Mental health status among Puerto Ricans,Mexican Americans,and Non-Hispanic whites

Compared mental health characteristics of island Puerto Ricans to three groups from the Los Angeles Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study: Mexican American immigrants, U.S.-born Mexican Americans, and Non-Hispanic whites. The Diagnostic Interview Schedule was used to obtain both diagnostic and symptom scale information about affective disorders, alcohol abuse/dependence, somatization, phobic disorder, and psychotic disorder. Mexican American immigrants had the fewest mental health problems of all groups. Puerto Ricans had more somatization disorder, but less affective and alcohol disorders than U.S-born Mexican Americans or non-Hispanic whites. Results are considered in the light of selection factors, relative disadvantage of groups and methodological problems. This research was supported by grants MH36230 and MH45763 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and made use of data from the Los Angeles site of the Epidemiologic Catchment Area Program, which is a series of five epidemiologic research studies performed by independent research teams in collaboration with staff of the Division of Biometry and Epidemiology of the National Institute of Mental Health. The NIMH principal collaborators were D. Regier, B. Locke, W. Eaton and J. Burke. The NIMH project officers were C. Taube and W. Huber. The principal investigators and coinvestigators from the five sites were Yale University: J. Myers, M. Weissman, G. Tischler; Johns Hopkins University: M. Kramer, E. Gruenberg, S. Shapiro; Washington University: L. Robins, J. Helzer; Duke University: D. Blazer, L. George; University of California at Los Angeles: M. Karno, R. Hough, J. Escobar, A. Burnam, D. Timbers.     

The psychological sequelae of disaster stress prospectively and retrospectively evaluated

Aimed to document the psychological sequelae of a disaster in the adult (17-68 years) population of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, by surveying 912 persons (including 375 previously interviewed) with a Spanish version of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule. A rigorous methodology, which included both retrospective and prospective designs, was used, enabled by the occurrence of a catastrophic disaster only a year after a comprehensive survey was completed. Framed in a stress theoretical perspective, disaster effects for new depressive, somatic, and posttraumatic stress symptoms were identified, even after adjusting for demographic and methodologic factors. All the effects, however, were relatively small, suggesting that most disaster victims were rather resilient to the development of new psychological symptoms. Comparison of results with previous findings and its implications for both disaster and stress research are discussed, as well as the role of community psychologists in disaster action.     

Improving perception of letters and visual structure of language.

Information about letters and the physical structure of language printed in Roman characters was given to children beginning to read. Experimental investigations coupled three alternative graphic modes of printing upper- and lower-case letters with an instructional intervention termed "Alpha-Beta" which provides practice in letter sorting, matching of letters, associative matching, and memory matching. In respect to graphics, Mode A letters were in standard alphabet form. Mode B provided standard letters with each backed by a unique half-tone (Visually Stippled Alphabet); Mode C provided standard letters with each backed by a unique visual texture (Visually Patterned Alphabet). Pre-posttest change in reading readiness was measured using the Metropolitan Readiness Test. In the first study 224 English-speaking 5- to 6-yr.-old children were tested. In the second there were 158 Spanish-speaking girls and boys 6 to 7 years old. It was predicted that Alpha-Beta intervention involving visually patterned alphabet would lead to the greatest increases in readiness scores. This is confirmed in both studies for children low in reading readiness preexperiment. Children high in reading readiness are less affected. The second experiment involved Spanish-speaking children and investigated intervention by Alpha-Beta against a no-intervention control. This confirms the value of Alpha-Beta per se. Possible explanations for the improvements are identified.     

Object recognition in dense clutter

Observers in recognition experiments invariably view objects against a blank background, whereas observers of real scenes sometimes view objects against dense clutter. In this study, we examined whether an object's background affects the information used for recognition. Our stimuli consisted of color photographs of everyday objects. The photographs were organized either as a sparse array, as is typical of a visual search experiment, or as high density clutter, such as might be found in a toy chest, a handbag, or a kitchen drawer. The observer's task was to locate an animal, vehicle, or food target in the stimulus. We varied the information in the stimuli by convolving them with a low-pass filter (blur) or a high-pass filter (edge) or converting them to grayscale. In two experiments, we found that the blur and edge manipulations produced a modest decrement in performance with the sparse arrangement but a severe decrement in performance with the clutter arrangement. These results indicate that the information used for recognition depends on the object's background. Thus, models of recognition that have been developed for isolated objects may not generalize to objects in dense clutter.     

