Does comorbid attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder impact the clinical expression of pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder?

What is the impact of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) on the phenotypic expression of pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). We examined phenotypic features, and functional and clinical correlates in youths with OCD, with and without comorbid ADHD, from a large sample of consecutively referred pediatric psychiatry patients. Although comorbid ADHD had no meaningful impact on the phenotypic expression or clinical correlates of OCD, it was associated with higher rates of compromised educational functioning compared with other OCD youths. Our findings suggest that the OCD phenotype runs true and is not impacted by comorbid ADHD in youths diagnosed with both OCD and ADHD. In such affected youths, both disorders contribute to morbid dysfunction and require treatment. More work is needed to determine whether OCD plus ADHD represents a developmentally and etiologically distinct form of the OCD syndrome.     

Examining the locus of age effects on complex span tasks

To investigate the locus of age effects on complex span tasks, the authors evaluated the contributions of working memory functions and processing speed. Age differences were found in measures of storage capacity, language processing speed, and lower level speed. Statistically controlling for each of these in hierarchical regressions substantially reduced, but did not eliminate, the complex span age effect. Accounting for lower level speed and storage, however, removed essentially the entire age effect, suggesting that both functions play important and independent roles. Additional evidence for the role of storage capacity was the absence of complex span age differences with span size calibrated to individual word span performance. Explanations for age differences based on inhibition and concurrent task performamce were not supported.     

Gender Differences in Problem Drinking and Depression: Different “Vulnerabilities?”

This study examines the relationship between stressors and resources and the functioning of a sample of 515 men and women who had a drinking problem. At a one-year follow-up, both women and men had improved on three functioning measures: alcohol consumption, days intoxicated, and depression. There were no gender differences at Time 2 on alcohol consumption, but men had more days intoxicated and women had more symptoms of depression. The impact of stressors and resources varied by life domain, functioning criterion, and gender. Although the predictors varied, the amount of variance in depression accounted for was the same for women and men. The most striking gender difference was the stronger impact of friendships for women on all aspects of functioning. This study provides support for reconsideration of the stress vulnerability of women and men.     

Medical Students' Perceptions of and Willingness to Treat Patients Who Are HIV Infected1

The purpose of this study is to examine the independent and joint influences of a patient's mode of acquisition of illness (blood transfusion vs. multiple sexual partners), attributions of responsibility (self-blame vs. chance blame), and sexual orientation (homosexual vs. heterosexual) on female and male medical students' attitudes toward and willingness to treat a patient who is HIV infected. One hundred nineteen 1st through internship-year medical students were randomly assigned to read and respond to case vignettes. Greater consistency between attribution of blame and mode of acquisition was related to more positive perceptions. Furthermore, the patient's sexual orientation influenced the providers' willingness to offer treatment, particularly for male medical students. Implications concerning health practices and medical education are considered.     

Task predictability and remembered duration

The effects of structural predictability on remembered duration judgments were examined within the context of the performance of a series of highly familiar tasks. Across a set of three experiments, task predictability was manipulated by the presence or absence of advance expectancies of what tasks were to be performed (Experiment 1), an (in)variant ordering of task performance (Experiment 2), and the placement of interruptions at between- versus within-task locations (Experiment 3). In each case, a higher degree of predictability led to more accurate and reliable duration estimates that were relatively free of bias, while uncertainty decreased accuracy through an overestimation bias. These results not only render insight into the mediational mechanisms responsible for temporal judgments, but also sug-gest some practical applications for everyday behavior.     

Social skill in third and sixth grade children: A moderator of lifetime stressful life events and behavior problems?

We investigated relationships among stressful lifetime life events, social skill, and behavior problems in children. Participants were 159 third graders, 138 sixth graders, and their mothers. Mothers reported on their children's life events, social skill, and behavior problems. Children self-reported on their social skill and behavior problems. Increased numbers of stressful life events significantly predicted increased behavior problems in third and sixth graders. Increased social skill significantly predicted decreased behavior problems in third and sixth graders. Social skill served a stress-protective role for third but not sixth graders; third graders with increased life events and better social skill had fewer behavior problems than their less socially skilled peers. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed, and suggestions for future resilience research are presented.     

A quantitative synthesis of literature on work status and subjective well being

Metanalytic techniques were used to synthesize results of studies on the relation of work status (retired, employed part time, employed full time) and subjective well being (SWB). The weighted mean of the work status/SWB relation across all studies was .18. When zero-order associations between work status and SWB were used as dependent variables, significant predictors of that relation were the way in which work status was operationalized, ratings of quality of study, year of publication for studies, and age midrange of samples. Gender was not a significant predictor of the work status/SWB relation.     

Logical competence and transitive inference in young children

Five-year-old children were trained on the length relationships between the adjacent members of a five-term series of sticks. They were then tested on their abilities (1) to judge the length relationships between nonadjacent pairs of the series, and (2) to incorporate an unseen novel stick into the series through inference. Children who were trained with sticks of markedly different lengths succeeded on the first test but not the second; they apparently relied on memory for the absolute lengths of the sticks. Children in the other groups succeeded on both tests. The critical factor in inducing the use of seriation and transitivity seemed to be the elimination of alternative solutions.     

A test of precategorical and attentional explanations of speech suffix interference

It is well-known that a redundant item or “stimulus suffix”, which does not have to be recalled, which is spoken, and which terminates the presentation of a beyond span-length sequence of to-be-remembered (TBR) spoken items, will generate considerable interference in immediate serial recall. Previous work has established that speech suffix interference is not influenced by a number of intrinsic attributes of the suffix. A limitation of this work, however, is the fact that in each study there has been little if any disparity between TBR sequence and suffix in terms of extrinsic attributes. Experiment I extends this work and showed that at least one intrinsic attribute of the suffix (personal significance) has no effect on suffix interference when there is also a marked disparity between TBR sequence and suffix in terms of one specific extrinsic attribute (spatial location). Experiment II simply served to eliminate one possible artifactual explanation of this finding. The result appears to have some theoretical importance since it is inconsistent with Kahneman's (1973) attentional account of suffix interference and with one interpretation of a precategorical hypothesis due to Morton, Crowder and Prussin (1971).