The Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (PC-DISC v.3.0): Parents and Adolescents Suggest Reasons for Expecting Discrepant Answers

To identify reasons for discrepancies between parent and child reports of child/adolescents's psychiatric symptoms, parents and adolescents (51 pairs) were asked to guess what the other would answer to questions from the PC-DISC about the adolescent's psychiatric symptoms, and to explain why they expected disagreement when the answer they provided for the other was different from their own. Adolescents' explanations for expecting (1) parental denial of symptoms the adolescent reported were: the parent was unaware of, forgot about, assumed the adolescent could not have, or trivialized the symptom; and (2) parental report of symptoms the adolescent denied were: the parent misread or exaggerated the adolescent's symptom, had too high expectations for the adolescent's behavior, put a negative label on or did not trust the adolescent. Parents' reasons for expecting their children to (1) deny symptoms the parents reported were: the adolescent did not remember how s/he felt, lied, did not recognize or minimized the importance or frequency of the symptom; and (2) report symptoms the parents denied were: the adolescent lied, exaggerated the importance of or interpreted the symptom differently.Support for this work was provided by National Institute of Drug Abuse grant number DA-05585 (Dr. Cottler, P.I.), and National Institute of Mental Health grants numbers MH-31302 (Dr. R. C. Cloninger, P.I.) and MH-17104 (Dr. Cottler, P.I.).Address all correspondence, including reprint requests, to Michelle Bidaut-Russell, Ph.D, MPH, MPE, Department of Psychiatry, Box 8134, Washington University School of Medicine, 4940 Children's Place, St. Louis, Missouri 63110.     

Neuropsychological Features of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is the epitome of a subcortical dementia process. Due to its relative rarity, there is only a small literature on the neuropsychological consequences of PSP. The findings to date demonstrate that PSP patients have dramatically slowed information processing and motor execution, rapid forgetting, problems in orienting attentional resources, and difficulty in planning and shifting conceptual sets. The pattern and severity of these deficits are unique to PSP and suggest that the study of PSP patients can provide a special insight into brain-behavior relations.     

The numbers game: Gender and attention to numerical information

Research suggests that males outperform females on standardized tests of math ability from early adolescence onward. Several explanations for this difference focus on the different experiences of females and males with numerical information. We reasoned that males have more experience with numerical information than females because typical male interests (e.g., sports) are more likely to involve numerical information than typical female interests (e.g., physical appearance). Thus, we predicted that males would attend more to numerical information than would females, at least when the information was presented in a male-related or gender-neutral context. Females were expected to attend more than males when the context was female-related. Results using White/Caucasian subjects provided some support for these predictions. Implications for future research on the relationship between the gender-linkage of math materials and gender differences in math performance are discussed.     

An investigation of the effects of comorbid Axis II pathology on outcome of inpatient treatment for unipolar depression

DSM-based research on comorbidity has suggested thatdepression andpersonality disorder frequently occur together and that the combination of syndromes is associated with a poor response to treatment for depression. The present study was designed to explore the effect of comorbid Axis II pathology for a sample of 45 inpatients who received treatment for major depression. Both categorical and dimensional ratings of personality disorder were used in the statistical analysis. Positive categorical diagnosis of Cluster C (anxious-avoidant) disorder, as well as higher dimensional rating of Cluster A (odd-eccentric) pathology, was predictive of a poor response to treatment (p<.05), as measured by change in pre-post clinical ratings on the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale. These results were construed as indicative of a significant Axis II comorbidity effect in the context of an inpatient, multimodal treatment setting for depression. The results also spotlight the influence of techniques of measurement in determining the outcome of statistical analysis.     

