Symptoms of depression in older home-care patients: patient and informant reports

The purpose of this study was to examine the level of agreement and patterns of disagreement between home-care patient and informant reports of depressive symptoms. The authors interviewed a sample of 355 older home-care patients and their informants using the Structured Diagnostic Interview for DSM-IV (R. L. Spitzer, M. Gibbon, & J. B. Williams, 1995). Informants reported more psychological symptoms than patients, and this type of discrepancy was higher for patients with cognitive impairment and patients who had younger informants. Younger informants also reported more cognitive symptoms, whereas patients were more likely to report suicidal thoughts or ideation if they were not cognitively impaired. The patterns of these discrepancies may reflect age- and cohort-related response bias in the reports of depressive symptoms obtained from older adults.     

Relations between psychopathy facets and externalizing in a criminal offender sample

The construct of psychopathy is viewed as comprising distinctive but correlated affective-interpersonal and social deviance facets. Here, we examined these facets of Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) in terms of their associations with the externalizing dimension of adult psychopathology, defined as the common factor underlying symptoms of conduct disorder, adult antisocial behavior, alcohol use/abuse, and drug abuse, along with disinhibitory personality traits. Correlational analyses revealed a strong relationship between this externalizing dimension and the social deviance facet of psychopathy (r = .84), and a lesser relationship with the emotional-interpersonal component (r = .44). Structural models controlling for the moderate overlap between the PCL-R factors revealed that externalizing was substantially related to the unique variance in the social deviance features of psychopathy, but unrelated to the unique variance of the emotional and interpersonal features whether modeled together or as separate factors. These results indicate that the social deviance factor of the PCL-R reflects the externalizing dimension of psychopathology, whereas the emotional-interpersonal component taps something distinct aside from externalizing. In addition, based on our finding of an association between PCL-R social deviance and externalizing, we were able to predict new relations between this facet of psychopathy and criterion variables, including nicotine use and gambling, that have previously been linked to externalizing. Implications for future research on the causes and correlates of psychopathy are discussed.     

Avoiding degeneracy in multidimensional unfolding by penalizing on the coefficient of variation

Multidimensional unfolding methods suffer from the degeneracy problem in almost all circumstances. Most degeneracies are easily recognized: the solutions are perfect but trivial, characterized by approximately equal distances between points from different sets. A definition of an absolutely degenerate solution is proposed, which makes clear that these solutions only occur when an intercept is present in the transformation function. Many solutions for the degeneracy problem have been proposed and tested, but with little success so far. In this paper, we offer a substantial modification of an approach initiated bythat introduced a normalization factor based on thevariance in the usual least squares loss function. Heiser unpublishedthesis, (1981) and showed that the normalization factor proposed by Kruskal and Carroll was not strong enough to avoid degeneracies. The factor proposed in the present paper, based on the coefficient of variation, discourages or penalizes nonmetric transformations of the proximities with small variation, so that the procedure steers away from solutions with small variation in the interpoint distances. An algorithm is described for minimizing the re-adjusted loss function, based on iterative majorization. The results of a simulation study are discussed, in which the optimal range of the penalty parameters is determined. Two empirical data sets are analyzed by our method, clearly showing the benefits of the proposed loss function.The authors would like to thank the editor, an associate editor, and three reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of this work.This revised article was published online in August 2005 with the PDF paginated correctly.     

Impact of a System of Care on a Community's Children's Social Services System

Researchers and practitioners have questioned how the implementation of a system of care influences the broader context of children's social services within a community. We examined the impact that the Dawn Project system of care had on children's services in Marion County, Indiana. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to gain a broad understanding of stakeholder perspectives related to how system-level and other community leaders viewed system of care influences. Qualitative analyses uncovered several common themes including positive impact at the community level, challenges to implementation, and feelings of ambivalence related to program impact. Results were generally positive and suggested that most respondents saw core system of care principles beginning to emerge within the community related to the establishment of the care system. In addition, challenges to implementing the system of care also were uncovered, including some underlying resistance to system-level changes. Implications from our study highlight the importance of continuously working to enhance strengths and collaboration among systems, integrate and coordinate across systems and services, and authentically involve families at all levels.     

Conscious intention and motor cognition

The subjective experience of conscious intention is a key component of our mental life. Philosophers studying 'conscious free will' have discussed whether conscious intentions could cause actions, but modern neuroscience rejects this idea of mind-body causation. Instead, recent findings suggest that the conscious experience of intending to act arises from preparation for action in frontal and parietal brain areas. Intentional actions also involve a strong sense of agency, a sense of controlling events in the external world. Both intention and agency result from the brain processes for predictive motor control, not merely from retrospective inference.     

L'Argument probabiliste pour une logique non classique de la mécanique quantique

Sans résuméJe désire remercier Jean et Claudine Donio pour la traduction de cet article à partir du manuscrit anglais.     

The effects of noncontingent reinforcement on task disengagement following failure of differential reinforcement treatment

Following the failure of applications of differential reinforcement (DR), the effects of reinforcement delivered noncontingently (NCR) on task disengagement and task completion were evaluated within reversal designs for three children with autism spectrum disorder. In Experiment 1, we compared DR and NCR schedules that combined positive and negative reinforcement. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results of Experiment 1 and then evaluated NCR schedules composed solely of negative reinforcement and NCR schedules that combined negative reinforcement with high-or low-preferred stimuli. In Experiment 3, we further analyzed NCR schedules that included different types and qualities of positive reinforcement, but without the inclusion of negative reinforcement. The results showed that NCR schedules using positive reinforcers can be effective as a treatment for task disengagement, but the type and preference of the reinforcer can alter effectiveness. These results are interpreted in terms of the motivating operations associated with task disengagement.     

FIXED-TIME SCHEDULES ATTENUATE EXTINCTION-INDUCED PHENOMENA IN THE TREATMENT OF SEVERE ABERRANT BEHAVIOR

We compared the effects of extinction (EXT) and fixed-time (FT) schedules as treatment for severe problem behavior displayed by 3 individuals with developmental disabilities. First, functional analyses identified the reinforcers maintaining aberrant behavior for all 3 individuals. Next, EXT and FT schedules were compared using a multielement design. During EXT, the reinforcer maintaining problem behavior was withheld. During FT, the reinforcers were presented response independently at preset intervals. Results showed that FT schedules were generally more effective than EXT schedules in reducing aberrant behavior. FT schedules may be used in situations when extinction-induced phenomena are problematic.