What mothers don't know and doctors don't say: Detecting early developmental delays

The present study examined the detection of early developmental delays of high‐risk infants by first‐time mothers in a community sample of families (N = 451). About half of the mothers were adolescents at time of childbirth, and two thirds reported household incomes below $20,000 annually. Children were assessed at 12 and 24 months of age on standardized measures of cognitive, language, adaptive, and socioemotional development. According to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (PL101‐476) guidelines, about 1 in 4 children was eligible for intervention services at 12 months, and about 1 in 3 children was eligible at 24 months. Despite receiving regular medical services, mothers reported that very few eligible children (2% at 12 months and 9% at 24 months) were identified by medical professionals as having any problems that could interfere with development. Much like medical professionals, few mothers were appropriately worried about development, and the likelihood of expressing concerns was related to mothers' knowledge about infant development. These findings highlight the need for medical providers to frequently screen high‐risk children and for parents to become more knowledgeable about infant development.     

Increasing task difficulty enhances effects of intersensory redundancy: testing a new prediction of the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis

Prior research has demonstrated intersensory facilitation for perception of amodal properties of events such as tempo and rhythm in early development, supporting predictions of the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis (IRH). Specifically, infants discriminate amodal properties in bimodal, redundant stimulation but not in unimodal, nonredundant stimulation in early development, whereas later in development infants can detect amodal properties in both redundant and nonredundant stimulation. The present study tested a new prediction of the IRH: that effects of intersensory redundancy on attention and perceptual processing are most apparent in tasks of high difficulty relative to the skills of the perceiver. We assessed whether by increasing task difficulty, older infants would revert to patterns of intersensory facilitation shown by younger infants. Results confirmed our prediction and demonstrated that in difficult tempo discrimination tasks, 5‐month‐olds perform like 3‐month‐olds, showing intersensory facilitation for tempo discrimination. In contrast, in tasks of low and moderate difficulty, 5‐month‐olds discriminate tempo changes in both redundant audiovisual and nonredundant unimodal visual stimulation. These findings indicate that intersensory facilitation is most apparent for tasks of relatively high difficulty and may therefore persist across the lifespan.     

The Infectious Diseases Society of America Lyme guidelines: a cautionary tale about the development of clinical practice guidelines

Flawed clinical practice guidelines may compromise patient care. Commercial conflicts of interest on panels that write treatment guidelines are particularly problematic, because panelists may have conflicting agendas that influence guideline recommendations. Historically, there has been no legal remedy for conflicts of interest on guidelines panels. However, in May 2008, the Attorney General of Connecticut concluded a ground-breaking antitrust investigation into the development of Lyme disease treatment guidelines by one of the largest medical societies in the United States, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). Although the investigation found significant flaws in the IDSA guidelines development process, the subsequent review of the guidelines mandated by the settlement was compromised by a lack of impartiality at various stages of the IDSA review process. This article will examine the interplay between the recent calls for guidelines reform, the ethical canons of medicine, and due process considerations under antitrust laws as they apply to the formulation of the IDSA Lyme disease treatment guidelines. The article will also discuss pitfalls in the implementation of the IDSA antitrust settlement that should be avoided in the future.     

Judging relationships between events: how do we do it?

A decade ago, Allan (1993) concluded that associative models provided the best account of data generated in tasks that require human observers to judge the relationship between binary events. In the intervening years, new data have been reported that provide evidence for higher-order processes. Some have argued that these new data pose a serious threat to the viability of the associative account. The purpose of the present paper is to review this evidence and to assess the severity of this threat.     

How We Define Success: A Qualitative Study of What Matters Most to Women and Men

In this article we explore how women and men define success and how their definition of success affects their career progress. Qualitative analysis of data from 40 interviews with successful women and men suggest that gender differences do exist. Women highlight the importance of balance and relationships. Men focus more on material success. Similar numbers of women and men thought that their definitions of success had limited their career progress, but the tradeoffs they reported making were distinctly different. Our results suggest that gender differences in the meaning of success exist even when occupational attainments are similar.     