The depth of distractor processing in search with clutter

Some search tasks involve looking for a category target in clutter. This is the task faced, for example, by a baggage screener looking for weapons in a suitcase. Such tasks presumably involve the segmentation and recognition of the target object, but it is unknown whether they also involve the segmentation and recognition of the distractor objects. To examine the depth of distractor processing in this task, we had observers search through cluttered displays composed of normal and chimerical distractors. The normal distractors were photographs of recognizable objects, while the chimerical distractors were created by interchanging parts between the normal objects. The obsever's task was to identify the display quadrant that contained an animal or a vehicle target. We varied the difficulty of the search task by varying target and distractor discriminability, target uncertainty, and target occlusion. Only when the target was partially occluded did we find an effect of distractor type. In this case, observers may have found the target through a process of mentally eliminating whole distractor objects. When the target was unoccluded, we found no evidence that observers selected and rejected whole distractors during search. This second result supports our previous claim that often the items for search in clutter are not whole objects.     

Editorial

Abstract

In recent years, the contribution of research in Neuroscience to Cognitive Psychology has broken new ground in Education, for the study, diagnosis and treatment of dyslexia, and has confirmed previous research studies. This article exposes some of the principal research conducted into the areas of the brain that is involved in learning the written language, and the effects of the application of psychopedagogical interventions in brain activity of children with dyslexia.     

Behavioural problems in adolescents who are in adoption, residential care, and grandparent fostering

The aim of this research is to identify the severity and type of behavioural problems found in a sample of 181 Spanish adolescents, aged 11 and 18, who have been, or still are in the protective system and to provide give up-to-date figures about behavioural problem situations of children are living under protective measures, and to determine the existence of diverse behavioural problems concerning the kind of care the adolescents are receiving (adoption, residential care, or with grandparent fostering). The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) was used in this study. The results show that most of the adolescents scored within the normal range and only a small percentage of them had important behavioural problems and were therefore situated within the clinical range of the trial. The adopted adolescents scored higher than the adolescents who were either fostered by their extended families or in residential care. The main problems identified in each section are discussed, along with the results, in the context of modernising the Spanish protection system.     

Deductive databases for computing certain and consistent answers from mediated data integration systems

We address the problem of retrieving certain and consistent answers to queries posed to a mediated data integration system under the local-as-view paradigm with open sources and conjunctive and disjunctive view definitions. For obtaining certain answers a query program is run under the cautious stable model semantics on top of a normal deductive database with choice operator that specifies the class of minimal legal instances of the integration system. This methodology works for all monotone Datalog queries. To compute answers to queries that are consistent with respect to given global integrity constraints, the specification of minimal legal instances is combined with another disjunctive deductive database that specifies the repairs of those legal instances. This allows to retrieve the answers to any Datalog^¬ query that are consistent with respect to global universal and referential integrity constraints.     

Psychometric properties of parents and children as informants in child psychiatry epidemiology with the Spanish diagnostic interview schedule for children (DISC.2)

Parent and child reports were examined to study how epidemiological researchers can best use the information provided to describe childhood psychopathology. As part of a multisite methodologic study of mental disorders in children, a probability sample (N=248) of children aged 9 to 17 years from the San Juan metropolitan area was selected. This sample was enriched with 74 clinic cases. Both parents and children were administered the DISC.2. Results showed that prevalence estimates were influenced by the informant. The clinicians' diagnosis is more concordant with children's reports of depression and with parents' reports of disruptive disorders. Parents and children provided unique information when interviewed with a structured psychiatric interview about child psychopathology. Their unique perspectives contributed to the observed discordance that emerged when DISC parent and DISC child results are compared. Combining the two perspectives with a simple OR rule at the symptom level did not seem to capture the unique perspectives.We acknowledge the research group of the Behavioral Sciences Research Institute for their valuable contributions to this work. We also recognize José V. Martínez, Vivian E. Febo, and Zenaida González for the data analyses, and Elizabeth Pastrana and Felícita Laboy for the secretarial work.This research was supported by grants (MH46732) from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as part of a collaborative methodologic epidemiologic study of children and adolescents (MECA) between the Universities of Columbia, Emory, Puerto Rico, Yale, and the NIMH.