Helping the child with cancer: what school personnel want to know

As more children with cancer survive, the importance of facilitating school reintegration as a part of maximizing the quality of life has become evident. Workshops have been presented to school personnel to acquaint them with the issues facing cancer patients and their families, but there are gaps in our knowledge of what school personnel really need or want to know. In this study, 18 teachers of children with cancer and 15 teachers with no prior contact with students with cancer completed a questionnaire designed to assess needs, beliefs, and priorities with regard to working with cancer patients in the classroom. Significant findings included: (a) a consensus that a certain core of information about medical/psychological issues would be useful, and presentation of such information by psychologists and medical personnel working with such families would be optimal; (b) teachers having cancer patients as students were less likely to see the adaptation of siblings as an important issue; (c) teachers associated working with a student with cancer with less stress and demands on their time than predictable from previous studies; and (d) cancer patients as a whole were rated as having fewer behavioral, emotional, and learning problems than randomly selected students without a major illness, suggesting a "halo effect" or contradiction of some literature. Preliminary findings are detailed and implications are discussed for those attempting to help teachers facilitate students' adjustment to school following diagnosis and treatment of cancer.     

Threshold tracking for assessment of long-term adaptation and sensitization in pain perception

To assess temporal variations in the perception of "phasic" heat pain stimuli a psychophysical tracking procedure was developed that enables repeated assessment of the pain threshold at short intervals. This "double-tracking" procedure produces two tracking curves simultaneously, one that approaches the pain threshold gradually from above, the other from below. The threshold for phasic heat pain was measured in 80 tracking trials with stimuli at temperatures near the pain threshold. Concurrently, the threshold for "tonic" heat pain was determined after every 20 tracking trials with a stimulus adjustment procedure. Eleven healthy subjects (age: 26.4 yr. +/- 6.0) participated in 2 sessions each. Phasic stimulation near the pain threshold did not produce any trends in either of the two threshold measures. Hence there was no long-term adaptation or sensitization. However, there were random variations (random walks) in the tracking curves, which we interpret as resulting from a stochastic relationship between stimulus and sensation. In agreement with other reports, discrimination seemed to be better at painful than at nonpainful temperatures.     

A model of perceptual classification in children and adults

The developmental trend from overall-similarity to dimensional-identity classifications is explained by a quantitative model. I begin with the assumption that objects are represented in terms of constituent dimensions and that the representation of objects changes little with development. Given this assumption, the model has three major parts. First, the similarity between objects is a function of the combination of the constituent dimensional differences. I propose developmental change in the likelihood that dimensions are differentially weighted in the calculation of similarity. Second, the perceived similarities between objects are valued for the purpose of constructing classifications. I propose that similarities are valued more dichotomously with age, such that identity becomes increasingly special. Third, the valued similarities are used to choose the best classification of those possible. The model provides good qualitative fits to the extant data. Three experiments examining classifications in 2- to 8-year-olds and in adults support specific new claims of the model. The data and the model provide new insights about development, classification, and similarity.     

Objective and simulated stimulation: an empirical study of the effect of indirect suggestion on motor behavior

In an experimental investigation it is demonstrated that motor behavior-in contrast to the opinion forwarded in the literature-is not only elicitable by means of direct persuasion, but also to a great extend by mere indirect suggestion, (feigning of stimuli). A differential investigation of these effects provided evidence that reactions to feigned stimuli are highly person specific and relatively homogenous concerning the respective instruments whereas objective stimuli lead to reactions relatively specific for the respective instrument applied. The findings are interpreted as an analog on to placebo-effects in the area of motor behavior. Their extend may be seen as an argument for a stronger concern with subjective reaction tendencies in this field.     

Creating new memories that are quickly accessed and confidently held

In two experiments involving a total of 542 subjects, a series of slides depicting a burglary was shown. After the initial event, subjects were exposed to one or more narratives about the event that contained some misinformation or neutral information about four critical details. Finally, subjects were tested on their memories of what they saw, and their reaction times and confidence levels were measured. When subjects took a standard test in which the misinformation item was a possible response option, they responded very quickly and confidently when making this incorrect choice. Misled subjects responded as quickly and confidently to these "unreal" memories as they did to their genuine memories. It does not seem, then, that the misinformation effect arises from a large proportion of subjects who must resolve a conflict between two memories when they are tested, a conflict that would be expected to take time. When subjects took a modified test in which the misinformation item was not a possible response, misled subjects were as accurate as were controls, but they responded more slowly, regardless of whether they ultimately chose the right or wrong option. These findings indicate that misinformation does introduce some form of interference not detected by a simple test of accuracy.     

Attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity and methylphenidate: The effects of dose and mastery level on children's learning performance

This investigation examined the relationship between methylphenidate (MPH) and the learning and recall of paired associations by children with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADDH). Forty-five children with ADDH were randomly assigned to one of three groups (novel, partial mastery, and mastery learning) that varied in the amount of previous learning of paired associations and participated in a double-blind, placebo-control, repeated-measures-across-dose (crossover) design. Each child received four doses of MPH (5 mg, 10 mg, 15 mg, and 20 mg) and a placebo in a random, counterbalanced sequence. The results indicated that both the rate of acquisition and accuracy in learning paired associations were significantly, but differentially, affected by MPH dose and the degree of learning mastery. The implications of these results for psychopharmacological research and the monitoring of psychostimulant effects on children's learning performance in academic settings are discussed.The authors wish to acknowledge and express their sincere appreciation to the graduate and undergraduate student members of the Children's Learning Clinic.     

Altering memory through recall: The effects of cue-guided retrieval processing

Three experiments were designed to investigate the influence of initial recall on memory by assessing delayed recall after different immediate cued-recall tests. In all experiments, subjects performed semantic and phonemic encoding tasks on a word list. The subjects then received a cued-recall test that cued the target using the same word as the context word in the encoding task, a test that cued the target with a word from the same level at which the target was encoded, a test that cued the target with a cue from a different level at which the target was encoded, or no immediate-recall test. One day later, the subjects performed a final cued-recall test in which the type of cue (semantic or phonemic) was varied. Consistently, delayed recall was facilitated primarily when the cue on the immediate test was from the same level as the cue on the delayed test. This pattern of facilitation suggests that immediate cued-recall produces an elaboration of an existing memory representation that is closely tied to the type of cue used on the immediate test.     

Supportive and problematic social interactions: A social network analysis

Assessed the number of sources of supportive and problematic social interactions in the total social network as well as the number who were the sources of consistently supportive or problematic interactions in a sample of 2nd year medical students. Number of problematic interaction sources was hypothesized to be more predictive of psychological and physical well-being than number of supportive interaction sources. Results showed that total supportive and total problematic interaction sources were equally predictive of life satisfaction. The presence of at least one individual who is a consistent source of problematic interactions was most predictive of lower life satisfaction. Results indicate the importance of studying both supportive and problematic social interactions. They also suggest that interactions with individuals that are consistently problematic may negatively impact upon well-being.     

Community psychology in Hong Kong: Past,present, and future

The expansion of mental health services during the 1960s from a single remote mental hospital to centers and clinics in mainstream communities fostered the development of community psychology in Hong Kong. Few psychologists were initially involved in the local community mental health movement, but its momentum resulted in increasing numbers of practitioner psychologists working in community-based service settings. Community psychology in Hong Kong today consists primarily of service delivery, but also includes applied research, community organization/consultation, and community education. Despite having many parallels with the American situation, key concepts underpinning the practice of community psychology in the Territory possess their own character as a reflection of nuances in the local scene. Prospects for the continued development of community psychology in Hong Kong appear favorable. Of special relevance is the field's potential contribution to a better understanding of the psychological phenomena associated with the Territory's sociopolitical transformation in 1997.     

Least-squares approximation of an improper correlation matrix by a proper one

An algorithm is presented for the best least-squares fitting correlation matrix approximating a given missing value or improper correlation matrix. The proposed algorithm is based upon a solution for Mosier's oblique Procrustes rotation problem offered by ten Berge and Nevels. A necessary and sufficient condition is given for a solution to yield the unique global minimum of the least-squares function. Empirical verification of the condition indicates that the occurrence of non-optimal solutions with the proposed algorithm is very unlikely. A possible drawback of the optimal solution is that it is a singular matrix of necessity. In cases where singularity is undesirable, one may impose the additional nonsingularity constraint that the smallest eigenvalue of the solution be , where is an arbitrary small positive constant. Finally, it may be desirable to weight the squared errors of estimation differentially. A generalized solution is derived which satisfies the additional nonsingularity constraint and also allows for weighting. The generalized solution can readily be obtained from the standard unweighted singular solution by transforming the observed improper correlation matrix in a suitable way.