Socioeconomic status, resources, psychological experiences, and emotional responses: a test of the reserve capacity model

The current study used ecological momentary assessment to test several tenets of the reserve capacity model (L.C. Gallo & K. A. Matthews, 2003). Women (N = 108) with varying socioeconomic status (SES) monitored positive and negative psychosocial experiences and emotions across 2 days. Measures of intrapsychic and social resources were aggregated to represent the reserve capacity available to manage stress. Lower SES was associated with less perceived control and positive affect and more social strain. Control and strain contributed to the association between SES and positive affect. Lower SES elicited greater positive but not negative emotional reactivity to psychosocial experiences. Women with low SES had fewer resources relative to those with higher SES, and resources contributed to the association between SES and daily experiences.     

Constraints and triggers: situational mechanics of gender in negotiation

The authors propose 2 categories of situational moderators of gender in negotiation: situational ambiguity and gender triggers. Reducing the degree of situational ambiguity constrains the influence of gender on negotiation. Gender triggers prompt divergent behavioral responses as a function of gender. Field and lab studies (1 and 2) demonstrated that decreased ambiguity in the economic structure of a negotiation (structural ambiguity) reduces gender effects on negotiation performance. Study 3 showed that representation role (negotiating for self or other) functions as a gender trigger by producing a greater effect on female than male negotiation performance. Study 4 showed that decreased structural ambiguity constrains gender effects of representation role, suggesting that situational ambiguity and gender triggers work in interaction to moderate gender effects on negotiation performance.     

MORPHINE TOLERANCE AS A FUNCTION OF RATIO SCHEDULE: RESPONSE REQUIREMENT OR UNIT PRICE?

Key pecking by 3 pigeons was maintained by a multiple fixed-ratio 10, fixed-ratio 30, fixed-ratio 90 schedule of food presentation. Components differed with respect to amount of reinforcement, such that the unit price was 10 responses per 1-s access to food. Acute administration of morphine, l-methadone, and cocaine dose-dependently decreased overall response rates in each of the components. When a rate decreasing dose of morphine was administered daily, tolerance, as measured by an increase in the dose that reduced response rates to 50% of control (i.e., the ED50 value), developed in each of the components; however, the degree of tolerance was smallest in the fixed-ratio 90 component (i.e., the ED50 value increased the least). When the l-methadone dose-effect curve was redetermined during the chronic morphine phase, the degree of cross-tolerance conferred to l-methadone was similar across components, suggesting that behavioral variables may not influence the degree of cross-tolerance between opioids. During the chronic phase, the cocaine dose-effect curve shifted to the right for 2 pigeons and to the left for 1 pigeon, which is consistent with predictions based on the lack of pharmacological similarity between morphine and cocaine. When the morphine, l-methadone, and cocaine dose-effect curves were redetermined after chronic morphine administration ended, the morphine and l-methadone ED50s replicated those obtained prior to chronic morphine administration. The morphine data suggest that the fixed-ratio value (i.e., the absolute output) determines the degree of tolerance and not the unit price.     

Accuracy and speed of orthographic processing in persons with developmental dyslexia

A group of 39 persons (20 male and 19 female, 11.0 to 32.5 yr.) with developmental dyslexia and 42 controls (21 male and 21 female, 11.2 to 32.3 years) were compared on computerized tests of sight word reading, nonword decoding, and spelling recognition. The subjects with developmental dyslexia performed significantly slower and less accurately than controls on all tasks. Further, the effect size of the group differences was larger for the older group. Within-group analyses showed a significant difference by age group on accuracy. Only the control group showed a significant age difference between groups on response time. Mean accuracy and response times for the reading-disabled subjects resembled shifted versions of the control group means. These results agree with previous reports that phonological deficits persist for reading-disabled adults and suggest a test of whether the discrepancy between reading-disabled and typically achieving readers may actually increase across age groups.     

