Human participants challenges in youth tobacco cessation research: researchers' perspectives

Recruiting adolescents into smoking cessation studies is challenging, particularly given institutional review board (IRB) requirements for research conducted with adolescents. This article provides a brief review of the federal regulations that apply to research conducted with adolescents, and describes researchers' experiences of seeking IRB approval for youth cessation research. Twenty-one researchers provided information. The most frequently reported difficulty involved obtaining parental consent. Solutions to commonly reported problems with obtaining IRB approval are also identified. Waivers of parental consent can facilitate recruitment of youths into studies; however, researchers must ensure that their protocols comply with federal regulations when requesting a waiver.     

Collaboration and Social Inquiry: Multiple Meanings of a Construct and Its Role in Creating Useful and Valid Knowledge

The concept of collaboration in community research and intervention, although not new, has grown tremendously in importance in the past 20 years. Yet, it is both a contested concept in terms of its intent and a still evolving idea in terms of its meaning and implications. The purpose of this monograph is to begin to "unpack" the collaboration construct in terms of its many meanings, rationales, goals, models, dynamics, and accomplishments. Although models of collaboration are often well articulated there is "partial paradigm acquisition" (E. J. Trickett, 1984) in terms of understanding their behavioral and ethical implications. There is more theology than conclusion. The promise of collaboration, although considerable, is still in need of multiple and varied empirical examples of how collaboration contributes to both the process and goals of community research and intervention, however defined. The monograph closes with a brief overview of what we have learned from reviewing this literature, an articulation of the kinds of questions that need to be addressed, and a series of recommendations for how to increase our understanding of the collaboration construct in community research and intervention.     

Initial behavior outcomes for the peacebuilders universal school-based violence prevention program

PeaceBuilders is a universal, elementary-school-based violence prevention program that attempts to alter the climate of a school by teaching students and staff simple rules and activities aimed at improving child social competence and reducing aggressive behavior. Eight matched schools (N > 4,000 students in Grades K-5) were randomly assigned to either immediate postbaseline intervention (PBI) or to a delayed intervention 1 year later (PBD). Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze results from assessments in the fall and spring of 2 consecutive school years. In Year 1, significant gains in teacher-rated social competence for students in Grades K-2, in childself-reported peace-building behavior in Grades K-5, and reductions in aggressive behavior in Grades 3-5 were found for PBI but not PBD schools. Differential effects in Year 1 were also observed for aggression and prosocial behavior. Most effects were maintained in Year 2 for PBI schools, including increases in child prosocial behavior in Grades K-2. Implications for early universal school-based prevention and challenges related toevaluating large-scale prevention trials are discussed.     

From children's hands to adults' ears: gesture's role in the learning process

Children can express thoughts in gesture that they do not express in speech--they produce gesture-speech mismatches. Moreover, children who produce mismatches on a given task are particularly ready to learn that task. Gesture, then, is a tool that researchers can use to predict who will profit from instruction. But is gesture also useful to adults who must decide how to instruct a particular child? We asked 8 adults to instruct 38 third- and fourth-grade children individually in a math problem. We found that the adults offered more variable instruction to children who produced mismatches than to children who produced no mismatches--more different types of instructional strategies and more instructions that contained two different strategies, one in speech and the other in gesture. The children thus appeared to be shaping their own learning environments just by moving their hands. Gesture not only reflects a child's understanding but can play a role in eliciting input that could shape that understanding. As such, it may be part of the mechanism of cognitive change.     

Memory for actions: Self-performed tasks and the reenactment effect

Encoding action phrases by enactment (self-performed tasks, or SPTs) leads to better memory than does observing actions (experimenter-performed tasks, or EPTs) or hearing action phrases (Engelkamp, 1998). In addition, recognition memory for SPTs is enhanced when test items are reenacted. Experiment 1 demonstrated a reenactment effect for EPTs, as well as for SPTs, indicating that the effect can be based on visual, as well as motoric, feedback. However, the reenactment effect in SPTs was found even when the participants were blindfolded at test (Experiment 2), indicating that the basis for the reenactment effect differs across SPTs and EPTs. Experiments 3 and 4 provided additional evidence that visual feedback is not critical for reenactment recognition in the case of SPTs. In addition, these experiments failed to show a hand congruency effect (enhanced recognition when the same hand enacts at study and at test), indicating that this effect is not as generalizable as the reenactment effect. These results have important implications for the motor-encoding hypothesis of the enactment effect.     

Dissociating the performance of cortical and subcortical patients on phonemic tasks

To assess cortical and subcortical contributions to phonemic processing, patients with left frontal, temporal-parietal, or cerebellar lesions as well as those with Parkinson's disease were tested on phonemic identification and production tasks. In Experiment 1, patients and controls were asked to identify syllables on both a voicing and place of articulation continuum. Subcortical patients were relatively unimpaired at this task whereas cortical patients were less accurate at identifying the endpoints of both continua and exhibited little evidence of categorical perception. For Experiment 2, controls and patients were asked to produce syllables. Subcortical patients were able to produce contrastive voice onset times (VOTs) for voicing cognates although VOT of the voiceless phoneme was more variable for cerebellar patients. Cortical patients showed greater overlap in the production of both VOT and formant transition intervals. These results are discussed in terms of the type of computations hypothesized to originate from each neural area.     

Interpretation and judgmental biases in social phobia

Previous research demonstrated that social phobia is characterized by content-specific interpretation and judgmental biases. The present study investigated whether this interpretation bias occurs not only in ambiguous, but also in positive and negative social events, and whether social phobic patients (SPs) are more characterized by a judgmental bias in costs than in probability. Besides, we argued that the judgmental bias observed in former studies could also be attributed to accurate estimations of SPs (of, for example, stuttering). Therefore, we assessed judgmental bias by the ratings of probability and costs of a negative evaluation (e.g. ‘people dislike me’) and not, as in previous studies, of negative social events (e.g. ‘stuttering’). SPs (n=228) and normal controls (n=33) were presented social and non-social events ranging from positive to profoundly negative. They ranked four different interpretations on likelihood to assess interpretation bias, and rated the profoundly negative interpretation on probability and cost to assess judgmental bias. SPs demonstrated content-specific interpretation and judgmental biases that also occurred in positive and negative social events. In contrast with expectations, SPs were characterized by a judgmental bias in both costs and probability.     

People with Williams syndrome process faces holistically

This study compared the performance of 47 adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome to 39 age-matched controls on a face recognition task. Using the whole-part paradigm developed by Tanaka and his colleagues, we found that although performance overall was lower in the participants with Williams syndrome, both groups showed similar patterns of performance across the different conditions. Both groups performed significantly better in the whole-face than in the isolated-part test condition for upright faces, but not for inverted faces. The whole-face advantage only in the upright condition provides strong evidence that people with Williams syndrome encode and recognize faces holistically in the same way as normal controls, suggesting the use of similar underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. These findings contradict earlier reports in the literature that people with Williams syndrome process faces abnormally.