Enhancing young people's social competence and health behavior: An important challenge for educators, scientists, policymakers, and funders

Large numbers of America's young people engage in multiple high-risk behaviors that may jeopardize their health and social development. Given the gravity of this situation, many federal agencies and national organizations have called for the implementation of school-based K-12 social competence and health promotion programs. Unfortunately, there is a gap between the comprehensive programs that policymakers are asking educators to implement and the limited scope, duration, and intensity of state-of-the-art health promotion programs that scientists have developed and evaluated. As a result, most schools currently adopt well-marketed programs that lack documented effectiveness. Although current research indicates that brief, well-designed, theory-driven competence promotion and health education programs produce short-term benefits, there have been no controlled, longitudinal field studies to evaluate the long-term effects of K-12 efforts. This paper proposes that policymakers and funding agencies support long-term collaborations among educators and scientists to develop and evaluate K-12 comprehensive social competence and health education programs and identifies critical issues that funded projects should address.     

REM sleep deprivation increases early morning pineal melatonin in castrated rats

Recently nighttime melatonin levels have been shown to be attenuated in depressive patients or patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type. On the other hand, depression can be transiently relieved by deprivation of rapid eye movement sleep. Since exogenous melatonin administration increases rapid eye movement sleep and slow wave sleep in the rat, could rapid eye movement sleep deprivation then inversely influence endogenous melatonin production? We found indices that in castrated Wistar rats 4 days of rapid eye movement sleep deprivation by the cuff pedestal method elevates the pineal content of melatonin by a factor of two at 1 to 2 h after light onset. Rapid eye movement sleep is thus suggested to influence pineal activity. This mechanism might be involved in the human depression-alleviating effect of rapid eye movement sleep deprivation.     

Bisecting and behavior: lateral inattention predicts 8-week academic performance

Converging evidence supports a left hemisphere role in defensive repression and sensation seeking. This led to the hypothesis that students with a relatively active left hemisphere would perform poorly during 8 weeks of a college class. The measure of relative hemispheric activation was the visual line-bisecting task given early in the course. The hypothesis was supported. Previous evidence that activation asymmetry is stable over time was supported because the single measurement of line bisecting was a longitudinal predictor of multiple behaviors. A temporal pattern of increasing correlation between the bisecting and performance measures favors a feedback repression model. Alternative explanations based on sensation seeking, subject-matter repression, and cooperation were considered but not eliminated.     

Place learning in scopolamine-treated rats: the roles of distal cues and catecholaminergic mediation

Experiments 1 and 2 tested the hypothesis that cholinergic receptor antagonists impair place learning in a water maze by interfering with the processing of distal, visual cues. Extramaze cues were offered to rats in the form of geometrical patterns arranged on the inner circumference of a curtain surrounding the water maze. In Experiment 1 the animals were offered both the distal cues and proximal cues in the form of pingpong balls in fixed positions on the surface of the water while only distal cues were present in Experiment 2. Animals were injected with either scopolamine (0.5 mg/kg body wt) or saline 20 min prior to the daily place learning sessions. Upon reaching criterion level performance the animals were tested on "rotation" sessions on which the distal cues were displaced. The outcome of such "rotations" demonstrated that-regardless of the presence or absence of proximal cues-scopolamine-treated rats relied at least as much as normal animals on the distal cues. The acquisition phase of both Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated an almost complete lack of scopolamine-associated impairment in acquisition and performance of the place learning task. In Experiment 3 (when scopolamine was no longer administered) the subjects of Experiment 2 were exposed to a series of pharmacological "challenges" of their place learning performance and eventually to surgical ablation of the anteromedial prefrontal cortex. The outcome of the pharmacological challenges and the postoperative test of task performance demonstrated that the place learning performance of animals which had acquired the task under scopolamine was mediated by a neural substrate dissimilar to the substrate of task performance in normal animals. Rats acquiring the task while deprived of the cholinergic system demonstrated above-normal contributions to task mediation from catecholaminergic-probably dopaminergic-mechanisms and tentative results pointed to a "shift" toward prefrontal task mediation.     

Modeling the effects of repetition and word frequency in perceptual identification

The counter model for word identification (Ratcliff & McKoon, 1997) has been challenged by recent empirical findings that performance on low-frequency words improves as the result of repetition of the words. We show that the model can accommodate this learning effect, and that it can do so without jeopardizing its explanations of the effects on word identification of a large number of other variables.     

Application of a trace model to the retention of information in a recognition task

A stochastic model is proposed to account for the behavior of subjects in recognition tasks in which stimuli are presented, one at a time, in a protracted sequence. The basic assumption is that the memory trace resulting from the presentation of a particular stimulus not only fades away during the presentation of subsequent stimuli but also diffuses in such a way as to become decreasingly stimulus specific. An account is thereby provided for both (a) the increase in the probability of false recognition with the total number of stimulus presentations and (b) the departure of curves of forgetting from the previously proposed simple exponential decay functions. An expression for the amount of information carried along when the number of stimulus presentations becomes large is then derived for subjects who conform with the model.The author has benefited from discussions of this work with J. W. Tukey, J. R. Pierce, E. N. Gilbert, and D. Slepian of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and with G. A. Miller of Harvard University.     

Aggression and self-esteem: a diary study of children's reactivity to negative interpersonal events

The study employs a daily diary design to assess self-esteem reactivity and its association with children's aggressive behavior. We test the hypothesis that the self-esteem of aggressive children will be more reactive to negative interpersonal events than the self-esteem of nonaggressive children. Results provide partial support for the aggression/reactivity hypothesis. Aggressive children's self-esteem was more reactive to negative peer events but less reactive to negative adult events than the self-esteem of less aggressive children. These findings are discussed in relation to the experimental literature relating self-esteem instability and ego-threat to aggression and in relation to the extensive body of research on childhood aggression. Intervention implications are also considered.     

Human cognition and a pile of sand: a discussion on serial correlations and self-organized criticality

Recently, G. C. Van Orden, J. G. Holden, and M. T. Turvey (2003) proposed to abandon the conventional framework of cognitive psychology in favor of the framework of nonlinear dynamical systems theory. Van Orden et al. presented evidence that "purposive behavior originates in self-organized criticality" (p. 333). Here, the authors show that Van Orden et al.'s analyses do not test their hypotheses. Further, the authors argue that a confirmation of Van Orden et al.'s hypotheses would not have constituted firm evidence in support of their framework. Finally, the absence of a specific model for how self-organized criticality produces the observed behavior makes it very difficult to derive testable predictions. The authors conclude that the proposed paradigm shift is presently unwarranted.     

Evaluating the efficiency and community safety goals of the Broward County Mental Health Court

Mental health courts have developed as one response to persons with mental illness who are involved with the criminal justice system. This study investigated the efficiency and safety goals of one such court in Broward County, FL. Mental health court (MHC) clients spent significantly fewer days in jail for the index arrest associated with study enrollment than a comparison group. MHC clients had similar survival time to re-arrest up to one year after study enrollment. MHC clients did not significantly differ from the comparison group in self-reported aggressive acts over an 8 month follow-up period, while they did self-report significantly fewer acts of violence than the comparison group at the 8 month follow-up. These findings suggest that some of the benefits associated with the MHC reported in prior studies were not achieved at the expense of efficiency and safety.