The assessment of cortisol using salivary ultrafiltrate

Cortisol can be used to indicate stress level as well as to monitor certain disease states. Although cortisol can be sampled from blood and urine, saliva sampling has decided advantages. Unfortunately, whole saliva contains a number of substances that can metabolize or bind with cortisol, potentially confounding analysis and quantitation. We introduce a semipermeable pouch that accumulates a contaminant-free salivary ultrafiltrate, thereby overcoming a number of the problems encountered with whole saliva. In three studies, we demonstrate accuracy and utility of the device for cortisol determination: (1) in an artificial medium, 60%–77% of the cortisol was recovered in the ultrafiltrate; (2) in vivo, ultrafiltrate cortisol correlated highly with whole-saliva cortisol collected under ideal conditions; and (3) ultrafiltrate cortisol evinced positive relationships with depression and cigarette use, consistent with studies in the literature. We conclude that this device and saliva-filtering technologies in general are useful in applications requiring quantitation of cortisol.     

A pointing technique for rapidly collecting localization responses in auditory research

A technique is described for rapidly collecting responses in auditory-localization experiments. Subjects indicate the perceived direction of the sound by pointing at a 20-cm-diam spherical model. In Experiment 1, the subjects judged the direction of a broadband signal, which could originate from any of 239 directions ranging through 360° of azimuth and between ?45° and +90° of elevation. Using this technique, the subjects responded 2–8 times more rapidly than previous subjects who used either a verbal-reporting technique or a head-pointing technique. Localization judgments were as accurate as they had been with verbal reports, but were not as accurate as judgments collected using the head-pointing technique. In Experiment 2, the signal was turned off and the experimenter read the spherical coordinates of the signal location to the subjects. The subjects pointed to these coordinates more accurately than they had judged the direction of the sounds in Experiment 1, suggesting that the response technique had not been the limiting factor in that experiment. Circumstances relevant to the choice of response techniques for auditory-localization experiments are discussed.     

The Fire Chief microworld generating program: An illustration of computer-simulated microworlds as an experimental paradigm for studying complex decision-making behavior

Computer-simulated microworlds bridge the gap between the complexity of field investigations and the rigor of laboratory studies. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the major methodological issues involved in developing and using computer-simulated microworlds for the psychological study of complex decision-making behavior. These issues comprise flexibility and generality in the microworlds that can be created, adequate psychological validity, automatic trial administration and data logging, capacity to interface simulations of psychological processes, and adequate testing and documentation. Each of these issues is illustrated by indicating how it has been addressed in Fire Chief, a microworld generating program specifically designed for creating realistic, yet controllable, decision-making task environments in the psychology laboratory. Fire Chief (Omodei & Wearing, 1993a) is introduced as both fully portable to other research teams and suitable for use in many different contexts requiring a complex task situation.     

Three- and four-year-olds’ perceptual confusions for spoken words

Although infants have the ability to discriminate a variety of speech contrasts, young children cannot always use this ability in the service of spoken-word recognition. The research reported here asked whether the reason young children sometimes fail to discriminate minimal word pairs is that they are less efficient at word recognition than adults, or whether it is that they employ different lexical representations. In particular, the research evaluated the proposal that young children’s lexical representations are more “holistic” than those of adults, and are based on overall acoustic-phonetic properties, as opposed to phonetic segments. Three- and four-year-olds were exposed initially to an invariant target word and were subsequently asked to determine whether a series of auditory stimuli matched or did not match the target. The critical test stimuli were nonwords that varied in their degree of phonetic featural overlap with the target, as well as in terms of the position(s) within the stimuli at which they differed from the target, and whether they differed from the target on one or two segments. Data from four experiments demonstrated that the frequency with which children mistook a nonword stimulus for the target was influenced by extent of featural overlap, but not by word position. The data also showed that, contrary to the predictions of the holistic hypothesis, stimuli differing from the target by two features on a single segment were confused with the target more often than were stimuli differing by a single feature on each of two segments. This finding suggests that children use both phonetic features and segments in accessing their mental lexicons, and that they are therefore much more similar to adults than is suggested by the holistic hypothesis.     