The Self‐Administered Witness Interview Tool (SAW‐IT): Enhancing witness recall of workplace incidents

Given the often crucial role of witness evidence in occupational health and safety investigation, statements should be obtained as soon as possible after an incident using best practice methods. The present research systematically tested the efficacy of a novel Self‐Administered Witness Interview Tool (SAW‐IT), an adapted version of the Self‐Administered Interview designed to elicit comprehensive information from witnesses to industrial events. The present study also examined the effect of schematic processing on witness recall. Results indicate that the SAW‐IT elicited significantly more correct details, as well as more precise information than a traditional incident report form. Contextual information about a worker's safety history biased the reports of participant witnesses, confirming that witnesses should be shielded from extraneous post‐event information prior to reporting. Importantly, these results demonstrate that the SAW‐IT can enhance the quality of witness reports.     

Reengagement With Education: A Multidisciplinary Home-School-Clinic Approach Developed in Australia for School-Refusing Youth

School refusal (SR) can result in decreased academic achievement, impaired social connections, and family stress. Current interventions for SR include behavioral and cognitive-behavioral treatments that are not always effective. Incorporating multidisciplinary work that includes therapeutic and educational interventions may enhance outcomes for youth displaying SR. The In2School program fosters a working partnership between mental health clinicians and teachers. It was designed to meet the needs of young people missing more than 50% of school in the previous 6 weeks due to mental health disorders, including anxiety or depression. This paper reports on an action research study in which the In2School program was piloted. Over a 14-week period, therapeutic and educational interventions were integrated into the learning environment via a transitional classroom to support youths’ return to school. Outcomes of this program are reported for the first cohort of 7 youth. Of these youth, 6 returned to mainstream schooling with attendance levels being maintained for 6 months after completing the intervention. Progress was observed in mental health recovery, quality of life reports, increased social interactions with peers, and positive experiences at school. The preliminary results presented in this paper suggest that a multidisciplinary, home-school-clinic intervention holds promise for helping school-refusing youth to return to school.     

An experimental examination of the effects of alcohol consumption and exposure to misleading postevent information on remembering a hypothetical rape scenario

We experimentally examined the effects of alcohol consumption and exposure to misleading postevent information on memory for a hypothetical interactive rape scenario. We used a 2 beverage (alcohol vs. tonic water) × 2 expectancy (told alcohol vs. told tonic) factorial design. Participants (N = 80) were randomly assigned to conditions. They consumed alcohol (mean blood alcohol content = 0.06%) or tonic water before engaging in the scenario. Alcohol expectancy was controlled by telling participants they were consuming alcohol or tonic water alone, irrespective of the actual beverage they were consuming. Approximately a week later, participants were exposed to a misleading postevent narrative and then recalled the scenario and took a recognition test. Participants who were told that they had consumed alcohol rather than tonic reported fewer correct details, but they were no more likely to report incorrect or misleading information. The confidence–accuracy relationship for control and misled items was similar across groups, and there was some evidence that metacognitive discrimination was better for participants who were told that they had consumed alcohol compared with those told they had tonic water. Implications for interviewing rape victims are discussed.     

The processing of English regular inflections: Phonological cues to morphological structure

Previous studies suggest that different neural and functional mechanisms are involved in the analysis of irregular (caught) and regular (filled) past tense forms in English. In particular, the comprehension and production of regular forms is argued to require processes of morpho-phonological assembly and disassembly, analysing these forms into a stem plus an inflectional affix (e.g., {fill}+{-ed}), as opposed to irregular forms, which do not have an overt stem+affix structure and must be analysed as full forms [Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1997). Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature, 387, 592-594; Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1998). Rules, representations, and the English past tense. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2, 428-435]. On this account, any incoming string that shows the critical diagnostic properties of an inflected form - a final coronal consonant (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/) that agrees in voicing with the preceding segment as in filled, mild, or nilled - will automatically trigger an attempt at segmentation. We report an auditory speeded judgment experiment which explored the contribution of these critical morpho-phonological properties (labelled as the English inflectional rhyme pattern) to the processing of English regular inflections. The results show that any stimulus that can be interpreted as ending in a regular inflection, whether it is a real inflection (filled-fill), a pseudo-inflection (mild-mile) or a phonologically matched nonword (nilled-nill), is responded to more slowly than an unambiguously monomorphemic stimulus pair (e.g., belt-bell). This morpho-phonological effect was independent of phonological effects of voicing and syllabicity. The findings are interpreted as evidence for a basic morpho-phonological parsing process that applies to all items with the criterial phonological properties.