An investigation of the relationship between self-efficacy and the communication effectiveness of product manual formats

Product manuals have been virtually ignored in published research despite their relevance to consumer satisfaction and marketplace safety. This study examines self-efficacy (perceptions of capabilities related to operating a product) and how it influences the effectiveness of and is also influenced by three safety message formats commonly used in product manuals (i.e., 1. safety messages presented in list format at the front of the manual; 2; safety messages presented by semantic similarity interspersed throughout the manual—chunked format, and 3. safety messages presented in a combined format—both list and chunked). As anticipated, pre-exposure self-efficacy was a significant covariate which was found to be positively related to post-exposure self-efficacy and negatively related to information evaluation. Further, controlling for pre-exposure self-efficacy, post-exposure self-efficacy was significantly lower in the combined (list plus chunked) condition. Findings of this research have important implications for the practice of repeating safety warnings and future research in the consumer information domain.Authors are listed in alphabetical order. This study was supported by an Illinois State University Research Grant.     

Quantitative measurement of observed workload in the analysis of aircrew performance

A methodology for the quantitative evaluation of observed workload was proposed. The model was designed to provide point estimations of observed workload at any time during the performance of a set of tasks. The model was also designed to provide information about the task-scheduling strategies used to complete a set of tasks. The proposed model was then tested with data from a full mission flight simulation. The model predictions correlated significantly with expert ratings of workload management made during the flight simulation. The model was also able to distinguish between low- and high-performing aircrews when performance was based on the number of errors made during flight simulations.     

Discrimination of Facial Identity and Facial Affect by Temporal and Frontal Lobectomy Patients

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which lobectomy affects ability to discriminate facial identity or facial expression. Fifteen right temporal, 15 left temporal, 5 right frontal, and 4 left frontal lobectomy patients, pair-matched for age, sex, and education to normal control subjects, participated in this study. Tasks included a Facial Identity Matching Task and a Facial Affect Matching task. The lobectomized patients as a whole were significantly impaired on both tasks (22% decrement in performance). The patients made twice as many errors resulting from perseveration of response-set of the first condition (identity or emotion matching) into the second condition. The site of lobectomy did not influence general performance on any one task or selective performance on any subset of affective categories. It was concluded that all four brain regions play a significant and equal role in face processing, and that circuits more specifically dedicated to visual face processing, which are responsible for hemispheric dominance affects and affect/identity dissociations, are probably located more posteriorly in the brain. Finally, it was concluded that perseveration of acquired habit may, under specific conditions, characterize temporal lobe dysfunction just as much as frontal lobe dysfunction.     

Managed mental health care and professional compensation

Managed care and organized systems of care are restructuring the delivery of care in the United States. As care is reorganized, physician practice styles, autonomy, and compensation are undergoing profound changes. To successfully integrate physicians into the new managed systems of care, their organizational relationship to and their compensation within these systems must be carefully considered. This paper first explores physician motivation as it is related to compensation. The paper then describes a variety of emerging organizational designs aimed at aligning the interests of physicians and hospitals. The author considers fully integrated, physician-hospital organizations with target income compensation arrangements to be most suitable to the collective success of professionals and organized systems of care. The paper concludes with a discussion of the many dilemmas and challenges posed by the intertwining of managed care, organized networks of care, and professional compensation.     

Human choice in concurrent ratio-interval schedules of reinforcement.

Seven undergraduates participated in a concurrent-choice experiment with monetary reinforcers. Response-independent analogues of variable-interval and variable-ratio schedules were used to assess whether subjects would maximize reinforcement rate. The optimal pattern of behavior, in terms of maximizing reinforcement rate, involved a large bias toward the ratio alternative, with only occasional sampling of the interval schedule. Most experiments with pigeons, however, demonstrate matching of response rates to reinforcement rates, with only slight biases for the ratio schedule. Although subjects in the present experiment allocated more time to the ratio alternative than required by matching, the magnitude of the bias did not approximate that predicted by a maximizing account. After exposure to clock stimuli correlated with the operation of each schedule, 1 subject's behavior did show a substantial level of bias, increasing the total number of reinforcers obtained, and lay at a point between the predictions of matching and maximizing. The other subjects, however, continued to respond less optimally. The present results can be accounted for by a view of matching that incorporates the effects of delayed reinforcement.