Taking Access to the Community: An Ecological Systems Framework for In‐Home Counseling With Older Adults

Bronfenbrenner's (1977) ecological systems theory is a holistic framework placing an individual in a system's context to address their concerns. This article offers a case study demonstrating use of the theory with older adults and the in‐home setting. Implications for the counseling field and future research needs are discussed.     

Psychometric characteristics of role-play assessments of social skill in schizophrenia

There is an extensive literature documenting that people with schizophrenia have marked impairments in social role functioning and social skill. One of the most widely employed strategies for assessing social skill has been role-play tests: simulated social interactions that are videotaped for subsequent behavioral coding. There has been considerable discussion of the validity of the approach in the literature, but there has not been adequate consideration of other psychometric characteristics of role-play tests. This paper examines the psychometric characteristics of a representative role-play measure: the Maryland Assessment of Social Competence (MASC). Data from 5 large schizophrenia studies that included the MASC were examined: a study of victimization in women who abuse drugs, a study of health care among people with diabetes, a study of vocational outcomes, a study of social skill among drug abusers, and a clinical trial comparing two antipsychotic medications. Data were examined in terms of five questions: (1) Can role-play scenes be rated reliably? (2) How are role-play ratings distributed across populations? (3) How many and which behaviors should be rated? (4) How many role-play scenes are required? (5) Is role-play behavior temporally stable? Overall, the data suggest that the MASC, and by implication other similar role-play procedures, does have good psychometric properties. However, several things often taken for granted in the literature warrant careful consideration in the design of research using role-play. Implications of the results for design of research are discussed.     

Information quantity and quality affect the realistic accuracy of personality judgment

Triads of unacquainted college students interacted in 1 of 5 experimental conditions that manipulated information quantity (amount of information) and information quality (relevance of information to personality), and they then made judgments of each others' personalities. To determine accuracy, the authors compared the ratings of each judge to a broad-based accuracy criterion composed of personality ratings from 3 types of knowledgeable informants (the self, real-life acquaintances, and clinician-interviewers). Results supported the hypothesis that information quantity and quality would be positively related to objective knowledge about the targets and realistic accuracy. Interjudge consensus and self-other agreement followed a similar pattern. These findings are consistent with expectations based on models of the process of accurate judgment (D. C. Funder, 1995, 1999) and consensus (D. A. Kenny, 1994).     

What-where-when memory in pigeons

The authors report a novel approach to testing episodic-like memory for single events. Pigeons were trained in separate sessions to match the identity of a sample on a touch screen, to match its location, and to report on the length of the retention interval. When these 3 tasks were mixed randomly within sessions, birds were more than 80% correct on each task. However, performance on 2 different tests in succession after each sample was not consistent with an integrated memory for sample location, time, and identity. Experiment 2 tested binding of location and identity memories in 2 different ways. The results were again consistent with independent feature memories. Implications for tests of episodic-like memory are discussed.     

The psychology of telling murder stories: do we think in scripts,exemplars, or prototypes?

According to the story model of Pennington and Hastie, jurors collect information at trial and modify it with general knowledge to create case stories. Schank and Ableson argue that human memory is organized to tell and understand stories. However, Finkel and Groscup questioned the use of manipulated, experimenter-constructed narratives to demonstrate the existence of multiple prototypical crime stories. We interviewed 76 jury eligible, death qualified citizens and asked them to imagine a first-degree murder scenario, describing the events that led to the killing. We coded the presence of dichotomous variables in the resulting stories and identified at least three shared story prototypes using cluster and profile analysis. We conclude that people do not store crime stories as simple prototypes and comment on the implications of this finding for legal decision-making.     

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of species-specific face processing

Several recent reports suggest that the behavioral and cortical specificity of face processing may be influenced by experience. To test this hypothesis, behavioral and electrophysiological data were recorded from adults in response to human and monkey faces differing in familiarity and orientation. An analysis of event-related potential and behavioral data revealed differentiation across species, familiarity, and orientation. Behavioral measures were correlated with amplitude and latency measures for each factor of interest. These analyses revealed that accuracy was positively related to the amplitude of the vertex positive potential in the human face task but not in the monkey face task. These findings suggest that previous experience with different categories of faces modulates the link between behavioral and electrophysiological measures of face processing.     

The kindness of strangers: organ transplantation in a capitalist age.

The topic of organ transplantation is examined from the perspective of three authors: Robert Bellah, Jeremy Rifkin, and Margaret Jane Radin. Introduced by reflections on the development of the justification of organ transplantation within the Roman Catholic community and the various themes raised by the historical study in Richard Titmuss's The Gift Relationship, the paper examines how and in what ways the possible commodification of organs will affect our society and the impacts this may have on the supply of organs.     

Metamorphosis: Essence, appearance, and behavior in the categorization of natural kinds

The transformation paradigm (Rips, 1989) was used to contrast causal homeostasis and strict essentialist beliefs about biological kinds. Participants read scenarios describing animals that changed their appearance and behavior through either accidental mutation or developmental maturation and then rated the animals on the basis of similarity, typicality, and category membership both before and after the change. Experiment 1 in the present study replicated the dissociation of typicality and categorization reported by Rips (1989) but also revealed systematic individual differences in categorization. With typicality and membership ratings collected between participants, however, Experiment 2 found no evidence for the dissociation and few essentialist responders. In Experiment 3, excluding information about offspring led most participants to categorize on the basis of appearance and behavior alone. However, with offspring information included and with questioning focused on the change of kind, essentialist categorization was still surprisingly rare. We conclude that strict essentialist categorization in the transformation task is relatively rare and highly task dependent, and that categorization is more commonly based on causal homeostasis.     

Neurocognitive Effects of Methamphetamine: A Critical Review and Meta-analysis

This review provides a critical analysis of the central nervous system effects of acute and chronic methamphetamine (MA) use, which is linked to numerous adverse psychosocial, neuropsychiatric, and medical problems. A meta-analysis of the neuropsychological effects of MA abuse/dependence revealed broadly medium effect sizes, showing deficits in episodic memory, executive functions, information processing speed, motor skills, language, and visuoconstructional abilities. The neuropsychological deficits associated with MA abuse/dependence are interpreted with regard to their possible neural mechanisms, most notably MA-associated frontostriatal neurotoxicity. In addition, potential explanatory factors are considered, including demographics (e.g., gender), MA use characteristics (e.g., duration of abstinence), and the influence of common psychiatric (e.g., other substance-related disorders) and neuromedical (e.g., HIV infection) comorbidities. Finally, these findings are discussed with respect to their potential contribution to the clinical management of persons with MA abuse/dependence.