Identifying Salient Beliefs About Leisure Activities: Frequency of Elicitation Versus Response Latency1

Sets of 16 beliefs about the consequences of each of 6 leisure activities were selected in a pilot study by means of free elicitation. The beliefs varied in salience (salient vs. nonsalient), valence (positive vs. negative), and type (instrumental vs. effective). In the main study, 69 college students expressed their agreements with each belief, evaluated the consequences involved in the beliefs, and rated each leisure activity on 4 evaluative scales as a standard measure of attitude. The latencies of these responses were used to assess accessibilities of beliefs and attitudes in an effort to quantify degree of salience. Accessibility of beliefs was found to increase significantly with frequency of elicitation in the pilot study (salience) and with the judged favorability of the consequences. Salience was further found to be related to degree and extremity of agreement. Accessibility was also found to moderate the correlation between beliefs and attitudes posited in the expectancy-value model of attitude. The correlation between a given belief and the direct attitude measure increased with the belief's accessibility, and the correlation between a measure of attitude based on the set of salient beliefs and the standard attitude measures increased with the accessibility of the attitude. Implications for the identification and measurement of perceived benefits and costs of leisure are discussed.     

Developmental perspectives and family therapy: The marital life cycle

Developmental perspectives have been part of family therapy for more than two decades with a primary focus on the family life cycle and individual development. Most efforts at recognizing a marital life cycle have subsumed marital tasks under rubrics based primarily on parental roles. This paper offers a marital life cycle based on marital development with specific tasks for each of four stages-the marital breakup and remarriage phases are not included here-and provides implications for therapy.     

An approach to integrating “professional responsibility” in engineering into the capstone design experience

ABET 2000 Criteria encourages development of proficiency in professional responsibility in engineering as part of the undergraduate curriculum. This paper discusses the use of industrially sponsored capstone design projects to encourage active discussion of professional responsibility in engineering that naturally occurs during the engineering design process. The paper also discusses student participation in designing responses and approaches to issues such as engineering ethics. The paper includes specific examples of topics addressed by students and the approaches developed (by students) in addressing these issues. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Ethics in Engineering and Computer Science, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, March 21–24, 1999.     

Evolution: Journey or Random Walk?

Though early ideas of evolution saw it as progressive, most modern theories see it as a random walk. The theories of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson, Stuart Kauffman, Steven Rose, and Robert Wesson are surveyed, showing their agreement on the fact of evolution but not on the mechanism. Evolution is an incomplete theory. Any theology should therefore be based only on its broadest features. Generally, evolution is the development of complex forms from simple ancestors. Within a Christian context, it can be seen as a journey toward the unification of all things in Christ, the ultimate complexity.     

What do the MMPI-2 restructured clinical scales reliably measure? Answers from multiple research settings

The Restructured Clinical (RC; Tellegen et al., 2003) scales were developed to improve measurement of the core constructs of the MMPI-2 (Butcher et al., 2001) Clinical scales by removing "demoralization," hypothesized to affect these scales adversely. Using 25 samples with MMPI-2 responses from 78,159 subjects across diverse clinical settings, we found that each RC scale was highly correlated with a Supplementary, Content, or Personality Psychopathology 5 (PSY-5; Harkness, McNulty, & Ben-Porath, 1995) scale: higher, in fact, than the correlation between the RC scale and its parent scale. Furthermore, for over half the RC scales (i.e., RC1, RC3, RC7, RC8, and RCd), the correlations were strong enough to conclude that the RC scales replicate MMPI-2 scales with rich empirical foundations; the remaining RC scales were not redundant. Next, we examined reliability estimates using alpha coefficients and interitem correlations and did not reveal superior reliability for most of the RC scales over existing MMPI-2 scales.     

Is there an evolutionary advantage of schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is a universal disorder with strongly genetic aetiology. A constant prevalence rate, universally, in the face of reduced fecundity leads to the argument here that an evolutionary advantage exists, but not solely for schizophrenia. Possible areas of advantage are examined and it is argued that schizophrenia exists as a costly trade-off, in the evolution of Homo sapiens, as a by-product of a yet unknown uniquely human quality. The reason it has stayed in existence is due to a combination of advantages bestowed upon the kin, the group and, to a lesser extent, individuals who suffer from the disorder; these all contribute a different type of advantage, each of which alone would not be sufficient. Further, the evidence for the other advantages alone lack the rigour of evidence seen in the by-product theories, which provide as yet unparalleled comprehensive evolutionary evidence.     

Comparing Democrats and Republicans on Intrinsic and Extrinsic Values

Although claimed differences in values have played a prominent role in recent U.S. politics, the value systems of typical Republicans and Democrats have not been evaluated within a relevant dimensional framework. In 4 studies, party members were compared on extrinsic (money, popularity, image) and intrinsic (intimacy, helping, growth) values. Republicans were consistently higher on extrinsic relative to intrinsic values, a pattern suggested by past research to be personally and socially problematic. In Study 4, Republicans were also lower in a different measure of prosocial values, derived from social-dilemma research. All studies found an interaction such that only nonreligious Republicans were lower than Democrats on the intrinsic value of helping needy others. Implications for contemporary political discourse are discussed.     

Exploration of the Factor Structure of ADHD in Adolescence through Self,Parent, and Teacher Reports of Symptomatology

Factor analytic studies of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adults have shown that second-order and bifactor models better represent ADHD symptoms than two- or three-factor models, yet there is far less evidence for a bestfitting model of ADHD in adolescence. Thus, the current study examined the factor structure of ADHD in adolescence and further evaluated the external validity of the best fitting model. Participants were 588 adolescents (22 % female; 366 with a childhood ADHD diagnosis; mean age 15.9 years) from the 8-year assessment of the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA). ADHD symptoms were assessed via adolescent self-report, parent report, and teacher report on the SNAP-IV scale. Potential factor structures for the 18 symptoms of ADHD were tested for each informant, which included traditional one-factor, two-factor, and three-factor models of ADHD, as well as second-order factor (specific factors loading onto general factor) and bifactor (items loading onto both specific and general factors) models. Unique associations between external criteria and the identified factors of each informant’s best fitting model were examined. Although several of the proposed models exhibited good fit, the second-order two-factor model best accounted for ADHD in adolescence according to self-report and parent report, and the second-order three-factor model was optimal according to teacher report. Several key measurement issues emerged for the hierarchical bifactor models, such as numerous Heywood cases and out-of-bound parameter estimates, which rendered them unfit as optimal representations of ADHD in adolescence. These findings and the implications of the best fitting model of ADHD in adolescence suggest that a possible reorganization of this disorder may eventually aid clinicians in the accurate diagnosis of ADHD in adolescents.