The effects of limited and intensive school psychologist-teacher consultation

Effects of two modes of school psychological consultation were examined against four main outcomes: (1) changes in teacher understanding of the child, (2) the direction of the changes in teacher understanding of the child, (3) teacher satisfaction with consultation, and (4) teacher follow-through on psychologist's recommendations. The two consultative modes were differentiated by the amount of time and by the length and elaboration of the psychological report. Eight school psychologists alternated in acting out the different consultative modes, plus a control condition, with a total of 120 teachers who had referred children. Data were obtained through paper and pencil questionnaires completed pre- and postconsultation by teacher and psychologist. The results strongly supported the intensive over the limited consultation, and any consultation over no consultation.     

The role of apparent motion cues in orientation masking

It has been reported that the tuning function relating masking of a vertical line to the orientation of a masking line differs in form depending upon whether the mask is presented with the target (simultaneous masking) or before it (forward masking). From such evidence, it might be concluded that different mechanisms are implicated. Lovegrove (1976) suggested that lateral inhibition mediates the simultaneous effect, whereas postexcitatory suppression (adaptation) mediates the successive effect. The six experiments reported here show that apparent motion cues reduce the effectiveness of successive masking when single-line stimuli are used, but that when such motion cues are eliminated, the two tuning functions are similar in form. It is, thus, unnecessary to invoke separate mechanisms in the two cases.     

“No,You're Playing the Race Card”: Testing the Effects of Anti-Black,Anti-Latino,and Anti-Immigrant Appeals in the Post-Obama Era

Despite a sizable literature on racial priming, scholars have failed to account for the shifting nature of racial appeals. First, theories of racial priming have not yet been widely applied to increasingly common anti-immigrant and anti-Latino political appeals. Second, theories of racial priming have not adequately accounted for both an increasingly racialized political climate and increased tolerance for explicit anti-minority appeals. In two survey experiments fielded both before Trump's rise and after his presidential victory, we find the Implicit-Explicit (IE) model always fails for anti-black appeals, sometimes fails for anti-immigrant appeals, but consistently holds for anti-Latino appeals. While we find the null effects of implicit versus explicit anti-black and anti-immigrant appeals are partly driven by tolerance for the explicit appeals, we also find evidence that white Americans are adept at recognizing the racial content of appeals featuring widely used, congruent issue-group pairs. Our findings shed light on conditions under which the IE model does and does not hold in the current political era.     

Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer''s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line vs. On-Line Sentence Processing

Two studies explored whether sentence comprehension impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are due to deficits in syntactic processing or memory. Study 1 used a picture-pointing sentence comprehension task to measure the final outcome of comprehension in an off-line fashion. It showed the comprehension of 30 patients with AD to be impaired, but suggested that the deficits could not be attributed solely to syntactic impairments. Study 2 investigated the effects of memory on sentence comprehension by comparing off-line (grammaticality judgment) with on-line (cross-modal naming) language processing in 11 AD and 9 control subjects. The results revealed impaired performance in the off-line task but normal performance in the on-line task using the same sentences. Performance on the off-line task correlated with independent measures of verbal working memory. These data are used to argue that sentence comprehension impairments are related to verbal working memory deficits in AD.     

Psychological trauma and schizotypal personality disorder

Two studies examined the relation between psychological trauma and schizotypal symptoms. In Study 1, in which 1,510 adults completed telephone interviews, both childhood maltreatment and the experience of an injury or life-threatening event were significantly associated with schizotypal symptoms. In Study 2, in which 303 adults (oversampled for having elevated levels of schizotypal symptoms) completed extensive in-person assessments, both childhood maltreatment and meeting posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Criterion A were significantly associated with schizotypal symptoms. The links between schizotypal symptoms and at least some forms of psychological trauma could not be fully accounted for by shared variance with antisocial and borderline personality disorders, absorption/dissociation, PTSD symptom severity, family history of psychotic disorder, or signs of neurodevelopmental disturbance (as indexed by minor physical anomalies and inconsistent hand use). Schizotypal symptoms were more strongly associated with childhood maltreatment among men than among women, whereas schizotypal symptoms were more strongly associated with PTSD Criterion A among women than among men. Finally, among men, the association between childhood maltreatment and schizotypal symptoms was moderated by signs of neurodevelopmental disturbance.     

Orthographic influences on phoneme deletion response times

The aim of this paper is to provide further evidence that orthography plays a central role in phonemic awareness, by demonstrating an orthographic congruency effect in phoneme deletion. In four initial phoneme deletion experiments, adult participants produced the correct response more slowly with orthographically mismatched stimulus-response pairs (e.g., worth-earth) than with matched pairs (e.g., wage-age). This orthographic effect occurred with or without specific instructions to ignore spelling and when stimuli were presented with or without the to-be-deleted sound. In a final experiment, participants made more errors on complex than simple onset items, but there was no interaction with orthographic mismatch. The repeated observation of this robust orthographic effect suggests that participants are at least aware of orthography during phonemic awareness tasks, and it supports the view that phonemic awareness is directly subserved by orthography.