Priming and recognition in ECT-induced amnesia

Priming and recognition were tested in patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for treatment of a psychiatric disorder. Patients studied a list of words just prior to ECT and then received memory tests for those words after recovering from ECT. Stem-cued recall was poor (retrograde amnesia), but priming on word-stem completion was preserved. Recognition was poor on a “high-criterion” test requiring a retrieval-based judgment but partially intact on a “low-criterion” test requiring a familiarity-based judgment. The results support the familiarity-retrieval distinction in two-component theories of recognition and suggest that signal detection measures of sensitivity are not wholly independent of response criteria.     

An Attributional (Causal Dimensional) Analysis of Perceptions of Sexual Harassment1

Female and male subjects read one of three scenarios depicting a social-sexual interaction between a man and a woman. The scenarios varied in severity of the stimulus male's behavior according to whether sexual harassment had occurred. Subjects then rated the offensiveness of his behavior and whether it constituted sexual harassment. Subjects also rated the stimulus male's behavior on Weiner's (1986) three basic dimensions of causality: locus of causality, or the perceived cause of the behavior as internal or external; stability, or the likelihood of its recurrence; and controllability, or the amount of volitional influence he exercised during the interaction. Additionally, subjects reported their anger at the target male and sympathy for the target female. Findings generally indicated that for both women and men, as the scenarios increased in severity, these ratings were elevated. Gender comparisons also showed elevations in these ratings for female but not for male subjects, and only in the scenarios of lesser severity. Regression analyses revealed attribution variables—control, stability, and anger—as reliable predictors of perceived offensiveness and harassment in the most severe scenario, whereas affects were the most reliable predictors in scenarios of lesser severity. The implications of these findings for perception of sexual harassment are discussed.     

Do women and men receive different care for sore throats?

Several studies have shown differences in the rates at which women and men receive treatment for several common medical problems, especially heart disease. The reason for these differences and the extent to which men and women receive different treatments for other problems is unclear. The purpose of the current study was to determine whether there are differences in the rates men and women receive antibiotic therapy for pharyngitis (sore throat), whether these differences are related to differences in disease severity or comorbidity across the sexes, and whether these differences could be due to prejudice against women by male clinicians. This was a retrospective analysis of data at two university student health services in Pennsylvania and Nebraska. Male clinicians did not prescribe antibiotics at significantly different rates for male and female patients, but female clinicians prescribed antibiotics more frequently for their male patients.The original data collection was supported in part by a grant from the National Library of Medicine, LM-04321.Presented in part at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making, Portland, Oregon, October, 1992, and at the Third Primary Care Research Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 1993.We thank Jane Kreisberg and Linda Rizjis for coordination of the collection of the original data, Linda Gray for help with data entry, and Cheryl Kull and Mary Martino for secretarial support. We are grateful to all the physicians who participated in the original study.     

The snodgrass picture fragment completion test: Alternate-form reliability

In two studies, the alternate-form reliability of the Snodgrass picture fragment completion test of implicit memory (Snodgrass, Smith, Feenan, & Corwin, 1987) was examined. In this test, identification thresholds are established for fragmented pictures. The same fragmented pictures are then shown again, intermixed with new fragmented pictures. Implicit memory is indicated by a decrease in identification threshold from the first to second presentation. Alternate-form reliability was low to moderate, depending on the measure used, regardless of the length of the test. A third study showed that explicit memory instructions did not increase the reliability. Recommendations for use of the test in correlational and experimental research are presented.     

Psychopathic Personality Traits in Relation to Self-report Delinquency in Adolescence: Should We Mind About Interaction Effects?

The aim of the present study was to investigate if interaction effects among Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI) Grandiose-Manipulative (GM), Callous-Unemotional (CU), and Impulsive-Irresponsible (II) may add significant information in predicting self-reports of juvenile delinquent behavior among adolescents. A sample of 558 Italian high school students were administered the YPI and the Self-Reports of Delinquency Scale (SRDS) in order to evaluate interaction effects among YPI GM, CU, and II dimensions. Results showed a significant effect for a three-way interaction among the three YPI dimensions in predicting the SRDS total score, β?=?.19, p?<?.01. In conclusion, the findings seem to underline that a three-factor model of psychopathy may help clinicians and researchers in predicting self-reported delinquency better than the individual factors.     

Moltmann and the Anti-Monotheism Movement

Building on the discredited work of Erik Peterson, Jürgen Moltman insists that monotheism is a foreign philosophical influence that corrupted Christianity into validating political domination. Christianity should renounce monotheism in favor of trinitarianism. Moltmann's trinitarian God, however, can never actually exist, but must always be coming from the future, lest it lose its condition of being in presence. Moltmann's future orientation serves as a heuristic to induce eschatological human community. The cost of accepting Moltmann's anti-monotheism undermines Christianity's moorings in Judaism and the trinitarian relations of an actually existing God, all for the sake of repudiating monotheism's ambiguous political significance.     

Psychopathy and Anxiety in Children and Adolescents: New Insights on Developmental Pathways to Offending

This study examined the relation between psychopathy and anxiety in 130 juvenile offenders. Adolescents were administered three psychopathy scales (PCL-YV, APSD, and SRP-II), a measure of psychopathology (APS), and subsequently followed prospectively in the community for three years in order to track recidivism. Three mediational models were tested to determine whether psychopathy mediates the relation between anxiety (trait anxiety, fearlessness, and trauma) and future offending. Findings indicated that psychopathy mediated the relation between two types of anxiety (trait anxiety and fearlessness) and recidivism when using the PCL-YV as an index for psychopathy. These influences were not supported when using self-report measures of psychopathy (APSD and SRP-II) and the meditational models did not apply to the anxiety subtype of trauma for any of the psychopathy measures. The PCL-YV mediational models provide new insights on the relation between psychopathy anxiety and offending. Specifically, pathways from fearlessness to psychopathy and later offending were in the expected direction. Surprisingly, higher levels of trait anxiety were linked with higher levels of psychopathy and subsequent offending. This developmental difference is in contrast with theory and the adult literature on this topic. The results from the current study suggest that both fear and anxiety may be important considerations in treatment planning for the reduction of adolescent offending.     

Judgment and Response Processes across Two Knowledge Domains

Wallsten and Gonzalez-Vallejo (1994) developed the Stochastic Judgment Model to account for true-false judgment and response processes in a single well-defined knowledge domain. This paper generalizes the model to a four-category rating task that encompasses two knowledge domains simultaneously. It then applies the model to an experiment in which Ph.D. students in history and English literature rated confidence in the truth of statements in both domains, and also decided which statement within a pair consisting of one from each domain was more likely true. Constrained versions of the general model fit the rating data very well and accurately predicted the pair-comparison (PC) choices. The results suggest that (a) the mean distance between the true and false statement distributions of confidence was greater in the better known domain; (b) judged confidence variability is greater in the domain of greater knowledge; while simultaneously (c) criterion variability is constant across domains; (d) the extreme response criteria are located symmetrically around the central one; which (e) is located to yield the usual bias to call statements true. Finally, cross-domain PC choices were very well predicted by assuming that respondents judged only the statement in the single domain they knew better and not well predicted by the more common assumption that they compare their levels of confidence in the two statements. Implications for the underlying cognitive processes are discussed including the effects of expertise.