Prenatal gender preference of mothers of feminine and masculine boys: Relation to sibling sex composition and birth order

A mother's (prenatal) wish for a girl has, at times, been implicated as an etiological factor for boyhood femininity or its DSM-III-R diagnostic equivalent, the Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood. In one sample of 52 feminine and 52 nonclinical control boys from Los Angeles, the proportion of mothers who recalled a wish for a girl during the pregnancy did not differ significantly between groups (26.9% vs. 19.2%, respectively); however, in both groups, the maternal wish for a girl was significantly more common in sibships in which all of the proband's older siblings were male. In a second sample of 103 feminine boys from Toronto, the maternal wish for a girl was significantly higher than that found in the Los Angeles sample (43.7% vs. 26.9%), but a control group was not available; as in the Los Angeles sample, the maternal wish for a girl was significantly more common in sibships in which all of the proband's older siblings were male. Implications of these findings for further study of maternal influences on boyhood femininity are discussed.     

Impact of a prevention program on aggressive children's friendships and social adjustment

A group of 46 aggressive boys aged 8 to 9 years participated in a prevention program aimed at reducing their externalizing problems in the short term and at preventing delinquency in the long term. Outcome measures were collected during the 3-year period following the prevention program. At that time, the boys were 10, 11, and 12 years old. Outcome measures included teacher ratings of aggressiveness and self-reports of delinquent behaviors. The boys' friends were rated on disruptive behaviors by their classmates. The experimental boys' outcome measures were compared to the measures obtained from 58 aggressive boys in a control group. The disruptive ratings of the experimental and control subjects' best friends were also compared. Differences in teacher-rated aggressiveness between the two groups increased from one year to the next for the 3-year followup period. Similarly, the friends' disruptive scores differed increasingly between the two groups over the 3-year period. The effect of the prevention program on the subjects' friendships and the mediating impact of friends with regard to social adjustment were stressed.This study was funded by the following agencies: National Welfare Grants Program of the Canadian Ministry of Health and Welfare, Conseil Québécois de la Recherche Sociale, Conseil de la Santé et des Services Sociaux Régional du Montréal Métropolitain, Fondation Cité des Prairies, Fonds FCAR-Centre et Equipes, Institut de la Recherche en Psycho-Education de Montréal, Centre d'Accueil le Mainbourg. Lucie Bertrand, Rita Béland, Michel Bouillon, Raymond Labelle, Hélène O'Reilly, and Daniel Reclus-Prince supervised or administered the intervention.     

An advocacy intervention program for women with abusive partners: Six-month follow-up

Presented the 6-month follow-up findings of an experimental intervention designed to provide postshelter advocacy services to women with abusive partners. The intervention involved randomly assigning half the research participants to receive the free services of an advocate, 4 to 6 hours per week, for the first 10 weeks postshelter. One hundred forty-one battered women were interviewed about their experiences immediately upon their exit from a domestic violence shelter: 95% of the sample were interviewed 10 weeks thereafter (postintervention), and 93% were successfully tracked and interviewed 6 months later. At the 6-month follow-up, participants in both groups reported increased social support, increased quality of life, less depression, less emotional attachment to their assailants, and an increased sense of personal power. Although women in both groups reported some decrease in physical abuse over time, there were no statistically significant differences between those with and those without advocates, and abuse continued to be a problem for many women. Those who were still involved with their assailants continued to experience higher levels of abuse and had been more economically dependent upon the men prior to entering the shelter. Women who had worked with advocates continued to report being more satisfied with their overall quality of life than did the women in the control group. The authors thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Thanks also to all present and past staff of the Community Advocacy Project, who helped in data collection and analyses. This work was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 1R01 MH 44849.     

Discrimination of Facial Identity and Facial Affect by Temporal and Frontal Lobectomy Patients

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which lobectomy affects ability to discriminate facial identity or facial expression. Fifteen right temporal, 15 left temporal, 5 right frontal, and 4 left frontal lobectomy patients, pair-matched for age, sex, and education to normal control subjects, participated in this study. Tasks included a Facial Identity Matching Task and a Facial Affect Matching task. The lobectomized patients as a whole were significantly impaired on both tasks (22% decrement in performance). The patients made twice as many errors resulting from perseveration of response-set of the first condition (identity or emotion matching) into the second condition. The site of lobectomy did not influence general performance on any one task or selective performance on any subset of affective categories. It was concluded that all four brain regions play a significant and equal role in face processing, and that circuits more specifically dedicated to visual face processing, which are responsible for hemispheric dominance affects and affect/identity dissociations, are probably located more posteriorly in the brain. Finally, it was concluded that perseveration of acquired habit may, under specific conditions, characterize temporal lobe dysfunction just as much as frontal lobe dysfunction.