PROMOTING LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR CHILD PROTECTION: A COMMUNITY ANALYSIS

The Colorado Occupant Protection Project (COPP) intervention provided police with brief instruction concerning the importance of citations for drivers' failure to use child safety seats and special coupons to accompany citations. Coupons were exchangeable by drivers for a safety seat and brief training in its use, plus a waiver of the $50 citation fine. Over 4.5 years of archival records were employed, using an ABA design and a comparison community to evaluate the program. Few tickets were issued for nonuse of safety seats during the 3-year baseline in either community. Citations for nonuse of safety seats increased to over 50 per month during the intervention period at the test site, whereas rates remained essentially zero at the comparison site. After the COPP intervention was removed at the intervention site, citation rates for nonuse of safety seats decreased to about 15 per month. Differences between intervention conditions and settings were statistically significant. During the intervention, officers were 44 times more likely to write citations than were controls. Results suggested that a behavioral program can increase police citation writing for child protection purposes.     

Task bias and the accuracy of judgment: Setting a baseline for expected group performance

When a judgment task evokes unbiased estimates (i.e. the errors in individual judgments are distributed randomly around the true value), mathematical aggregation of individual estimates, even by a simple arithmetic mean, often will outperform all group members. However, when a task evokes biased estimates, mathematical aggregation does not perform so well. In this study, simulated data were accumulated to specify the expected' accuracy of mathematical aggregation relative to the accuracy of observed judgment of individual group members under varying conditions of task bias. Three types of judgment tasks were employed: (1) single-estimate, holistic tasks, (2) multiple-estimate, ranking tasks, and (3) multi-cue, decomposed tasks. Findings indicated across all task types that a large percentage of judgment-making group estimates formed strictly by computing the arithmetic mean of individual estimates performed better than their most capable members when a judgment task evoked little or no bias, a result particularly pronounced for ranking tasks. When the task was more greatly bias-evoking, a large percentage of parallel groups performed more poorly than average (or median) members, again a pattern more starkly evident for ranking tasks. These results suggest that the extent to which a judgment task evokes bias in a population of prospective group members is an important explanatory variable deserving much greater attention in the study of group performance. For example, an assertion about the efficacy of a particular group intervention based on a reliable demonstration of group performance as accurate as the most capable members may be unfounded when a task evokes no bias, since the baseline standard under such conditions should be much higher. By selecting tasks and populations that jointly produced highly biased estimates, researchers can lower the performance floor enough to detect (with reasonably small samples of groups) experimental effects should they occur.     

A ray of light about frozen embryos.

The Tennessee Supreme Court's decision in Davis v. Davis, a case that raises the question of how to allocate frozen embryos in the event of divorce, addresses many of the legal issues posed by in vitro fertilization. The decision considers the interests of the progenitors as well as of the children who may result. For example, the court held that gamete providers' discretion regarding the disposition of embryos can be limited only when their decisions would harm the children who might be born. The court also made clear that efforts to seek genetic parenthood are protected only when accompanied by a desire to raise the resulting children, a conclusion that also affects other reproductive technologies. In addition to elaborating an analytic framework, the court set guidelines for resolving disputes when the couples had made no prior agreements, including holding that while the embryos are ex-utero the desire to avoid genetic parenthood almost always trumps the wish to become a parent. The well-reasoned analysis in Davis v. Davis should help shape legal and ethical discussion regarding the use of in vitro fertilization for many years to come.     

Oculomotor readiness and covert orienting: Differences between central and peripheral precues

The costs produced by invalid precues can depend on the spatial relationship between the cued location and the target location. If oculomotor programs mediate attention shifts, then the effect of varying the spatial relation between the cue and target should be the same for covert orienting (indexed by manual responses) and saccadic responses. We found this to be true only for central precues. With central precues, both manual and saccadic costs were greater when cue and target occurred on opposite sides of the vertical meridian than when they occurred on the same side. With peripheral precues, there were no meridian effects in either response condition, but there was a significant dissociation in the pattern of saccadic and manual costs. For manual responses costs were greater when the target was eccentric relative to the cue, whereas for saccades costs were greater when the cue was eccentric to the target. These results provide additional support for the idea that different orienting mechanisms are engaged by central and peripheral precues. They further suggest that the relationship between oculomotor and attentional orienting may depend on the nature of the precue, with the potential for interdependence being greater with central precues.     

