Five points and a lament about Range and Cotton's "Reports of assent and permission in research with children: illustrations and suggestions

This comment responds to an article by Range and Cotton (1995) on reporting of parental permission and child assent procedures in published articles for 4 psychology journals. Issue is taken with the assumptions, methodology, interpretations, and implications of listing researchers in the Range and Cotton article. There is no evidence researchers failed in their ethical obligations or that children were put at risk. Reporting permission/assent in publications is not an ethical requirement. Listing researchers as "failing" to do something not part of an ethical code is lamentable. Too many unfortunate implications and problems can be derived from Range and Cotton's analysis and conclusions.     

Reply to William R. Ferrell’s paper “A model for realism of confidence judgments: Implications for underconfidence in sensory discrimination”

Ferrell’s decision-variable partition model and our subjective distance model belong to the same family of Thurstonial models. The subjective distance model is limited to sensory discrimination with the method of constant stimuli and rooted in such notions as discriminal dispersion and sense distance. Ferrell’s model is intended to be wider in scope and to apply to both cognitive and sensory tasks. Both models need supplementary assumptions to predict calibration phenomena. The point of departure for us is the fact that the model predicts under-confidence under “guessing” and the empirical finding that people are about 100% correct when they report “absolutely certain.” Ferrell makes assumptions about cutoffs on the decision variable. The respondent is assumed to adjust or not adjust cutoffs according to “cues to difficulty.” We disagree with Ferrell’s claim that the hard-easy effect is explained by the respondent’s failure to adjust cutoffs sufficiently when there is a change in level of difficulty, and argue that this amounts to little more than a translation of the hard-easy effect into the lingua of Ferrell’s decision-variable partition model. Our argument is that the hard-easy effect is a consequence of the post hoc division of items according to solution probability. In addition, error variance may contribute to regression effects that enlarge the hard-easy effect. Finally, in contrast to Ferrell’s position, we regard inference (cognitive uncertainty) and discrimination (sensory uncertainty) as different psychological processes. An understanding of calibration in these two areas requires separate models.     

Within-category discrimination of musical chords: Perceptual magnet or anchor?

Recent speech research has begun to evaluate the internal structure of categories. In one such study, Kuhl (1991) found that discrimination was poorer for vowel stimuli that were more representative of the category (prototype, or P, set) than it was for less representative stimuli (nonprototype, or NP, set). This finding was interpreted as indicating that a category prototype may function as a “perceptual magnet,” effectively decreasing perceptual distance, and thus discriminability, between stimuli. The present study examines the function of prototypes in a musical category—another natural, but nonspeech category. Paralleling the Kuhl study, representative (P) and less representative (NP) sets of major triad stimuli were constructed, based on equal temperament. Musically experienced subjects rated the stimuli in each set for goodness as a major triad, with the highest rated stimulus serving as a prototype standard for a subsequent discrimination task. Results from the discrimination task demonstrated better performance in the P context than in the NP context. The current nonspeech results indicate that a prototype functions as an anchor rather than a magnet. In addition to providing a natural, nonspeech standard for comparison with speech findings, the results provide some important insights into the nature of musical categories.     

A pointing technique for rapidly collecting localization responses in auditory research

A technique is described for rapidly collecting responses in auditory-localization experiments. Subjects indicate the perceived direction of the sound by pointing at a 20-cm-diam spherical model. In Experiment 1, the subjects judged the direction of a broadband signal, which could originate from any of 239 directions ranging through 360° of azimuth and between ?45° and +90° of elevation. Using this technique, the subjects responded 2–8 times more rapidly than previous subjects who used either a verbal-reporting technique or a head-pointing technique. Localization judgments were as accurate as they had been with verbal reports, but were not as accurate as judgments collected using the head-pointing technique. In Experiment 2, the signal was turned off and the experimenter read the spherical coordinates of the signal location to the subjects. The subjects pointed to these coordinates more accurately than they had judged the direction of the sounds in Experiment 1, suggesting that the response technique had not been the limiting factor in that experiment. Circumstances relevant to the choice of response techniques for auditory-localization experiments are discussed.     

