Effects of Comt Genotype on Behavioral Symptomatology in the 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome

The 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (DiGeorge/velocardiofacial syndrome) is associated with elevated rates of psychosis, and is also characterized by severe attentional difficulties and executive dysfunction. Behavioral manifestations of this syndrome could result from haploinsufficiency of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene, located within the 22q11 region. The goal of the present study was to examine COMT genotype in relation to behavioral symptomatology in this syndrome. Val^158/108Met was genotyped in 38 patients (16 Met/-, 22 Val/-) with confirmed 22q11.2 deletions who had received the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) as part of a comprehensive evaluation. Results indicated that the Val genotype was associated with significantly greater internalizing and externalizing behavioral symptomatology in children with 22q11.2 deletions. Val allele status was associated with a greater-than-four-fold increase in risk for clinically significant behavior problems in children with this syndrome. These data are consistent with previous findings of increased psychopathology associated with the Val genotype in normal individuals and suggest that a functional genetic polymorphism in the 22q11 region may influence behavior in individuals with COMT haploinsufficiency.     

Increasing ethnic minority participation in substance abuse clinical trials: lessons learned in the National Institute on Drug Abuse's Clinical Trials Network

Underrepresentation in clinical trials limits the extent to which ethnic minorities benefit from advances in substance abuse treatment. The objective of this article is to share the knowledge gained within the Clinical Trials Network (CTN) of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and other research on recruiting and retaining ethnic minorities into substance abuse clinical trials. The article includes a discussion of two broad areas for improving inclusion-community involvement and cultural adaptation. CTN case studies are included to illustrate three promising strategies for improving ethnic minority inclusion: respondent-driven sampling, community-based participatory research, and the cultural adaptation of the recruitment and retention procedures. The article concludes with two sections describing a number of methodological concerns in the current research base and our proposed research agenda for improving ethnic minority inclusion that builds on the CTN experience.     

Who is crossing where? Infants' discrimination of figures and grounds in events

To learn relational terms such as verbs and prepositions, children must first dissect and process dynamic event components. This paper investigates the way in which 8- to 14-month-old English-reared infants notice the event components, figure (i.e., the moving entity) and ground (i.e., stationary setting), in both dynamic (Experiment 1) and static representations of events (Experiment 2) for categorical ground distinctions expressed in Japanese, but not in English. We then compare both 14- and 19-month-old English- and Japanese-reared infants’ processing of grounds to understand how language learning interacts with the conceptualization of these constructs (Experiment 3). Results suggest that (1) infants distinguish between figures and grounds in events; (2) they do so differently for static vs. dynamic displays; (3) early in the second year, children from diverse language environments form nonnative – perhaps universal – event categories; and (4) these event categories shift over time as children have more exposure to their native tongue.     

in‐house career coaching: an international partnership

This article describes a project in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to develop an inhouse career coaching program to support and develop young employees recruited on an affirmative action initiative. The project involved the international partnership of a financial services organization in the UAE and a training provider in Canada to train human resources and learning and development professionals in basic career coaching skills. Initial evaluation showed promising potential for in‐house career coaching as a tool for employee engagement and retention and for the usefulness of such partnerships between career professionals and organizations.     

Generalized others and imaginary audiences: A neo-Meadian approach to adolescent egocentrism

Piaget’s conception of adolescent egocentrism, as interpreted and extended by Elkind (1967) is discussed, and research that has related Elkind’s egocentric ideations of personal fable and imaginary audience to age and intellectual development is considered. Alternative theories of adolescent egocentrism and its decentration are examined, and a neo-Meadian framework is discussed that understands the imaginary audience ideation of adolescents as a possibly functional, highly variable response to the complex task of coordinating individual and social perspectives as part of the adolescent’s search for identity.     

