Late onset of alcoholism among older midwestern men in treatment

60 men were administered a questionnaire to assess whether the prevalence of alcoholism in men over 60 years of age in alcoholism treatment centers parallels the reported rates of late-onset for one-third or more alcoholics. Analysis showed 11% of the subjects were of late onset while 33% were quasilate onset. There were no significant differences in the life stress between alcoholics of early and later onset.     

The cognitive interview: Its origins,empirical support,evaluation and practical implications

This paper provides a background to current research on the cognitive interview (CI), which is a set of cognitive retrieval techniques designed to facilitate memory search (for example, via reinstatement of contextual cues). One of the principal aims of this research is to identify and develop techniques which police investigators can themselves use. A series of studies were conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles, using police officers as interviewers and students, non-students and children as witnesses to realistic crimes. In all studies the CI elicited significantly more correct information with no apparent increase in errors or confabulations. The CI has been tested in a field study involving police officers in Florida. This paper will critically review this research, as well as more recent unpublished work including CI studies conducted in Germany and the UK. Some important modifications of the original CI procedure are described, and there is a theoretical discussion and explanation of the various components of the CI procedure. Finally, we will consider applications of the CI in clinical and organizational settings.     

Teaching minority high school students to recruit helpers to attain personal and educational goals

Recruiting help from mentors and other potential helpers is a promising strategy for helping disadvantaged and minority youths meet their personal and educational goals. Three African-American high school seniors participated in a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training procedures that would allow them to ask for help in attaining educational and other personal goals. A behavioral training procedure that included instructional materials, role-play practice, praise, and feedback was used. Targeted skills included goal setting and 30 responses involved in the process of meeting with a potential helper. Role-play situations were used to evaluate participants' help-recruiting skills before and after training. Participants increased their help-recruiting skills from an average of 38% during baseline, to an average of 75% after training. Self-reported measures of goal attainment suggested that the students benefited from the training. Implications for mentoring programs designed to increase minority students' opportunities to reach educational goals were discussed.     

Vocal changes in stutterers and nonstutterers when speaking to children

Within the last few years, considerable attention has been devoted to the possibility that the amelioration of stuttering in many novel speaking conditions is a function of vocal changes with or without accompanying modifications in prosodic expression. These formulations have made reference primarily to conditions in which stutterers were induced into one or another novel speech pattern by an external stimulus such as masking noise, a rhythmic cue, or by instructions to sing, or read in unison with another speaker. In contrast, far less attention has been paid to other ameliorative conditions that lack a novel external stimulus or special instructions that direct the stutterer to speak in some unique manner. Speaking or reading to a child is an example of this latter type of condition. The present study was conducted to see if nine adult stutterers and a matched group of nonstutterers would evince vocal changes as they read aloud to another adult, a child, and a child and adult together. There was also a fourth control condition wherein the subjects read to one of the experimenters. Dependent measures of disfluency and stuttering, fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency deviation, fluent reading rate, and peak vocal sound pressure level were made and treated statistically. The major findings of this study indicated that, relative to the control condition, both subject groups exhibited several vocal changes when reading to a child alone and to a child and adult together. In addition, the stutterers experienced a reduction in disfluency, but only when reading to the child alone. The normal speakers exhibited too few disfluencies in the control condition for any meaningful change to occur in that dependent variable. The fact that the stutterers evinced vocal changes in both experimental conditions but a significant drop in disfluency in just one bears importantly on hypotheses that emphasize vocal changes in conditions that ameliorate stuttering.     

A microcomputer-based system for continuous measurement of rodent food intake

A microcomputer-based system is described for the automatic acquisition, storage, and analysis of rodent food intakes. The feed-o-meter provides reliable, valid measurements of consumption, with minute-by-minute accuracy of ?.03 g.     

Behavior analysis of cigarette smoking

Patterns of cigarette smoking, treated as series of discrete events in time, were investigated with a variety of quantitative techniques designed to characterize individual subject smoking series and to illuminate the relationship between cigarette smoking and environmental events. Data were collected from a total of 35 subjects who were either participants in residential laboratory studies or in a smoking cessation program. Cigarette smoking events were found to be fairly irregularly distributed with respect to time within individual subject series. However, strong dependencies were found between the occurrence in time of individual acts of cigarette smoking and coffee drinking. In addition, the distribution and frequency of smoking events throughout one-hour activity sequences were found to be dependent upon the nature of the activity, and the temporal scheduling of activities was found to affect several quantitative indices of smoking patterns.     

Models of word recognition

Major hypotheses about the processes involved in word recognition are reviewed and then assessed through four experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords, and beyond that, to discover basic differences in their processing that might underlie the word advantage. The second experiment was designed to assess the contribution of whole-word and letter cluster cues to the word advantage. Finally, Experiments III and IV were focused on the question of whether the word advantage can be wholly explained in terms of response bias or sophisticated guessing. Taken together, the results of these experiments were most compatible with criterion bias models. A version of the criterion bias model is suggested wherein the word advantage is attributed to interfacilitation among single letter and lexical units in memory.