Psychiatric patient- and informant-reported personality: predicting concurrent and future behavior

The authors investigated the criterion and incremental validity of personality reports from psychiatric patients and knowledgeable informants in predicting patient substance use, social and risky behaviors, and psychological distress. Patient and informant reports of patient personality and behavior were collected from an adult psychiatric sample (N = 94). Hierarchical regressions indicated that patient reports of personality accounted for significant variance in both concurrent (17%-42%) and future behavior assessed 1 year later (17%-40%). Informant reports contributed significantly to the prediction of several behaviors and most strongly to social behaviors. Behaviors were predicted equally well by self-reports and informant reports in prospective as in concurrent regressions. Thus, both patient and informant reports of personality contribute importantly to prediction of behavior, and predictive ability is stable across time.     

Psychosocial Treatment Strategies in the MTA Study: Rationale, Methods, and Critical Issues in Design and Implementation

The Collaborative Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the MTA, is the first multisite, cooperative agreement treatment study of children, and the largest psychiatric/psychological treatment trial ever conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health. It examines the effectiveness of Medication vs. Psychosocial treatment vs. their combination for treatment of ADHD and compares these experimental arms to each other and to routine community care. In a parallel group design, 579 (male and female) ADHD children, aged 7–9 years, 11 months, were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental arms, and then received 14 months of prescribed treatment (or community care) with periodic reassessments. After delineating the theoretical and empirical rationales for Psychosocial treatment of ADHD, we describe the MTA's Psychosocial Treatment strategy applied to all children in two of the four experimental arms (Psychosocial treatment alone; Combined treatment). Psychosocial treatment consisted of three major components: a Parent Training component, a two-part School Intervention component, and a child treatment component anchored in an intensive Summer Treatment Program. Components were selected based on evidence of treatment efficacy and because they address comprehensive symptom targets, settings, comorbidities, and functional domains. We delineate key conceptual and logistical issues faced by clinical researchers in design and implementation of Psychosocial research with examples of how these issues were addressed in the MTA study.Deceased     

The Therapeutic Factors Inventory: Development of a Scale

Although Yalom's (1995) framework of the therapeutic factors facilitating outcome in group has been accepted by group specialists, no empirically based instrument assesses all of these factors. The Therapeutic Factors Inventory (TFI), with 11 scales based on the therapeutic factors, has been designed to fill this gap. This article summarizes the development and preliminary reliability testing of the TFI. Each scale of the instrument demonstrated high internal consistency; however, one scale obtained unacceptably low test-retest reliability. Further validity testing is needed. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Diagnosing agoraphobia in the context of panic disorder: examining the effect of DSM-IV criteria on diagnostic decision-making

A diagnostic and statistical manual (DSM)-IV diagnosis of agoraphobia in the context of panic disorder (PD) is based on three nosologically sufficient criteria: (1) avoidance, (2) use of companions, and (3) endurance of situations despite distress. Therefore, an agoraphobia diagnosis can be made across an extremely broad range of cases including when there are no avoidance behaviors (e.g., the patient endures the situation). It was hypothesized that clinicians do not weight these criteria equally and that the DSMs individual, sufficient criteria lead to poor inter-rater reliability. Clinicians (N=48) rated hypothetical patients with symptom profiles emphasizing each of these three criteria. Consistent with expectation, clinicians differentially weighted these criteria. Avoidance was relatively more apt to produce a diagnosis when only one criterion was emphasized in clinical vignettes. Inter-rater reliability was poor in instances when only one sufficient criterion was highlighted. Knowledge concerning DSM criteria resulted in a greater rate of agoraphobia endorsement, but knowledge did not account for the overall pattern of findings.     

The cognitive foundations of reading and arithmetic skills in 7- to 10-year-olds

A range of possible predictors of arithmetic and reading were assessed in a large sample (N=162) of children between ages 7 years 5 months and 10 years 4 months. A confirmatory factor analysis of the predictors revealed a good fit to a model consisting of four latent variables (verbal ability, nonverbal ability, search speed, and phonological memory) and two manifest variables (digit comparison and phoneme deletion). A path analysis showed that digit comparison and verbal ability were unique predictors of variations in arithmetic skills, whereas phoneme deletion and verbal ability were unique predictors of variations in reading skills. These results confirm earlier findings that phoneme deletion ability appears to be a critical foundation for learning to read (decode). In addition, variations in the speed of accessing numerical quantity information appear to be a critical foundation for the development of arithmetic skills.     

The social context of imitation in infancy

Infants increasingly generalize deferred imitation across environmental contexts between 6 and 18 months of age. In three experiments with 126 6-, 9-, 12-, 15-, and 18-month-olds, we examined the role of the social context in deferred imitation. One experimenter demonstrated target actions on a hand puppet, and a second experimenter tested imitation 24h later. When the second experimenter was novel, infants did not exhibit deferred imitation at any age; when infants were preexposed to the second experimenter, all of them did. Imitating immediately after the demonstration also facilitated deferred imitation in a novel social context at all ages but 6 months. Infants' pervasive failure to exhibit deferred imitation in a novel social context may reflect evolutionary selection pressures that favored conservative behavior in social animals.     

Timing variability in circle drawing and tapping: probing the relationship between event and emergent timing

R. Ivry, R. M. Spencer, H. N. Zelaznik, and J. Diedrichsen (2002) have proposed a distinction between timed movements in which a temporal representation is part of the task goal (event timing) and those in which timing properties are emergent. The issue addressed in the present experiment was how timing in conditions conducive to emergent timing becomes established. According to what the authors term the transformation hypothesis, timing initially requires an event-based representation when the temporal goal is defined externally (e.g., by a metronome), but over the first few movement cycles, control processes become established that allow timing to become emergent. Different groups of participants (N = 84) executed either 1 timed interval, 4 timed intervals, or 2 timed intervals separated by a pause. They produced the intervals by either circle drawing, a task associated with emergent timing, or tapping, a task associated with event timing. Analyses of movement variability suggested that similar timing processes were used in the 2 tasks only during the 1st interval. Those results are consistent with the transformation hypothesis and lead to the inference that the transition from event-based control to emergent timing can occur rapidly during continuous movements.     

Perception of visual speed while moving

During self-motion, the world normally appears stationary. In part, this may be due to reductions in visual motion signals during self-motion. In 8 experiments, the authors used magnitude estimation to characterize changes in visual speed perception as a result of biomechanical self-motion alone (treadmill walking), physical translation alone (passive transport), and both biomechanical self-motion and physical translation together (walking). Their results show that each factor alone produces subtractive reductions in visual speed but that subtraction is greatest with both factors together, approximating the sum of the 2 separately. The similarity of results for biomechanical and passive self-motion support H. B. Barlow's (1990) inhibition theory of sensory correlation as a mechanism for implementing H. Wallach's (1987) compensation for self-motion.