Adolescent and parent perspectives on ethical issues in youth drug use and suicide survey research

The contribution of adolescent and parent perspectives to ethical planning of survey research on youth drug use and suicide behaviors are highlighted through an empirical examination of 322 7th-12th graders' and 160 parents' opinions on questions related to 4 ethical dimensions of survey research practice: (a) evaluating research risks and benefits, (b) establishing guardian permission requirements, (c) developing confidentiality and disclosure policies, and (d) using cash incentives for recruitment. Generational and ethnic variation in response to questionnaire items developed from discussions within adolescent and parent focus groups are described. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential contributions and challenges of adolescent and parent perspectives for planning scientifically valid and ethically responsible youth risk survey research.     

Learning words and rules: abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension

Children quickly acquire basic grammatical facts about their native language. Does this early syntactic knowledge involve knowledge of words or rules? According to lexical accounts of acquisition, abstract syntactic and semantic categories are not primitive to the language-acquisition system; thus, early language comprehension and production are based on verb-specific knowledge. The present experiments challenge this account: We probed the abstractness of young children's knowledge of syntax by testing whether 25- and 21-month-olds extend their knowledge of English word order to new verbs. In four experiments, children used word order appropriately to interpret transitive sentences containing novel verbs. These findings demonstrate that although toddlers have much to learn about their native languages, they represent language experience in terms of an abstract mental vocabulary. These abstract representations allow children to rapidly detect general patterns in their native language, and thus to learn rules as well as words from the start.     

Depression as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory-II among injecting drug users

This study conducts a confirmatory factor analysis of the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) with a sample of 598 individuals who reported recent injecting drug use. Findings indicate that out of four models tested, the best model for this sample is a three-factor solution (somatic, affective, and cognitive) previously reported by Buckley, Parker, and Heggie. The findings that nearly 50% of participants provided BDI-II scores indicating significant depressive symptomatology reveals that these individuals are in need of treatment for their psychiatric symptoms as well as substance use. Somatic symptoms are endorsed more strongly than affective or cognitive symptoms of depression, suggesting a possible, but yet poorly defined, relationship between depressive symptomatology and drug use that centers on shared somatic symptomatology.     

How effective are cognitive and behavioral treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorder? A clinical significance analysis

Controlled outcome studies investigating the efficacy of psychological treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have employed different methods of determining the clinical significance of treatment effects. This makes it difficult to draw conclusions regarding the absolute and relative efficacy of psychological treatments for OCD. To address this issue, standardized Jacobson methodology for defining clinically significant change was applied to recent psychological outcome trials for OCD. The proportion of asymptomatic patients following treatment was also calculated. When recovery is defined by Jacobson methodology, exposure and response prevention (ERP) appears the most effective treatment currently available (50-60% recovered). However, when the asymptomatic criterion is used as the index of outcome, ERP and cognitive therapy have low and equivalent recovery rates (approximately 25%).     

School-Based Intervention for Adolescents with Social Anxiety Disorder: Results of a Controlled Study

Social anxiety disorder, whose onset peaks in adolescence, is associated with significant impairment. Despite the availability of effective treatments, few affected youth receive services. Transporting interventions into schools may circumvent barriers to treatment. The efficacy of a school-based intervention for social anxiety disorder was examined in a randomized wait-list control trial of 35 adolescents (26 females). Independent evaluators, blind to treatment condition, evaluated participants at preintervention, postintervention, and 9 months later. Adolescents in the intervention group demonstrated significantly greater reductions than controls in social anxiety and avoidance, as well as significantly improved overall functioning. In addition, 67% of treated subjects, compared to 6% of wait-list participants, no longer met criteria for social phobia following treatment. Findings support the possible efficacy of school-based intervention for facilitating access to treatment for socially anxious adolescents.     

Functional assessment and noncontingent reinforcement in the treatment of disruptive vocalization in elderly dementia patients

Noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) was used as an intervention with 2 elderly dementia patients who engaged in disruptive vocalization. Several assessment procedures, including functional analysis, were conducted to identify reinforcing stimuli for use in the NCR intervention. Functional analyses and the NCR intervention were implemented in each participant's natural environment. NCR was effective in reducing disruptive vocalizations.     

Mental health literacy of those with major depression and suicidal ideation: an impediment to help seeking

Mental health literacy is the knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders that aid their recognition, management, or prevention, and is an important determinant of help seeking. This has relevance in suicide prevention, particularly for those with major depression, the clinical condition most frequently associated with suicidal behavior. In this study of a random and representative community sample, a vignette depicting classical features of major depression was presented to subjects along with questions related to mental health literacy. The responses of those with major depression, as delineated by the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders instrument, both with and without suicidal ideation, were compared to those of a third group of respondents. The results demonstrated that despite increased professional contact by those with major depression and suicidal ideation, there were few differences among the three groups on either open-ended or direct questions related to mental health literacy. This indicates that increased professional contact in itself was not related to increased mental health literacy, and suggests that more specific psychoeducational programs are required.     

Formal Requirements of Markov State Models for Paired Associate Learning

Discrete state learning models that make Markov assumptions are a powerful tool for the analysis and optimization of performance in paired associate tasks. We seek here to derive bounds on the complexity needed by such models in order to account for the critical effects of lag and retention intervals on paired associate learning. More specifically, after establishing that two different Markov chains are needed (one for describing the effects of trials where a paired associate is presented and one for describing the effects of trials where the paired associate is not presented), we determine the minimum number of states required in a Markov model with two chains. It is shown formally that, under certain psychologically plausible assumptions, more than three states are required. A model with two chains and four states is presented and it is shown empirically that it can account for the lag and retention effects in paired associate learning. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.     

Individual differences in pathogen disgust predict men’s,but not women’s,preferences for facial cues of weight

Previous research suggests that people who score higher on measures of pathogen disgust demonstrate (1) stronger preferences for healthy individuals when assessing their facial attractiveness and (2) stronger negative attitudes about obese individuals. The relationship between pathogen disgust and attractiveness judgments of faces differing in cues of weight has yet to be investigated, however. Here we found that men’s, but not women’s, pathogen disgust was positively correlated with their preference for facial cues of lower weight. Moreover, this effect of pathogen disgust was independent of the possible effects of moral and sexual disgust. These data implicate pathogen disgust in individual differences in preferences for facial cues of weight, at least among men, and suggest that the sex-specific effects of pathogen disgust on preferences for facial cues of weight may be different to those previously reported for general negative attitudes about obese individuals.     

Gender Roles and Pressure to be Truthful: The Bogus Pipeline Modifies Gender Differences in Sexual but Not Non-sexual Behavior

Previous studies have indicated that the research context has an influence on whether gender differences are found in sexual behavior, likely due to adherence to different gender norms for men and women. The present study utilized bogus pipeline methodology to help determine if the purported use of a lie detector would influence gender differences in reports of other types of behaviors considered more suitable for one gender or the other. Participants consisted of General Psychology students attending a regional campus of a major Midwestern university in the United States. Approximately half of 293 participants completed a questionnaire while connected to non-functioning lie detection equipment and the other half completed the questionnaire after the equipment had been disconnected. There were interactions between gender of participant and testing condition for sexual behavior but not for other types of common behaviors considered more appropriate for one gender or the other. This suggests that there is something specific to sexual behavior with regard to a differential willingness between men and women to report behavior unless there is pressure to be honest. Hypergender ideology was related to reports of sexual behavior (but not nonsexual behavior) only for men in the bogus pipeline condition, lending further support to the idea that gender role expectations influence reports of sexual behavior more than reports of other types of behavior.