Development and validation of a brief self-report measure of trauma exposure: the Trauma History Screen

Although information about individuals' exposure to highly stressful events such as traumatic stressors is often very useful for clinicians and researchers, available measures are too long and complex for use in many settings. The Trauma History Screen (THS) was developed to provide a very brief and easy-to-complete self-report measure of exposure to high magnitude stressor (HMS) events and of events associated with significant and persisting posttraumatic distress (PPD). The measure assesses the frequency of HMS and PPD events, and it provides detailed information about PPD events. Test-retest reliability was studied in four samples, and temporal stability was good to excellent for items and trauma types and excellent for overall HMS and PPD scores. Comprehensibility of items was supported by expert ratings of how well items appeared to be understood by participants with relatively low reading levels. In five samples, construct validity was supported by findings of strong convergent validity with a longer measure of trauma exposure and by correlations of HMS and PPD scores with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. The psychometric properties of the THS appear to be comparable or better than longer and more complex measures of trauma exposure.     

Duties to Companion Animals

This paper outlines the moral contours of human relationships with companion animals. The paper details three sources of duties to and regarding companion animals: (1) from the animal’s status as property, (2) from the animal’s position in relationships of care, love, and dependency, and (3) from the animal’s status as a sentient being with a good of its own. These three sources of duties supplement one another and not only differentiate relationships with companion animals from wild animals and other categories of domestic animals such as livestock, but they also overlap to provide moral agents with additional reasons for preventing and avoiding harm to companion animals. The paper concludes that not only do owners and bystanders have direct and indirect duties to protect companion animals from harm, but also that these duties have the potential, in some circumstances, to clash with duties owed to the state and fellow citizens.     

A model for removing the increased recall of recent events from the temporal distribution of autobiographical memory

The reminiscence bump is the tendency to recall relatively many personal events from the period in which the individual was between 10 and 30 years old. This effect has only been found in autobiographical memory studies that used participants who were older than 40 years of age. The increased recall of recent events possibly obscures the reminiscence bump in the results of younger participants. In this study, a model was proposed that removes the increase for recent events from the temporal distribution. The model basically estimates a retention function based on the 10 most recent years from the observed distributions and divides the observed distributions by predictions derived from the estimated retention function. The model was examined with three simulated data sets and one experimental data set. The results of the experiment offered two practical examples of how the model could be used to investigate the temporal distribution of autobiographical memories.     

Is phonological short-term memory related to phonological analysis stages in auditory sentence processing?

Despite extensive research, the role of phonological short-term memory (STM) during oral sentence comprehension remains unclear. We tested the hypothesis that phonological STM is involved in phonological analysis stages of the incoming words, but not in sentence comprehension per se. We compared phonological STM capacity and processing times for natural sentences and sentences containing phonetically ambiguous words. The sentences were presented for an auditory sentence anomaly judgement task and processing times for each word were measured. STM was measured via nonword and word immediate serial recall tasks, indexing phonological and lexicosemantic STM capacity, respectively. Significantly increased processing times were observed for phonetically ambiguous words, relative to natural stimuli in same sentence positions. Phonological STM capacity correlated with the size of this phonetic ambiguity effect. However, phonological STM capacity did not correlate with measures of later semantic integration processes while lexicosemantic STM did. This study suggests that phonological STM is associated with phonological analysis processes during sentence processing.     

Behavioral versus Behavioral and Pharmacological Treatment in ADHD Children Attending a Summer Treatment Program

As part of the behavioral treatment in the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA), children participated in an intensive summer treatment program (STP). This study examined the differences between 57 children in the combined treatment (Comb) group, who were medicated, and 60 children in the behavioral treatment (Beh) group, who were unmedicated throughout the STP. Comb children were significantly better than Beh on 5 measures: rule following, good sportsmanship, peer negative nominations, and STP teacher posttreatment ratings of inattention/overactivity. Groups did not differ on any of the other 30 measures, and responded similarly to the STP over time. Comparisons to normative data revealed that Comb children were more likely to fall within the normative range on 6 measures. The differences between these results and the main MTA results, in which Comb was always superior to Beh, are discussed in terms of the relative intensity of combined treatments. The implications for future studies of pharmacological and behavioral treatment for ADHD are discussed.     

Visual illusions affect both movement planning and on-line control: a multiple cue position on bias and goal-directed action

Over the last decade, there has been an interest in the impact of visual illusions on the control of action. Much of this work has been motivated by Milner and Goodale's two visual system model of visual processing. This model is based on a hypothesized dissociation between cognitive judgments and the visual control of action. It holds that action is immune to the visual context that provides the basis for the illusion-induced bias associated with cognitive judgments. Recently, Glover has challenged this position and has suggested that movement planning, but not movement execution is susceptible to visual illusions. Research from our lab is inconsistent with both models of visual-motor processing. With respect to the planning and control model, kinematic evidence shows that the impact of an illusion on manual aiming increases as the limb approaches the target. For the Ebbinghaus illusion, this involved a decrease in the time after peak velocity to accommodate the 'perceived' size of the target. For the Müller-Lyer illusion, the influence of the figure's tails increased from peak velocity to the end of the movement. Although our findings contradict a strong version of the two visual systems hypothesis, we did find dissociations between perception and action in another experiment. In this Müller-Lyer study, perceptual decisions were influenced by misjudgment of extent, while action was influenced by misjudgment of target position. Overall, our findings are consistent with the idea that it is often necessary to use visual context to make adjustments to ongoing movements.     

Self-selected visual information during discrete manual aiming

The authors examined strategic selection of visual samples during manual aiming. Participants (N = 12) wore liquid-crystal goggles while performing discrete movements to a small target. Initially, participants controlled a 40-ms visual sample via a switch in their nonaiming hand. Subsequently, experimenter-imposed strategies required participants to take visual samples before movement initiation or early or late in the movement. Although participants adopted a variety of strategies to optimize the use of vision, they were more likely to select a sample during the early stages of the movement. Experimenter-imposed early and late instructions resulted in longer movement times than did self-selected sampling. Compared with late sampling, early sampling resulted in a temporal advantage with similar accuracy.