Aggressivity,inattention, hyperactivity,and impulsivity in boys at high and low risk for substance abuse

Aggressivity, inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity are cardinal dimensions of externalizing behavior problems of childhood. They are diagnostic and clinical features of childhood disorders, and are thought to be linked to the subsequent development of adult disorders such as substance abuse (SA). Little is known, however, about the convergent and discriminant validity of these four constructs. We used multiple measures to develop indices of aggressivity, inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity in a sample of 10- to 12-year-old boys (N=183) with and without a family history of SA. Data were taken from mother reports, child reports, teacher reports, and laboratory tasks. The study aims were (1) to test the convergent and discriminant validity of aggressivity, inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity; (2) to examine whether the data were consistent with a model specifying the four constructs as indicators of one superordinate factor; and (3) to differentiate boys with and without a family history of SA in construct scores. The results supported the convergent and discriminant validity of the four constructs. Although discriminable, the constructs covaried strongly and were consistent with a model specifying them as indicators of a single superordinate factor. Boys with a family history of substance abuse scored higher than control boys on aggressivity, inattention, and impulsivity scores, but the groups did not differ on hyperactivity scores. The results are discussed in terms of the role of childhood behavior problems in vulnerability to SA.This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse grant No. DA 05605.     

The comorbidities of adolescent problem behaviors: A latent class model

The correlations and comorbidities of a series of adolescent problem behaviors were studied in a sample of 739 New Zealand 15-year-olds. This analysis revealed the presence of strong comorbidities between different problem behaviors. The data were modeled using methods of unrestricted latent class analysis and this suggested that the best fitting model to describe the data was one which assumed that adolescent problem behaviors were described by four general classes of children. While the same general four-class model applied to males and females, there were marked gender differences in the rates of problems. Specifically, the predominant problem behaviors in females were those relating to an accelerated transition to adulthood marked by early sexual activity, alcohol abuse, and cannabis use whereas the predominant problems for boys were related to antisocial and law-breaking behaviors. Rates of children with no problems (85%) and with multiple problems (3%) were similar for boys and girls.This research was funded by grants from the Health Research Council of New Zealand, the Canterbury Medical Research Foundation, and the National Child Health Research Foundation.     

An advocacy intervention program for women with abusive partners: Six-month follow-up

Presented the 6-month follow-up findings of an experimental intervention designed to provide postshelter advocacy services to women with abusive partners. The intervention involved randomly assigning half the research participants to receive the free services of an advocate, 4 to 6 hours per week, for the first 10 weeks postshelter. One hundred forty-one battered women were interviewed about their experiences immediately upon their exit from a domestic violence shelter: 95% of the sample were interviewed 10 weeks thereafter (postintervention), and 93% were successfully tracked and interviewed 6 months later. At the 6-month follow-up, participants in both groups reported increased social support, increased quality of life, less depression, less emotional attachment to their assailants, and an increased sense of personal power. Although women in both groups reported some decrease in physical abuse over time, there were no statistically significant differences between those with and those without advocates, and abuse continued to be a problem for many women. Those who were still involved with their assailants continued to experience higher levels of abuse and had been more economically dependent upon the men prior to entering the shelter. Women who had worked with advocates continued to report being more satisfied with their overall quality of life than did the women in the control group. The authors thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Thanks also to all present and past staff of the Community Advocacy Project, who helped in data collection and analyses. This work was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 1R01 MH 44849.     

Accounting for macro-level causation

By a macro-level feature, I understand any feature that supervenes on, and is thus realized in, lower-level features. Recent discussions by Kim have suggested that such features cannot be causally relevant insofar as they are not classically reducible to lower-level features. This seems to render macro-level features causally irrelevant. I defend the causal relevance of some such features. Such features have been thought causally relevant in many examples that have underpinned philosophical work on causality. Additionally, in certain typical biological cases, we conceive of causally relevant features at various compatible levels of analysis. When elaborated, these points make a strong prima facie case for macro-level causal relevance. However, we might abandon both the philosophical guideposts and the corresponding explanatory practice in the special sciences were we convinced that no reflective philosophical account could provide for the causal relevance there supposed. I show that such drastic measures are not necessary, for we can make sense of macro-level causal relevance by drawing on Paul Humphreys' recent work in ways suggested by the concrete examples considered here.Some of the work on this paper was undertaken at the 1991 NEH Summer Seminar on Causality, directed by Paul Humphreys. I wish to thank my fellow participants, and Paul Humphreys, John Tienson, and Terry Horgan for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.