing of spill-over sentences was facilitated for adults but inhibited for children, suggesting children needed additional time to process protagonists’ emotional states and integrate them into coherent mental representations. Children and adults were similar in their valence and arousal ratings as they rated protagonists’ emotional states as more negative and more intense than their own emotional states. However, they differed in that children rated their own emotional states as relatively neutral, whereas adults’ ratings of their own emotional states more closely matched the negative emotional states of the protagonists. This suggests a possible difference between children and adults in the mechanism underlying emotional inferencing.     

Girls’ Stuff,boys’ stuff and mental rotation: fourth graders rotate faster with gender-congruent stimuli

Males outperform females in mental-rotation for various reasons, e.g. stimuli characteristics. This study tested the hypothesis that girls and boys solve mental-rotation tests with female- or respectively male-stereotyped objects faster and more correctly. 116 fourth-graders solved a chronometric mental-rotation test with either female- or male-stereotyped action-based objects as stimulus material and reported their solution strategies and familiarity with handling the objects in real life. Boys reacted faster than girls only in the male-stimuli condition, while gender differences were inversed in the female-stimuli condition. All children were faster with gender-congruent material, probably provoked by gender-schematic processing or stereotype lift effects. Furthermore, analytic solving strategies appeared as efficient as holistic strategies in gender-congruent conditions, while holistic strategies were more advantageous only in gender-incongruent conditions. The congruence of stimulus material and gender best predicted children’s reaction time. Practical implications are considered regarding the importance of diverse and gender-equalised material to assess mental-rotation skills.     

The Relationship Of Gender And Voice To Depression And Eating Disorders

Research often fails to document a gender difference in measures of voice. This is inconsistent with Gilligan's conceptualization of voice as a gendered construct. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate currently available measures of voice, particularly in terms of whether they appear to be assessing the same characteristics in men as in women. Eighty-seven men and 146 women, all college students, completed both the Silencing the Self Scale (STSS; Jack & Dill, 1992) and the Saying What I Think Around Others scale (SWIT; Harter and Waters, 1991). In addition, measures of depression and eating problems as well as the Personal Attributes Questionnaire were completed. Results indicated inconsistent gender differences on voice measures with some showing no differences, others showing men as having lower voice, and others showing lower voice in women. Correlations between the two voice measures for men and for women were small to moderate. As suggested by Harter, Waters, Whitesell, and Kastelic (1998), femininity was often negatively related to voice, though masculinity was more consistently, and positively, related. The link between lack of voice and psychopathology that has been suggested by various researchers was documented more clearly for women than for men. The results, then, show different patterns of relationships involving voice measures for men than for women. This raises the possibility that the measures are tapping different constructs in men and women, rendering mean comparisons questionable.     

Lack of coherence and divergent thinking: Two sides of the same coin in artistic talent?

The aim of this study was to identify some of the underlying cognitive components of artistic talent. The participants in this study were an artistically gifted group of young adults, and a group of controls with no such talent but matched on intelligence. Two components were investigated, one was a preference for local over global processing and others were measures of divergent thinking. The results supported the hypothesis that talented artists might, in contrast to others, show a distinctive cognitive style which may be linked to divergent thinking.     

Children's memory for television advertising: effects of programme–advertisement congruency

The effects of the surrounding programme environment and level of involvement upon children's memory (year 6 primary school, mean age 11.1, SD = 0.4, 48 boys and 69 girls) for television advertisements was examined by manipulating the degree of congruency between the production genre of the programme and the advertisements embedded within it. In Experiment One (n = 56) the ad‐break comprised either all cartoons (n = 4) or all non‐cartoons (n = 4). In Experiment Two (n = 61) cartoon and non‐cartoon advertisements were equally represented in each ad‐break. After viewing, participants provided evaluative ratings of the programme and completed memory tests for advertisements, using prompted recall and brand‐recognition tasks. Memory performance overall was better for cartoon advertisements than for non‐cartoon advertisements, with the latter being poorly remembered when presented in the non‐cartoon programme. In Experiment Two, the programme had no effect on overall recall of advertising, but was related to brand recognition, which was better for advertisements placed in the cartoon programme. Free recall of non‐cartoon advertisements was best when placed in the cartoon programme, while free recall only of cartoon advertisements was best when placed in the non‐cartoon programme. The measures of audience involvement (programme ratings) did not show any significant correlation with memory for advertising. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of IQ on executive function measures in children with ADHD.

The present study compared children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and controls on a selected set of clinical measures of executive function (EF). A total of 92 children (51 ADHD, 41 control), ages 6-16, completed measures chosen from a larger neuropsychological battery to illustrate diverse components of the EF construct (planning, inhibitory control, response preparation, memory search). The selected measures were moderately correlated with one another, and moderately correlated with IQ. After controlling for age, sex, presence of learning disability (LD), ADHD, and IQ test version, Full Scale IQ was significantly related to four of the five selected EF measures. A second analysis showed group differences on the EF measures at different IQ levels. After covarying for age, there was a significant multivariate effect for IQ level (average, high average, superior) and a significant multivariate interaction between group (ADHD vs. control) and IQ level. Three of the five selected EF measures showed significant univariate group effects (controls performing better than ADHD) at the average IQ level; however, there were no significant group differences between children with ADHD and controls at high average or superior IQ levels. These results suggest that clinical measures of EF may differ among children with ADHD and controls at average IQ levels, but there is poorer discriminatory power for these measures among children with above average IQ.     

Lack of coherence and divergent thinking: Two sides of the same coin in artistic talent?

The aim of this study was to identify some of the underlying cognitive components of artistic talent. The participants in this study were an artistically gifted group of young adults, and a group of controls with no such talent but matched on intelligence. Two components were investigated, one was a preference for local over global processing and others were measures of divergent thinking. The results supported the hypothesis that talented artists might, in contrast to others, show a distinctive cognitive style which may be linked to divergent thinking.     

Anxiety Symptoms as Predictors of Nursing Home Placement in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

Anxiety symptoms are fairly common among patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Such symptoms are likely to make patient care more problematic and, therefore, increase the risk of nursing home placement. Anxiety symptoms were evaluated on the basis of physician examinations, in conjunction with caregiver interviews, in 372 community-dwelling AD patients. Patients received annual follow-up for 1–12 years (M = 4.4). Patients who exhibited anxiety symptoms at baseline assessment were significantly more likely to enter nursing homes, regardless of initial cognitive status or other risks for institutionalization. There was a 15% increase in risk for each point on a 0–5 scale. This study supports the hypothesis that anxiety symptoms increase the risk of nursing home placement in patients with AD. Consequently, there is a need for better understanding of the causes of anxiety in AD and for the development of effective methods of assessment and treatment.