References for motor tasks--gender differences across age in motor performance: a meta-analysis

In 1985 we published a meta-analysis of gender differences across age in motor performance in Psychological Bulletin, but it did not include an indexing of each motor task to the references from which it was obtained. This paper provides a table listing the 20 motor tasks and the references from which data for each task were taken. The range of tasks was from fundamental movements (e.g., catching, jumping, running, throwing) to motor fitness (e.g., agility, arm hang, balance, grip strength) to perceptual-motor abilities (e.g., anticipation timing, fine eye-motor coordination, pursuit-rotor tracking, reaction time). The arm hang was represented in the fewest papers (n = 2) while the dash and long jump were most frequently referenced (n = 21).     

Book Reviews

The Psychological Record -     

Implications of memory and language dysfunction in the naming deficit of senile dementia

Young normals, elderly normals, and patients with either mild-to-moderate or severe senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT) were administered several tests of language function and remote memory. On all of the language tests examined, elderly normals exhibited a mild, nonsignificant performance decrement relative to the young normals. Advanced SDAT patients were markedly impaired on all of the tests. Early dementia patients were most impaired, relative to aged normals, on tests of object naming, category instance fluency, and remote memory. The deficit was smaller on the WAIS vocabulary subtest, on selecting the name of a visually presented object, and on recalling the function of an object. Early SDAT patients were least impaired in selecting the picture of an object after its name had been provided and in selecting objects that belong to a specified functional category. The results are consistent with the notion that the language dysfunction in early SDAT is due to a deficit in semantic memory function in which general, categorical information remains available whereas information about specific attributes becomes less accessible. The object naming test might be useful in the assessment of treatment effects upon SDAT because of its sensitivity and specificity to dementia, its high face validity, and its independence of recent memory.     

Work site group meetings and the effectiveness of a televised smoking cessation intervention

At the work site, smoking accounts for increased health care expenses and worker absenteeism due to smoking-related illness and reduced productivity and lost wages. Developing comprehensive and accessible smoking cessation programs at the work site is an important objective for health care professionals. In this study, employees of 43 corporations participated in a televised smoking cessation program accompanied by self-help manuals. The media component involved presenting a smoking cessation program on a network television affiliate station during the 4:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. news for 20 days. Employees at half the corporations also had access to semiweekly self-help group meetings. Adding self-help support groups to a program involving self-help manuals and the media reports was found to significantly increase abstinence and its maintenance over time. The implications of using the media, self-help groups, and work site locations in large-scale community-based interventions are discussed.     

The effects of commitment to threats and promises upon bargaining behaviour and outcomes

The course of bargaining is determined in part by interdependent individuals exchanging messages so as to influence other's behaviour, and thereby to increase the likelihood of achieving outcomes consistent with their own goals. The communication of threats and promises are two major message strategies that are employed to influence the behaviour of others in a bargaining relationship. The present study examines the effects of players' level of commitment to these forms of message strategies upon behaviour in a duopoly bargaining task. Past research has oprationalized commitment in terms of the consistency with which an individual has followed through on threats or promises in the past. In the present research, Becker's (1960) concept of a side-bet is employed to provide an alternative means for defining and manipulating commitment. A side-bet obtains when either a threatener or a promiser posts a valued resource, say a bond, which they forfeit if they do not follow through on their stated threat or promise. The main expectations of the present study were that increased commitment to threat meassages would lead to more competitive behaviour and outcomes within a duopoly bargaining task, whereas increased commitment to promise messages would produce more cooperative behaviour and outcomes. Partial support for these major expectations, as well as confirmation of a number of secondary expectations, was obtained.     

