Do childhood anxiety measures measure anxiety?

The Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (FSSC-R), Revised-Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS), and the Modified State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC-M) are three widely used self-report measures of childhood anxiety. While previous studies have established the reliability of these measures, their validity in discriminating anxious from non-anxious youngsters remains to be established. The present study examines the discriminant validity of the three measures by comparing clinic referred samples of boys with an anxiety disorder (n=105) or ADHD (n=59) with a community sample of never-psychiatrically-ill boys (n=49). Results indicated that the two patient groups differed significantly from the never-psychiatrically-ill group on the RCMAS and STAIC-M, but the anxious and ADHD groups did not differ from each other. None of the three groups differed on the FSSC-R. The implications of these findings for the assessment of childhood anxiety disorders are discussed.     

Scientific Meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

An empirical evaluation of a scale to measure occupational aspiration level

Data from 34,118 American high school students are used to evaluate the Occupational Aspiration Scale (OAS). The OAS is successively reevaluated for each of 16 subsamples (cells) generated by cross-classifying respondents by grade in school (9–12), sex, and socioeconomic status (SES). In each cell the OAS is found to be essentially unifactorial, and that factor is identified as level of occupational aspiration (LOA). The reliability of the OAS is slightly lower among females ($\text{r}$_kk = .681) than among males ($\text{r}$_kk = .756); it does not vary appreciably by grade or SES. The mean scores are lower for youth from low SES families than for those from high SES families, in accord with previous research. Mean OAS differences due to sex and grade are small. No important differences by age, sex, or SES are found in the standard deviations of the test scores. This and previously published data from small, local samples indicate that the reliability and validity of the OAS are sufficient for research on high school youth of both sexes and from both higher and lower SES levels.     

Understanding quantified categorical expressions

A model of categorical inference (Revlis, 1975b) claims that a conversion operation participates in the encoding of quantified, categorical expressions. As a consequence, a reasoner is said to interpret such sentences as “All A are B” in a way that permits it to also be the case that “All B are A.” The present study examines this conception of encoding using a sentence-picture verification task. In two experiments, students were asked to judge whether one of five possible Euler diagrams was true or false of a categorical expression (e.g., All A are B, No A are B, Some A are B, Some A are not B). Verification errors support a three-stage verification model whose major component is access to a “meaning stack” representing the progressive analysis of categorical relations; at the top of that stack is a converted reading of the input sentence. These findings have implications for current conceptions of categorical inference and semantic retrieval.     

AFFILIATIVE ASSOCIATIONS

The International Platform of the International Journal of Psychology plans a series of articles on the associations affiliated to the IUPS. The first article on the World Federation for Mental Health was written by a long time member of the Executive Committee of the IUPS, Professor Otto Klineberg, President of the World Federation for Mental Health.     

Introspection,Anton's Syndrome,and Human Echolocation

Philosophers have recently argued that since there are people who are blind, but don't know it, and people who echolocate, but don't know it, conscious introspection is highly unreliable. I contend that a second look at Anton's syndrome, human echolocation, and ‘facial vision’ suggests otherwise. These examples do not support skepticism about the reliability of introspection.