Effects of a televised smoking cessation intervention among low-income and minority smokers

In November 1985, a television smoking cessation program was broadcast for 20 days on the noon and 9 p.m. news. Smokers in West Garfield Park, an inner-city impoverished area of Chicago, were randomly assigned either to a comprehensive intervention or to a no-intervention control condition. Although 100,000 self-help manuals had been distributed throughout Chicago, none of the controls in this low-income area had obtained a manual. The intervention consisted of providing the smokers a self-help manual, the televised broadcast, weekly support meetings, and supportive phone calls. At a 4-month follow-up, 20% of treatment participants were abstinent compared to 9% of controls. The results indicated that intensive supplementary opportunities enhanced participation by low-income smokers in a media smoking cessation program.     

Team-Track: A tool for investigating tracking performance in teams

Team performance and coordination have gained considerable interest in disparate fields (e.g., aviation, process control, medicine, and wartime operations). Team-Track, a C program that allows controlled experimental manipulation of team conditions, was developed to meet the research needs resulting from this interest. Using Team-Track, one can manipulate task interdependence, team staffing, relative contributions of team members, communications, and informational displays in a low-cost environment. The dependent measure of performance generated by the program is the absolute tracking error along each dimension. The program is ideal for investigating team interactions as it allows for orthogonal manipulation of team variables, therefore accommodating a multitude of research paradigms.     

PC operating system for measuring discrete biological responses during classical conditioning

A software package, written in C source code for MS-DOS 5.0 or higher IBM-compatible computers, was developed for the classical conditioning of discrete biological responses. The program’s primary functions include collecting and storing conditioning parameters, controlling presentation of stimuli, transforming discrete analog responses into dependent measures (e.g., CR frequencies and various measures of response topography), and generating data sets for use with commercial PC statistical packages. These functions were implemented in a windows-based user interface to increase the experimenter’s ease of use and to maximize efficiency in performing experimental procedures. Scrollable windows provide detailed visual displays that permit monitoring responses during conditioning and a review of each trial after the session is over. Additional software tools aid the visual inspection of response topographies, data manipulation, and calibration of the experimental apparatus. An overview of the system, its design objectives, and the user interface is presented.     

The Logic of ADHD: A Brief Review of Fallacious Reasoning

This paper has two central purposes: the first is to survey some of the more important examples of fallacious argument, and the second is to examine the frequent use of these fallacies in support of the psychological construct: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The paper divides 12 familiar fallacies into three different categories—material, psychological and logical—and contends that advocates of ADHD often seem to employ these fallacies to support their position. It is suggested that all researchers, whether into ADHD or otherwise, need to pay much closer attention to the construction of their arguments if they are not to make truth claims unsupported by satisfactory evidence, form or logic.     

Professional Decision-Making in Research (PDR): The Validity of a New Measure

In this paper, we report on the development and validity of the Professional Decision-Making in Research (PDR) measure, a vignette-based test that examines decision-making strategies used by investigators when confronted with challenging situations in the context of empirical research. The PDR was administered online with a battery of validity measures to a group of NIH-funded researchers and research trainees who were diverse in terms of age, years of experience, types of research, and race. The PDR demonstrated adequate reliability (alpha = .84) and parallel form correlation (r = .70). As hypothesized, the PDR was significantly negatively correlated with narcissism, cynicism, moral disengagement, and compliance disengagement; it was not correlated with socially desirable responding. In regression analysis, the strongest predictors of higher PDR scores were low compliance disengagement, speaking English as a native language, conducting clinical research with human subjects, and low levels of narcissism. Given that the PDR was written at an eighth grade reading level to be suitable for use with English as a second language participants and that only one-fourth of items focused on clinical research, further research into the possible roles of culture and research ethics training across specialties is warranted. This initial validity study demonstrates the potential usefulness of the PDR as an educational outcome assessment measure and a research instrument for studies on professionalism and integrity in research.