Coping strategies and diastolic blood pressure

An organizational field study involving 95 civil service employees examined the ways these individuals coped with the stressful events of their daily living. Lazarus' cognitive-phenomenological analysis of psychological stress provided the theoretical framework. Subjects indicated on Lazarus' Ways of Coping Checklist those coping thoughts and actions used in the specific encounter described as stressful. As hypothesized, individuals experiencing higher diastolic blood pressure were more likely to cope using strategies characterized by wishful thinking, avoidance, and minimization of threat than were individuals exhibiting lower blood pressure. Implications from both an individual and organizational perspective are discussed.     

Psychological conceptions of randomness

This article presents a critique of the concept of randomness as it occurs in the psychological literature. The first section of our article outlines the significance of a concept of randomness to the process of induction; we need to distinguish random and non-random events in order to perceive lawful regularities and formulate theories concerning events in the world. Next we evaluate the psychological research that has suggested that human concepts of randomness are not normative. We argue that, because the tasks set to experimental subjects are logically problematic, observed biases may be an artifact of the experimental situation and that even if such biases do generalise they may not have pejorative implications for induction in the real world. Thirdly we investigate the statistical methodology utilised in tests for randomness and find it riddled with paradox. In a fourth section we find various branches of scientific endeavour that are stymied by the problems posed by randomness. Finally we briefly mention the social significance of randomness and conclude by arguing that such a fundamental concept merits and requires more serious considerations.     

HIV counselling in the national blood transfusion service

The problems caused for the NBTS by the advent of HIV are reviewed, with particular reference to the impact on blood donor numbers, the strategies adopted to minimise the risk of HIV infection through blood transfusion, and the counselling dilemmas faced by the Service in the setting of the blood donor clinic. The notification procedure for blood donors found anti-HIV positive is described, with the importance of confirmation of such results before approach to the donor emphasised. Counselling issues arising from indeterminate and false positive lest results are explored and those arising from enquiries generated by cases of possible post-transfusion HIV infection are examined.     

Conversational skills for autistic adolescents: An autistic peer as prompter

In this study, an autistic youth served as peer prompter for three other autistic adolescents. The peer prompter encouraged the other boys to talk about sports, a topic frequently discussed by typical teenagers. A multiple-baseline design across participants was used to assess the effectiveness of the peer-prompting procedure. During baseline, the youth rarely talked about sports, although all three had previously completed a sports-appreciation class and had displayed large pre-to-post gains on a paper-and-pencil test. During intervention, when a peer prompted sports discussions, all three youth engaged in much more sports-related conversation. Generalization measures indicated that: (1) the youth engaged in sports discussions in groups, as well as in the dyads that characterized the training situation; (2) they talked about sports in a setting other than the training setting; (3) they discussed sports with their peers when an unfamiliar teacher was present; and (4) they continued to discuss sports when training tapes and behavioral contracts between the teacher and the peer prompter were withdrawn. Previously, it has been common to use nonhandicapped or less-handicapped peers as tutors; this study demonstrates that an autistic youth may also effectively serve as a prompter who assists his schoolmates in acquiring conversational skills that contribute to their normalization.     

The role of visual information in the processing of

Visual information provided by a talker’s mouth movements can influence the perception of certain speech features. Thus, the “McGurk effect” shows that when the syllable /bi/ is presented audibly, in synchrony with the syllable /gi/, as it is presented visually, a person perceives the talker as saying /di/. Moreover, studies have shown that interactions occur between place and voicing features in phonetic perception, when information is presented audibly. In our first experiment, we asked whether feature interactions occur when place information is specified by a combination of auditory and visual information. Members of an auditory continuum ranging from /ibi/ to /ipi/ were paired with a video display of a talker saying /igi/. The auditory tokens were heard as ranging from /ibi/ to /ipi/, but the auditory-visual tokens were perceived as ranging from /idi/ to /iti/. The results demonstrated that the voicing boundary for the auditory-visual tokens was located at a significantly longer VOT value than the voicing boundary for the auditory continuum presented without the visual information. These results demonstrate that place-voice interactions are not limited to situations in which place information is specified audibly. In three follow-up experiments, we show that (1) the voicing boundary is not shifted in the absence of a change in the global percept, even when discrepant auditory-visual information is presented; (2) the number of response alternatives provided for the subjects does not affect the categorization or the VOT boundary of the auditory-visual stimuli; and (3) the original effect of a VOT boundary shift is not replicated when subjects are forced by instruction to \ldrelabel\rd the /b-p/auditory stimuli as/d/or/t/. The subjects successfully relabeled the stimuli, but no shift in the VOT boundary was observed.