Effects of background anger,provocation, and methylphenidate on emotional arousal and aggressive responding in attention-deficit hyperactivity disordered boys with and without concurrent aggressiveness

We investigated the effects of background anger, provocation, and methylphenidate on emotional, physiological, and behavioral responding in children with attentiondeficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with and without concurrent aggression. Our study revealed that ADHD boys showed more emotional and physiological distress when exposed to an interaction in which an administrator chastised each boy's favorite counselor, compared to a friendly interaction between the two adults. The background anger manipulation did not affect the aggressive behavior of the boys against an opponent in an aggressive game. High-aggressive (HA) ADHD boys were more likely to respond to provocation with aggression than low-aggressive (LA) ADHD boys, but only LA boys showed increased physiological reactivity with increasing provocation. Methylphenidate resulted in increased heart rates under all conditions and did not interact with any of the other findings.This project was conducted while the first author had the support of National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grant AA 06267.The authors wish to thank the staff members of the 1987 Summer Day Treatment Program who assisted in conducting this project. The authors also express their appreciation to Karen Guthrie for coordinating the medication assessment and to Hart Blanton for computer programming.     

A practitioner's guide to meta-analysis

Describes the application to community issues of the meta-analytic research strategies increasingly used in many field of psychology. First, we highlight the potential value of meta-analysis to community research. Second, we describe six major steps involved in conducting an effective meta-analysis. These steps include formulating the initial research question(s), locating relevant studies, abstracting critical information from each study, and presenting, analyzing, and interpreting the resultant data. In this guide, the major aspects of meta-analysis are discussed with particular emphasis on the procedures that are most critical to the validity of its conclusions. Greater familiarity with the techniques, issues, and potential of meta-analysis may stimulate investigators to make more effective use of this powerful approach to integrating research in community psychology.     

Peer support telephone dyads for elderly women: Was this the wrong intervention?

Tested a preventive intervention in which peer telephone dyads were developed for low-income, community-living, elderly women with low perceived social support. After an initial assessment, respondents were randomly assigned to either an assessment-only control or received 10 weeks of friendly staff telephone contact. After a second assessment, participants receiving the staff contact were randomly assigned to continue that contact or were paired in dyads to continue phone contact with one another. Dependent variables were measures of perceived social support, morale, depression, and loneliness. All groups, particularly the staff contact group, showed some improvement in mental health scores over time, but there were no significant differences between intervention groups, or between intervention and assessment-only control groups. The results suggest that participation in the study and in personal assessment interviews at home were probably morale enhancing, and that additional telephone contact did not significantly add to that effect. Evidence also indicates that, in this sample, low perceived family support was significantly related to poor mental health, so it is possible that a program designed to increase friend support may have been the wrong intervention.     

Automatic processes in lexical access and spreading activation.

The semantic priming effect can be reduced or eliminated depending on how the prime word is processed. The experiments reported here investigate this prime task effect. Two experiments used identity and semantic priming tasks to determine whether the prime word is encoded at a lexical level under letter-search conditions. When the prime task was naming, both identity and semantic priming occurred; however, when a letter-search task was performed on the prime word, only identity priming occurred, thus supporting the argument that the search task affects activation of semantic associates rather than lexical access of the prime word. Another experiment demonstrated that this identity priming was the result of lexical processes rather than of letter-by-letter priming. A cross-modal priming technique demonstrated that the letter-search prime task does not actively suppress activation of semantic associates. The implications of these results for automaticity and for proposed mechanisms of priming are discussed.     

Learning disabilities, distinctive encoding, and hemispheric resources

The purpose of this study was to isolate possible sources of learning ability differences in distinctive encoding of item-specific and relational information. Two mechanisms postulated as underlying ability group differences were attentional capacity (as inferred from the magnitude and direction of correlations between primary and secondary recall) and resource monitoring strategies (as reflected in measures of selective attention and laterality). In Experiment 1, learning disabled and nondisabled childrens' word recall was compared on dichotic listening recall tasks that included nonorienting instructions, and orienting instructions that directed children's attention toward semantic, phonemic, or structural word features. Disabled children showed lower recall and more diffuse selective attention to word features than nondisabled children. Reciprocity (negative correlations) between targeted and background words within and between ability groups was comparable, except when targeted word features were phonemically organized. Experiment 2 indicated that disabled childrens' cued recall was inferior to that of nondisabled children, even though both ability groups produced comparable symmetrical recall patterns related to ear presentations. Taken together, the results suggest that the locus of disabled childrens' distinctive encoding deficiencies is related to resource monitoring strategies during interhemispheric processing.     

