Moderators of informant agreement in the assessment of adolescent psychopathology: extension to a forensic sample

A well-documented finding in developmental psychopathology research is that different informants often provide discrepant ratings of a youth's internalizing and externalizing problems. The current study examines youth- and parent-based moderators (i.e., youth age, gender, and IQ; type of psychopathology; offense category; psychopathic traits; parental education, income, and stress) of informant discrepancies in a sample of young offenders and compares the utility of youth and caregiver reports against relevant clinical outcomes. Results indicate that gender moderated the discrepancy between informant reports of somatic complaints, while parenting stress moderated the discrepancies across reports of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. Variables unique to the forensic context (e.g., offense category) were found to moderate cross-informant discrepancies in reports of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. Further, youth self-reports of internalizing symptoms predicted a clinician-generated diagnosis of a mood disorder, while caregiver reports of aggressive behaviors predicted the presence of an externalizing diagnosis. Results highlight the importance of assessing informant agreement in the context of forensic assessment and raise questions surrounding the optimal use of informant data in this setting.     

Significant life events and the shape of memories to come: a hypothesis

Much has been said about how significant life events modulate our response to stimuli that are integral to those events. However, we know less about the more general consequences of these events, that is, how they affect subsequent learning abilities that are seemingly irrelevant to the initial event. Here, it is proposed that significant life events, most often stressful in nature, alter future learned responses by inducing nonspecific and persistent changes in neuroanatomical structures. These changes are induced in the presence of sex and stress hormones, which are released either in response to the event itself or as a consequence of stages of life. To illustrate, the effects of acute stressful experience on learning processes and their regulation by the release of hormones are reviewed. I discuss how these events and their hormonal consequences alter anatomical substrates such as those involved in neurogenesis and synaptogenesis. It is proposed that these modulatory processes allow past experiences to change the shape of memories to come. In this way, memorable life events become less about the past and more about the future.     

Why Me? The Persistence of Negative Appraisals Over the Course of Illness1

This paper examines the relationship of illness appraisals and causal attributions to later psychological adjustment among individuals coping with a chronic illness. Data on threat and challenge appraisals, causal attributions, and depression were collected twice over an 18-month period from patients with recently diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Appraisals and attributions were differentially related to psychological adjustment. Challenge appraisals were stable over time but were unrelated to depression. Internal, stable, global attributions about the diagnosis were associated with greater depression at follow-up for subjects who were initially high on the depression measure but were related to lowered depression for individuals with initially low depression. An interaction between initial threat appraisals and depression was also found for depression 18 months later. For individuals with low depression scores initially, threat appraisals were related to greater depression later; when initial depression was high, threat appraisals were unrelated to later depression. In addition, initial threat appraisals mediated the relationship between initial level of depression and rumination (continuing to ask, “Why me?”) 18 months later. These findings are discussed in terms of the failure to achieve some resolution about the place of the illness in one's life and of theories of dysphoric rumination that suggest that negative self-focus contributes to a continuing depressed mood.     

An enhanced examination of Holland's consistency and differentiation hypotheses

The research support for Holland's concepts of consistency and differentiation has been equivocal (Nauta, 2010). To provide a reexamination of these concepts, a new method of operationalizing Holland's constructs of consistency and differentiation using the cosine fit function to the RIASEC score profile is proposed. The relation of these new indices to career certainty, congruence and the moderation of the congruence–certainty relation were examined in a sample of 118 college students (study 1). Support was found for the superiority of the cosine fit definitions of consistency and differentiation over the traditional representations. The cosine fit indices were further examined in a second study on 167 adults examining interest stability over 15 years. The cosine fit indices of consistency and differentiation were related to both occupational stability over 15 years and career satisfaction. The results suggest that the concepts of differentiation and consistency may still have merit but only with more exact methods of specification.