Psychometric properties of parents and children as informants in child psychiatry epidemiology with the Spanish diagnostic interview schedule for children (DISC.2)

Parent and child reports were examined to study how epidemiological researchers can best use the information provided to describe childhood psychopathology. As part of a multisite methodologic study of mental disorders in children, a probability sample (N=248) of children aged 9 to 17 years from the San Juan metropolitan area was selected. This sample was enriched with 74 clinic cases. Both parents and children were administered the DISC.2. Results showed that prevalence estimates were influenced by the informant. The clinicians' diagnosis is more concordant with children's reports of depression and with parents' reports of disruptive disorders. Parents and children provided unique information when interviewed with a structured psychiatric interview about child psychopathology. Their unique perspectives contributed to the observed discordance that emerged when DISC parent and DISC child results are compared. Combining the two perspectives with a simple OR rule at the symptom level did not seem to capture the unique perspectives.We acknowledge the research group of the Behavioral Sciences Research Institute for their valuable contributions to this work. We also recognize José V. Martínez, Vivian E. Febo, and Zenaida González for the data analyses, and Elizabeth Pastrana and Felícita Laboy for the secretarial work.This research was supported by grants (MH46732) from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as part of a collaborative methodologic epidemiologic study of children and adolescents (MECA) between the Universities of Columbia, Emory, Puerto Rico, Yale, and the NIMH.     

Balance Theory Applied to Service Quality: A Focus on the Organization, Provider, and Consumer Triad

As quality experts have focused primarily on manufacturing, theoretical frameworks for examining quality in the service sector are lacking. In order to fill this gap, Heider's (1958) balance theory is applied to explain how service organization, service provider, and consumer interrelationships influence service quality. Propositions are offered pertaining to: (a) how and why positive or negative relationships among the parties in this triad are developed, and (b) the consequences of these relationships on service quality, affective outcomes, and withdrawal behaviors. Examination of the service triangle within this framework can enhance understanding of quality service delivery and guide future research efforts in the continuous improvement domain.     

Automatic and expectancy-based priming effects in a digit naming task

In a voice reaction time task, subjects named target digits that were horizontally flanked by noise digits or by a neutral symbol (#). For the control subjects, the noise digits were uncorrelated with the target digit, whereas for three experimental groups, the value of the noise digit predicted the target digit by an arithmetic rule (target = noise, target = noise + 1, target = noise - 1) on 75% of the trials. Patterns of reaction time facilitation and inhibition relative to the control condition among the four subject groups illustrated differing time courses of involuntary and expectancy-based priming. For prediction rules requiring an arithmetic transformation (expect N = 1 and expect N - 1), responses to predicted targets were slowed by response competition at short stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOAs) but greatly facilitated by expectancy at longer SOAs.     

Critiques of Casuistry and Why They Are Mistaken

Casuistic methods of reasoning in medical ethics have been criticized by a number of authors. At least five main objections to casuistry have been put forward: (1) it requires a uniformity of views that is not present in contemporary pluralistic society; (2) it cannot achieve consensus on controversial issues; (3) it is unable to examine critically intuitions about cases; (4) it yields different conclusions about cases when alternative paradigms are chosen; and (5) it cannot articulate the grounds of its conclusions. Two main versions of casuistry have been put forward, and the responses to these objections depend in part on which version one is defending. Jonsen has advocated a version modeled on the approach to casuistry used by moral theologians in the 15th and 16th century, involving comparison of the case at hand with a single paradigm and a lineup of cases. The present author has advocated another version, drawn from experience with cases in clinical ethics, which involves comparing the case at hand with two or more paradigms. Four of the five objections are unsuccessful when directed against Jonsen'sapproach, and all of them are unsuccessful when directed against the approach involving comparison with two or more paradigms.     

Gert's moral theory and its application to bioethics cases

Bernard Gert's theory of morality has received much critical attention, but there has been relatively little commentary on its practical value for bioethics. An important test of an ethical theory is its ability to yield results that are helpful and plausible when applied to real cases. An examination of Gert's theory and his own attempts to apply it to bioethics cases reveals that there are serious difficulties with regard to its application. These problems are sufficiently severe to support the conclusion that Gert's theory is unacceptable as an approach for resolving bioethics cases, even relatively noncontroversial cases.     

Continuing the dialogue: a reply to Bernard Gert

Continuing the dialogue begun in the March 2006 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, I suggest that Bernard Gert's response to my paper does not adequately address the criticisms I make of his theory's application to bioethics cases.     

The relationship between the frequency and the processing complexity of linguistic structure

In this paper the relative frequencies of the possible resolutions of ambiguities involving noun phrase attachment sites are compared to the results of off-line psycholinguistic measurements of syntactic complexity. A lack of correlation between the two is observed. It is therefore argued that the comprehension system is distinct from what is driving the frequencies in the corpora. A production heuristic separate from the comprehension system is proposed to account for the observed frequencies.We would like to thank Susanne Tunstall for providing linguistic judgments in the corpus analyses reported in Sec. 3.3. We also wish to thank the following people for helpful, comments and discussions on earlier presentations of this paper: the audience at the Eighth Human Sentence Processing Conference, in Tucson Arizona, Maria Babyonyshev, Tom Bever, Martin Corley, Danny Fox, Don Mitchell, Edson Miyamoto, Janet Nicol, Colin Phillips, Gregg Solomon, Michael Spivey-Knowlton, James Thomas, and Tom Wasow. All remaining errors are our own. The second author was supported by the Research Training Grant Language: Acquisition and Computation awarded by the National Science Foundation (U.S.) to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (DIR 9113607), and by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Attention as a mediating variable in the dynamics of bimanual coordination

The influence of focal attention on the coordination dynamics in a bimanual circle drawing task was investigated. Six right-handed and seven left-handed subjects performed bimanual circling movements, in two modes of coordination, symmetrical or asymmetrical. The frequency of movement was scaled by an auditory metronome from 1.50 Hz to 3.00 Hz in 7 steps. On each trial, subjects were required to attend either to the dominant hand, to a neutral position, or to the nondominant hand.The uniformity of the relative tangential angle was lower in asymmetrical than in symmetrical conditions, but was not influenced by the direction of attention. In the asymmetrical mode, shifts in RTA relations, suggestive of loss of stability, were evident as the movement frequency was increased. Typically, these shifts were mediated by distortions of the trajectory of the nondominant limb. When the nondominant hand was the focus of attention, movements of this hand were more circular, and temporal variability was reduced, at the cost of a greater deviation from the target frequency. Movements of the dominant hand were not affected by the direction of attention. The findings show that although directed attention acts to modify the coordination dynamics, it does so primarily at the level of the individual hands, rather then in terms of the relation between them.