Perceptual learning following a long-lasting tactile reversal.

Crossing 2 adjacent fingers produces a distorted perception when 2 tactile stimuli are touched to the crossed fingertips. This is because a given pair of fingers has a functional range of action within which spatial perception is correct (uncrossed fingers) and beyond which perceived location of tactile stimuli is wrong (crossed fingers). The present study tested the possibility that this range of action could be modified following a long-lasting crossing. Therefore, the functional range of action of the 2nd and 3rd fingers was tested every month in 6 volunteers who maintained the finger crossing for as long as 6 months. The results show that after a variable period of time the range of action was enlarged such that spatial perception was correct with crossed fingers as well. The perceptual organization of the human hand therefore depends on experience and is not rigidly determined on a genetic basis.     

Scratching as a behavioral index of anxiety in macaque mothers.

The aim of this study was to assess the validity of the notion that anxiety influences maternal style in monkeys. To this end, we investigated the correlations between measures of the quality of mother-infant relationship and scratching, a behavior pattern that reflects a state of anxiety. The subjects were seven group-living macaque mothers and their infants observed during the first 12 weeks postpartum. Postpartum scratching by the mothers was positively correlated with both maternal possessiveness and maternal warmth, two composite measures of the quality of mother-infant relationship that reflect a possessive and attentive maternal style. Evaluation of the correlations between maternal rank and scratching before and after parturition indicated that interactions with their infants, not those with other group companions, were the main source of anxiety for the mothers. These results support the notion that anxiety influences maternal style in monkeys and suggest that studies aimed at investigating physiological and social correlates of maternal emotionality in nonhuman primates could use scratching as a useful and simple behavioral measure.     

Implicit and explicit learning: individual differences and IQ

We explored the degree to which individual differences in performance were observed in a group of subjects who worked with two different tasks: one implicit and one explicit. The implicit task was a standard artificial grammar-learning task; the explicit was a series-completion problem-solving task. Substantial individual differences were found between subjects on the explicit task; relatively small individual differences were found on the implicit task. Moreover, performance on the explicit task correlated strongly with intelligence quotient, but performance on the implicit task did not. Data from previous experiments were also found to be in agreement with these results. The findings are presented in the context of a general theory of implicit learning proposed recently by Reber (1989a, in press) that derives from considerations of the evolution of cognitive processes. This evolutionary model argues that unconscious, implicit induction systems are evolutionarily older and antedate conscious, explicit learning processes, and that this antiquity carries with it particular patterns of function that differentiate implicit processes from explicit processes.     

Suicidal behavior in Italy: data, trends and guidelines for a suicide intervention/prevention policy.

Even though in Italy, as in the majority of Mediterranean countries, the increase in suicide rates is not among the highest in Europe, between 1969 and 1989 it showed a sharp upswing (+43% among males and +31% among females). In terms of geographical differences, the regions with the highest suicide rate are the northern ones (up to twice the national average). The age groups with the highest suicide risk are those over 74 years (in 1989 the rate among males over 65 was the highest of all: 31.3 per 100,000). The differences in the between-sexes distribution show that among females over 65 years old the suicide rate rose by 70% between 1974 and 1989, versus 77% for males of the same age. The preliminary epidemiological results of one of two Italian centers are presented. These centers are collaborating with the WHO/EURO Multicenter Study on Parasuicide; parasuicide rates are higher for females than for males (55.9 per 100,000, as against 38.1 for males), while the age group at highest risk is seen to be young women (15-24 years), with a specific rate of 115.6.