Child and adolescent psychopathology research: Problems and prospects for the 1990s

In November 1990 the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) convened a special conference of over 100 scientists and leaders to outline specific strategies and research initiatives that should be developed to implement the recently released National Plan for Research on Child and Adolescent Mental Disorders.Participants included journal editors, educators from psychology and psychiatry, representatives from private foundations, and leaders of research program areas in public funding agencies. Critical knowledge gaps were identified in five areas of child and adolescent psychopathology, including depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, the anxiety disorders, and the developmental disorders. For each of these areas, special emphasis was placed on developing new ideas and obtaining critical input from other areas of investigation. This report summarizes the identified research gaps and recommends research initiatives to implement the National Plan, as outlined by the conference participants.     

Child protection dilemmas in a 'not-existing' pattern of abuse

Three cases from a larger review of child abuse inquiry reports are discussed. The abuse the children suffered is termed 'not-existing' because they had been shut away until they perished. Interaction between the children's caretakers and the child protection professionals is examined within a revised framework of the double-bind.     

A Power Test of Conceptual Complexity: Textual Correlates1

Conceptual complexity is a personality characteristic that involves the individual's ability to differentiate and integrate aspects of information. It is usu ally measured with the Paragraph Completion Test (PCT), which requires the completion of six paragraphs, in response to standard stems, often with a time limit of 100-120 sec each. In order to eliminate time pressure, which may reduce complexity, the current study evaluated a revised format that used only two stems but allowed 8 minutes per response. As expected, this procedure resulted in higher scores and produced enough written output to allow analysis of particular test components. Complexity scores from 277 university students were related to total number of words written, sentence length, and number of words with more than three syllables, but not to standard formulae designed to measure readability, such as the Flesch, SMOG and FOG indices. The modest size of the obtained correlations suggests that the scoring of conceptual complexity on the basis of semantic content cannot be replaced by indices based on linguistic and textual components.     

Embeddability,syntax, and semantics in accounts of scientific theories

Recently several philosophers of science have proposed what has come to be known as the semantic account of scientific theories. It is presented as an improvement on the positivist account, which is now called the syntactic account of scientific theories. Bas van Fraassen claims that the syntactic account does not give a satisfactory definition of empirical adequacy and empirical equivalence. He contends that his own semantic account does define these notations acceptably, through the concept of embeddability, a concept which he claims cannot be defined syntactically. Here, I define a syntactic relation which corresponds to the semantic relation of embeddability. I suggest that the critical differences between the positivist account and van Fraassen's account have nothing to do with the distinction between semantics and syntax.     

Rate variables and automatized naming in developmental dyslexia

The rate variable in rapid automatized naming (RAN) was investigated in 50 adolescent and 40 adult students with developmental dyslexia, in matched normal controls, and in learning-disabled students without reading difficulties. Visual stimuli depicting familiar colors and common objects were presented in isolation at three film speeds and three exposure times. Film speed and exposure time contributed as independent variables to error rate; and dyslexic subjects of both age groups made significantly more naming errors than controls. Dyslexic subjects also responded with longer naming latencies than controls when the same RAN stimuli were presented in a continuous sequential mode as a matrix of rows and columns. Naming latencies in the sequential presentation were highly correlated with naming errors in the film version. The implications of reduced naming rates for nongraphological stimuli in developmental dyslexia are discussed.     

Prediction and prejudice

Evidence that supports a theory may be available to the scientist who constructs the theory and used as a guide to that construction, or it may only be discovered in the course of testing the theory. The central claim of this essay is that information about whether the evidence was accommodated or predicted affects the rational degree of confidence one ought to have in the theory. Only when the evidence is accommodated is there some reason to believe that the theoretical system was ‘fudged’ to fit the evidence in a way that weakens support. This weakening is an objective matter, but not one that can be conclusively determined by examining the contents of the theory and its logical relationship to the evidence. Consequently, there is less reason to believe a theory on the basis of that evidence when it is known that the evidence was accommodated than there would be if it was known instead that the same evidence had been predicted.     

Scotching the Dutch Book Argument

Consistent application of coherece arguments shows that fair betting quotients are subject to constraints that are too stringent to allow their identification with either degrees of belief or probabilities. The pivotal role of fair betting quotients in the Dutch Book Argument, which is said to demonstrate that a rational agent's degrees of belief are probabilities, is thus undermined from both sides.     

Inquiry into intentional systems I: Issues in ecological physics

Summary The role of intention in guiding the behavior of goal-directed systems is a problem that continues to challenge behavioral science. While it is generally agreed that intentional systems must be consistent with the laws of physics, there are many obvious differences between inanimate, physical systems and sentient, intentional systems. This suggests that there must be constraints over and above those of physics that govern goal-directed behavior. In this paper it is suggested that generic properties of self-organizing mechanisms may play a central role in the origin and evolution of intentional constraints. The properties of self-organizing systems are first introduced in the context of simple physical systems and then extended to a complex (biological) system. Whereas behavior of an inanimate physical system is lawfully determined by force fields, behavior of an animate biological system is lawfully specified by information fields. Biological systems are distinguished from simple physical systems in terms of their ubiquitous use of information fields as special (biological and psychological, social, etc.) boundary conditions on classical laws. Unlike classical constraints (boundary conditions), informational constraints can vary with time and state of the system. Because of the nonstationarity of the boundary conditions, the dynamic of the system can follow a complex trajectory that is organized by a set of spatially and temporally distributed equilibrium points or regions. It is suggested that this equilibrium set and the laws that govern its transformation define a minimal requirement for an intentional system. One of the benefits of such an approach is that it suggests a realist account for the origin of semantic predicates, thereby providing a basis for the development of a theory of symbolic dynamics. Therefore, the principles of self-organization provide a comprehensive basis for investigating intentional systems by suggesting how it is that intentions arise, and by providing a lawful basis for intentional behavior that reveals how organisms become and remain lawfully informed in the pursuit of their goals.