Dynamically oriented group therapy with alcoholics: Making it work despite the prevailing bias

A bias exists in the psychiatric community against dynamically oriented group therapy with alcoholics. The basis for this bias lies primarily in negative experiences of practitioners who have attempted to use traditional therapy with alcoholic patients who continued to drink. At Appleton Outpatient Clinic, we have found that dynamically oriented group therapy is a highly suitable treatment modality for alcoholic patients when negative biases of treators can be addressed and when initial preparatory work is done with patients. This preparatory work includes: (a) building a working alliance around abstinence and providing adequate supports to make this possible; (b) explicit contracting that establishes clear treatment goals and consequences should the goals not be met; (c) preparatory short-termgroup experiences.This paper was presented at the 1988 annual meeting of the American Group Psychotherapy Association.     

Breakdowns in flexible use of information: Intelligence-related differences in transfer following equivalent learning performance

Groups of retarded and nonretarded children were investigated as they learned three rules underlying problems adapted from the Raven Progressive Matrices Test: rotation, imposition, and subtration. The interest was in evaluating group differences in the ease with which the original set of rules was learned and the flexibility with which these rules were transferred to modified contexts. In the case of either learning or transfer, the metric of performance was the amount of aid, specifically the number of computer-generated graduated hints, needed for each subject to solve the problems. The groups were matched on their entering competence to deal with the rules under scrutiny, and also on mental age. No group differences were obtained as the subjects learned the original set of rules. However, on subsequent occasions when required to make flexible use of those rules, clear group differences emerged; and those differences increased as the similarity of the training and test contexts decreased. The results were seen as consistent with theories that emphasize transfer flexibility as one potential source of individual and comparative differences in intelligence.     

The internal structure of English transitive sentences

A major question in psychology is whether the same mechanisms are required for language learning and processing as for other cognitive tasks. A substantial body of literature has shown that natural categories are organized around a prototype, with other category members resembling the prototype to a greater or lesser amount based on the degree of shared properties. In order to investigate whether the prototype notion could be extended to linguistic phenomena, adult students (N=148) rated 512 sentences on a 7-point scale as to their goodness of fit to the categoryEnglish transitive sentence. Sentences differed in the animacy fo their actors and patients, the noun pairs used as actor/patient exemplars, and the hypothesized prototypicality of their verbs. Each of the identified factors showed the spread in ranking across different exemplars that is typical of other natural categories, but the factors interacted with each in complex ways to determine the overall ranking of the sentence. Not all sentences were equally representative of the categoryEnglish transitive sentence. In general, sentences with animate actors, high-prototypicality verbs, and animate patients were the most prototypical, followed closely by sentences with animate actors high-prototypicality verbs, and inanimate patients. Results were consistent with the suggestion that language and other types of cognitive tasks require the same basic processes and structures.     

Labeling effects on memory for nonsense pictures

It has been shown that labeling nonsense pictures improves memory for them, but how the label takes effect is uncertain. In this study subjects viewed nonsense pictures with or without labels; in the former case, the labels were either meaningful or nonmeaningful with respect to the pictures. Then the subjects took part in a free recall test, followed by recall in the presence of cues. Only the meaningful labels facilitated free recall of the pictures, but both types of labels facilitated cued recall. The results suggest that a meaningful label affects picture encoding by providing a conceptual interpretation for the picture; a nonmeaningful label, in contrast, appears to provide only an ad hoc associative cue.     

Adaptation to difficult designs: Facilitating use of new technology

The interface between technology and people has long been the focus of human factors engineering. The past decade has been a growth period for cognitive psychologists and computer scientists to collaborate on research and design for human-computer interaction. Psychologists in general and organizational psychologists in particular can also contribute to this work with models that capture the dynamics of technology implementation and the impact of technology on people, their work and working relationships. Strategies to support and adapt technology can affect users' evaluation of new technology. Facilitation may take the form of job aids, training, access to technical support staff, or the design of a comprehensive service, of which new technology is only one component.The work described in this article was conducted while the author was employed at AT&T Bell Laboratories.Portions of this article were presented at the 1991 Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco, and at a 1992 meeting of the New York Metropolitan Human Factors Society. The author wishes to acknowledge Pamela Kidder, Karen Patten and Larry Penwell for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.