Some effects of positive life events on community mental health

Measures of positive and negative events were derived from a life-event inventory to test the predictions of an equilibrium model and a positive mental health model of psychological well-being. These measures were related to indicators of individual and community well-being with data obtained through a household survey of 454 residents. Residents who reported more negative events also reported more psychological distress and less positive adjustment. Positive events were associated with reports of positive adjustment. An analysis of census tract scores on life events revealed that the relative absence of positive events in census tracts was associated with higher service utilization rates to the community mental health center serving those tracts. The number of negative events was unrelated to service rates for census tracts but was related to several demographic indicators of well-being.     

Short-term memory in deaf and hearing children in relation to stimulus characteristics

Experiment 1 examined short-term memory with a serial probe task in 20 younger (mean age: 6 years, 3 months) and 20 older (mean age: 8 years, 8 months) deaf children. Four sets of stimuli were used: familiar animals, unfamiliar nonsense forms, fingerspelled letters, and lower-case print. In contrast to earlier research with hearing children, strong primacy effects were found with all stimuli at both ages, with frequent gestural and/or oral labeling but little cumulative rehearsal evident. To determine whether results were uniquely tied to deafness, identical procedures were used in Experiment 2 with 20 younger (4 years, 9 months) and 20 older (5 years, 10 months) hearing children. Again, overt activity was common, with strong primacy effects on animals and nonsense forms in the older group and on animals in the younger group. Contrasts between present and earlier findings suggest the need to consider the degree to which stimulus labels are overlearned, the role of nonverbal mediators in rehearsal, and the effects of changing educational experiences.     

SHORT- AND LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF CONTINGENCY MANAGED INSTRUCTION ON LOW,MEDIUM, AND HIGH GPA STUDENTS1

Undergraduate students had been assigned to a contingency managed course or a conventional lecture course (Du Nann and Fernald, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1976, 9 , 373–374). Two years later, some 35% (N = 86) of the original classes responded to a letter offering them $2.00 to participate in a study of their educational experiences. These students completed a multiple-choice test on material from the course, and answered questions about activities and attitudes that might have been affected by the experience in Introductory Psychology. In the contingency management course 2 yr past, students were tested each week on a chapter of textbook material with 10-item multiple-choice quizzes. The course employed a modified “Doomsday Contingency”, requiring each student to achieve 80% mastery on one of the four weekly quizzes or drop the course. Quizzes were given in small groups and scored individually, while the student stood near, by an undergraduate proctor assigned to that group. The proctor was asked to show interest in the students' quiz performances, help clear up difficult areas, and develop a friendly working relationship with each student. While many students passed the quiz on the first attempt, others were given individual tutoring, so that no one was in fact forced to drop the course. In addition to the weekly quiz assignment, students in the contingency managed group were asked to attend one lecture each week. While the contingency management course procedures had much in common with PSI (Keller, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1968, 1 , 79–89), several departures made them unique. First, self-pacing was curtailed because students were required to master one unit per week or drop the course. Second, proctors met with students in small groups, usually giving individual tutoring only to those students who did not pass the quiz on the first attempt. Finally, students were asked to attend one lecture per week. Students in the conventional lecture group were not asked to pass weekly quizzes, but instead attended three 50-min lectures each week. Two of these lectures followed the textbook material closely, while the third, which was also attended by students from the contingency management course, covered material only indirectly related to the text. This partition of lecture content allowed material to be similar across the two instructional groups. Although students in the lecture condition were told they could obtain copies of the quizzes, few of them did so. Course grades were determined by scores on two 45-item multiple-choice hourly exams, each covering half the semester material (each worth 25%), and by a 90-item final exam, which served as a measure of short-term retention. Before analyzing the follow-up data, several characteristics of the returning students were compared to determine the comparability of the sample from the two original classes. Most important, both attrition and the current mean GPAs of students from the two classes were very similar. These considerations, and others, suggested there was no systematic sampling bias to confound comparisons of student performance. A 2 (contingency management versus traditional lecture) by 3 (high, medium, and low GPA) analysis of variance was computed on the course final-exam scores and the follow-up measures. Instructional procedure and GPA interacted on the final exam such that low and medium GPA students performed significantly better under contingency management, but there was no significant effect of instructional procedure with high GPA students. On the 2-yr retention measures, students from the contingency management course performed significantly (p < 0.01) better on items drawn from quizzes used in their original course, and marginally better (p < 0.10) on items drawn from the final exams, but no interactions with GPA appeared. Furthermore, instructional method produced no significant main effects or interaction with how many students became majors or minors in psychology, how many psychology courses were later taken, how many books in psychology were reported to have been read, or on students' evaluation of the interest and importance of psychology.     

Organizational trust among job seekers: The role of information‐seeking and reciprocation wariness

This study explores job seekers’ information‐seeking and pre‐hire trust, and the role of reciprocation wariness in the development of pre‐hire trust. Individuals seeking a job with a technology company (N = 192) reported their perceptions of the organization’s website usability and perceived similarity to their recruiter, organizational trustworthiness and trust, and intent to accept a job offer. Wariness moderated the relationship between website usability perceptions and trustworthiness. Unexpectedly, the interaction was in the opposite direction of what we predicted. In addition, job seekers’ perceived similarity to their recruiter related to trustworthiness, and trust related to intent to accept a job offer. Our findings suggest that to some extent, recruiting organizations can encourage trust perceptions in the pre‐hire context.     

Changing the guard: new leadership for an established group

When the leader of an established therapy group decides to leave, the group may wish to continue with a new leader. This decision deserves careful exploration. The transfer of leadership to a new leader is a powerful event in a group. New leaders often experience strong countertransference reactions. Specific recommendations for new leaders include meeting individually with each continuing member, helping the group stabilize and process the meaning of the change, and developing ownership of the leader role. When managed successfully, a leadership transition can strengthen the group cohesion and offer important therapeutic opportunity.     

Two-year test-retest reliability of the colored progressive matrices

The Raven Colored Progressive Matrices was administered to a sample of 259 children in Lithuania and re-administered 2 years later. The test-retest reliability was .499.     

Ethical and practical considerations in managing incidental findings in functional magnetic resonance imaging

Functional magnetic resonance imaging has emerged as a powerful tool for mapping the neurologic underpinnings of sensory, motor and cognitive function. Much of this evolution carries assumptions about the subject population under study and, in particular, the neurologic status of subjects entered into studies either as healthy controls or as belonging to a specific disease group. Recent reports of incidental MRI abnormalities in normal volunteers for fMRI studies have brought to attention a variety of practical challenges and ethical dilemmas for researchers, many of whom are not physicians and most of whom have no formal radiological training. We propose a minimum standard for consenting subjects in fMRI protocols, and consider strategies over the longer term that call for expert physician participation, archiving of incidental findings including false positives, and the adoption of guidelines for handling variation in neural activations or performance that appear outside expected norms.