Personality, stress and disease: description and validation of a new inventory

The construction of a new Personality-Stress Inventory is discussed, based on previous research and other types of inventory constructed on the same principles. Scores on the inventory divide people into six types, selectively prone to different types of disease. The instrument is administered twice, with six months intervening, and changes in the inventory scores are prognostic of the probability of contracting different diseases. Evidence is presented to show the validity of the questionnaire and the method used.     

Modeling item responses when different subjects employ different solution strategies

A model is presented for item responses when different subjects employ different strategies, but only responses, not choice of strategy, can be observed. Using substantive theory to differentiate the likelihoods of response vectors under a fixed set of strategies, we model response probabilities in terms of item parameters for each strategy, proportions of subjects employing each strategy, and distributions of subject proficiency within strategies. The probabilities that an individual subject employed the various strategies can then be obtained, along with a conditional estimate of proficiency under each. A conceptual example discusses response strategies for spatial rotation tasks, and a numerican example resolves a population of subjects into subpopulations of valid responders and random guessers.The first author's work was supported by Contract No. N00014-85-K-0683, project designation NR 150-539, from the Cognitive Science Program, Cognitive and Neural Sciences Division, Office of Naval Research. We are grateful to Murray Aitkin, Isaac Bejar, Neil Dorans, Frederiksen, and Marklyn Wingersky for their comments and suggestions, and to Alison Gooding, Maxine Kingston, Donna Lembeck, Joling Liang, and Kentaro Yamamoto for their assistance with Example 2.     

A measure of semantic complexity among predications

A scale for assessing the complexity or density of utterances was developed using 10 categories ofsemantic relations (e.g., temporal ordering, causality). The categories are inferable from the particular meanings of the words (e.g., connectives, particular tense variations) used in an utterance. The scale was applied to three samples of subjects to assess its interjudge reliability and to compare the utterances of fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade children from middle- and working-class neighborhoods. It was also used to compare the complexity of utterances for different types of visual stimuli (used to elicit language samples). Interjudge reliabilities were more than acceptable for each of the samples, and significant differences in semantic density were found across grade, between children from working-class and middle-class neighborhoods, and for the stimuli used to elicit the utterances. When two of the three types of eliciting visual stimuli were equated for content and exposure conditions, the differences in verbal density between eliciting conditions were not replicated. The usefulness of the scale for assessing utterance density and by implication, comprehension difficulty of utterances and of texts, is discussed.This study was supported in part by a Grant from the National Institute of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Complexity in Auditory and Graphics Communication, Project No. 4-470. Points of view or opinions stated here do not necessarily represent National Institute of Education position or policy.     

Finding relations between systems of entities: a multivariate approach

A procedure to find out the relationship between systems of entities is described. The crux of the approach depends on projecting the systems to be compared on the same arbitrary hyperspace so that any two systems of entities can be related. The procedure described applies to data presented in square or rectangular non-singular matrices and provides a procedure to determine multiple regression coefficients, multiple correlations, canonical correlations and the relationships between the inner product of the row vectors and of the column vectors of the matrices involved. The operations described apply to raw values, deviation or standard scores, and may help in interdisciplinary research, though the risks involved in the blind application of a mathematical abstract formulation should not be ignored.     

The role of compliance in hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia

We modified the standard procedure for administering finger pressure pain in order to assess the extent to which subjects biased their reports of pain reduction when exposed to compliance-inducing instructions. Experiment 1 used only highly hypnotizable subjects and found that compliance-induced reductions in reported pain were about half as large as the reported reductions produced by hypnotic analgesia suggestions. Experiment 2 used low as well as high hypnotizables and administered hypnotic or nonhypnotic analgesia instructions and compliance instructions to the same subjects on separate pain trials. Reported pain reductions produced by hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia suggestions and those produced by compliance instructions were substantially and significantly correlated. Furthermore, hypnotizability correlated with compliance-induced reported pain reductions as highly as it correlated with the reported reductions produced by hypnotic analgesia suggestions. Among high hypnotizables (but not low hypnotizables) compliant responding was predicted by social desirability. The findings of both studies indicate that compliance strongly influences the reports of hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia proffered by high hypnotizables. The role of compliance in the pain reductions reported by low hypnotizables is less clear-cut.     

Syntactic comprehension in Japanese aphasics: effects of category and thematic role order.

Syntactic comprehension disturbances in Japanese aphasics were investigated focusing on the role of category order and thematic role order. The data from Japanese aphasics show that the canonicity of thematic role order determines the ease of interpretation of different sentence types. This finding implies that language-specific factors, rather than language-universal factors, influence the sentence comprehension mechanisms that are retained by aphasic patients.     

The predictive validity of teacher nominations: A five-year followup of at-risk youth

The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive validity of a teacher nomination procedure for identifying at- risk children. Two hundred and twenty-five children were nominated by their teachers as well- adjusted (n= 75), socially withdrawn (n=76), or socially aggressive (n=74) during the fourth grade. Five years later, 198 of these children (88%) were located and their adjustment evaluated. Significant differences among the nominated children were found on a variety of measures, including academic grades, sociometric status, and social behavior. In addition, differences in school dropout and delinquent offenses were noted. Results are discussed in terms of the validity of teacher nomination procedures and their utility in identifying at- risk youth.     

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.     

Stimulus repetition effects and the dimension-feature distinction in alternative targets

The negative repetition effect (NRE) refers to a poorer perception of the target in noise-same-as-target than in noise-alternative-target displays. Using the parenthesis as target and noise that are either identical or different in orientation, we tested predictions derived from a feature-specific inhibition model (Bjork & Murray, 1977) that explains the NRE as arising from inhibitory interactions among channels handling identical inputs. Contrary to our expectation of evidence for orientation-specific inhibition, a positive repetition effect (PRE) was observed. We also found a PRE for the dimension target sets whose stimuli differ only in orientation and an NRE for the feature target sets whose stimuli differ in the number of elements. Further experiments that systematically varied relationships between alternative targets indicate that these basic findings, termed the stimulus attributes effects, do not arise from pattern masking, perceptual strategies, or response bias.     

The effects of right hemisphere damage on the pragmatic interpretation of conversational remarks

The ability to interpret conversational utterances was assessed in a group of 12 male patients with unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) and 12 non-brain-damaged, age-matched male control subjects. Subjects listened to short vignettes which described both the affective tone of the relationship between a speaker and an actor, and the actor's performance on a task. Each vignette concluded with the speaker characterizing the actor's performance. In half of the items, the speaker's utterance was literally true; in the other half, the utterance was literally false and invited a nonliteral interpretation. Results showed no appreciable differences in the performance of control subjects and RHD patients when interpreting literally true utterances. In contrast, the two groups differed reliably when interpreting the pragmatic intent of nonliteral utterances: Control subjects used information about both the actor's performance and the speaker-actor relationship, while RHD patients demonstrated difficulty in using the information about the speaker-actor relationship. Results have implications for patients' understanding of essential elements of conversations, such as characters' internal states and their intentions in employing different forms of literal and nonliteral language.