Linguistic cues enhance the learning of perceptual cues

When language is correlated with regularities in the world, does it enhance the learning of these regularities? This question lies at the core of both notions of linguistic bootstrapping in children and the Whorfian hypothesis. Support for an affirmative answer is provided in an artificial-noun-learning task in which 2-year-old children were taught to distinguish categories of solid and nonsolid things with and without supporting correlated linguistic cues.     

Differential relationships between intergroup contact and affective and cognitive dimensions of prejudice

Research on affective dimensions of intergroup relationships suggests that positive effects of intergroup contact can generalize through establishing affective ties with outgroup members. However, research on cognitive dimensions emphasizes that it is often difficult to generalize positive contact outcomes. In this research, the authors examine whether affective and cognitive dimensions of prejudice bear different relationships to intergroup contact. Using data from a larger meta-analysis of contact effects, Study 1 demonstrates that affective indicators of prejudice typically yield stronger, inverse contact-prejudice relationships than such cognitive indicators as stereotypes. Study 2 replicates these trends in a survey study using multiple indicators of affective and cognitive dimensions of prejudice. Study 2 also shows significant, inverse relationships between contact and affective prejudice when contact is assessed either as number of outgroup friends or intergroup closeness. Together, these results suggest that affective dimensions of intergroup relationships are especially critical for understanding the nature of contact-prejudice effects.     

IQ decline following early unilateral brain injury: a longitudinal study

We examine whether children with early unilateral brain injury show an IQ decline over the course of development. Fifteen brain injured children were administered an IQ test once before age 7 and again several years later. Post-7 IQ scores were significantly lower than pre-7 IQ scores. In addition, pre-7 IQ scores were lower for children with larger lesions, but children with smaller lesions and higher pre-7 IQ scores showed a greater IQ decline over time. These findings suggest that the cognitive outcomes of children with early lesions, particularly those with relatively small lesions, change over the course of development.     

Understanding of the concept of numerically "less" by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

In 2 experiments, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) judged the ordinal relationship between novel numerosities. The dolphins were first trained to choose the exemplar with the fewer number of items when presented with just a few specific comparisons (e.g., 2 vs. 6, 1 vs. 3, and 3 vs. 7). Generalization of this rule was then tested by presenting the dolphins with all possible pairwise comparisons between 1 and 8. The dolphins chose the exemplar with the fewer number of items at levels far above chance, showing that they could recognize and represent numerosities on an ordinal scale. Their pattern of errors was consistent with the idea of an underlying analog magnitude representation.     

A Meta-Analysis of Cognitive Deficits in Adults with a Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

This review identified 1275 studies examining cognitive deficits in people with schizophrenia, published between 1990 and 2003. Data from 113 studies (4365 patients and 3429 controls) were combined in a meta-analysis carried out on the five cognitive domains of IQ, memory, language, executive function, and attention. Studies were excluded where they lacked a suitable control group or failed to present complete information. In all five cognitive domains, analysis indicated a consistent trend for patients to perform more poorly than healthy controls, with significant heterogeneity across studies. Sources of heterogeneity were analyzed and a need to ensure more appropriate composition of patient and control groups and to adopt a more refined and methodologically correct, hypothesis-driven approach was identified.     

Psychometric evaluation of the restructured clinical scales of the MMPI-2

Conceptual overlap and heterogeneity have long been noted as weaknesses of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory's clinical scales. Restructured clinical (RC) scales recently were developed to address these concerns (A. Tellegen et al., 2003). The authors evaluated the psychometric properties of the RC scales in psychology clinic clients (N=285) and military veterans (N=567). The RC scales were as internally consistent as the clinical scales and correlated strongly with their original counterparts (except for RC3/Hysteria). They also were less intercorrelated, produced conceptually clearer relations with measures of personality and psychopathology, and yielded somewhat greater incremental utility than the clinical scales. Thus, the RC scales demonstrated several psychometric strengths while utilizing 60% fewer items, but the 2 sets of scales cannot be used interchangeably. Interpretive considerations are discussed.