The effects of continuous phonation on Xenon-inhalation air curves (of the kind used in deriving regional cerebral blood flow)

Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) may be measured with inhalation techniques that use end-expired values of radioactivity to estimate the isotope concentration in arterial blood. These end-expired data are used as an input function in a mathematical equation to derive rCBF. End-expired air is assumed normally to be in equilibrium with the arterial blood at the alveolar surface of the lung during regular (passive) breathing; this assumption may not be valid during continuous phonation. We therefore have analyzed breathing (inhalation/exhalation) patterns and end-expired radioactivity (¹³³Xe) during (1) speaking, (2) singing, and (3) humming of the national anthem, and also during (4) passive breathing. Statistically significant differences in breathing patterns were measured between a group of nonmusicians and two groups of musicians (singers) during the phonation tasks: The nonmusicians breathed more often (and more rapidly) and exhibited less variability in their breathing patterns than did the musicians. Notwithstanding these differences, the shapes of smoothed functions derived from the end-expired values were not influenced appreciably during phonation (except possibly during talking). The latter finding suggests that estimates of rCBF derived with these data should not be confounded seriously because of the continuous phonation.     

Discovery as correction

In recent years, there have been some attempts to defend the legitimacy of a non-inductive generative logic of discovery whose strategy is to analyze a variety of constraints on the actual generation of explanatory hypotheses. These proposed new theories, however, are only weakly generative (relying on sophisticated processes of elimination) rather than strongly generative (embodying processes of correction).This paper develops a strongly generative theory which holds that we can come to know something new only as a variant of what we already know — and that the novelty of this variant is not thereby eliminated nor beyond our powers of characterization, a double requirement that is vital for resolving the Meno paradox. In this light, the discovery of a new hypothesis is taken as the correction of an antecedent hypothesis in response to the discrepancies between the predictions generated by that antecedent hypothesis and the desired result (e.g. the actual data to be explained). This process comprises two parallel operations: the first, which demonstrates the positive role of the facts in generating new explanations, involves a mapping between multiple hypotheses and sets of predictions generated from those hypotheses, for the purpose of taking the actual data as a determinable variant of neighboring sets of predictions. This mapping permits the facts to indicate how corrective adjustments in the working hypothesis should be made; the second operation, which demonstrates the positive role of explanations in generating new facts, involves a mapping between differently construed versions of the actual data and the conceptualizations derived from those perceptual versions, for the purpose of taking the working hypothesis as a determinable variant of these neighboring conceptualizations. This mapping permits a given hypothesis to generate predictions increasingly closer to the actual facts.The proposed theory provides the basis for a reformed conception of justification. Because hypotheses are meaningful only as variants of neighboring hypotheses, and because such variation is corrective, their justification in the reformed sense will incorporate not only their justification in the traditional sense, but their generation as well.     

Separating the redundancy of voicing from nasality in American English

This paper reports the results of a study designed to separate the voicing redundancy from nasality in American English and to determine their individual saliencies. Sixty-seven subjects judged the similarity of nonnasal pairs versus nasal pairs of CV and VC nonsense syllables on a 5-point magnitude-estimation task. The 80 stimuli were constructed to control and to demand subjects' cognitive strategies for coping with redundancy rather than experimental manipulation of the data. They were developed from the consonantal repertoire of / b d g m n p t k / paired with the vowels / i a u /, totaling 72 pairs of dyads. Eight additional stimuli of similar structure, testing multifeature and identity contrasts, were included to monitor the validity of the experimental procedure. Results indicated that (a) speech redundancy can be circumvented cognitively, (b) nasality was more salient (different) than voicing, and (c) a recency effect was found. These findings are discussed in reference to existing data.     

Risk factors and the Child Behavior Checklist in a child mental health center setting

The relationship between risk factors and the severity and type of childhood disorder, as measured by parent-completed Child Behavior Checklists, was examined for 768 children, ages 4–16, seen at a child mental health center. Regression analyses revealed no significant relationships between any combination of risk factors and the total number of behavior problems, internalizing, or externalizing scores for the entire group, males and females separately, or for the age and sex groupings of 6- to 11- and 12-to 16-yearolds. Chi-square tests revealed no relationship of profile type with any risk factor or with total number of risk factors. Implications for broad-based child assessment and risk factor research within a clinical population are discussed.We wish to thank Orin Bolstad, Linda Magnuson, and Julian Taplin for their assistance in this project.