Language laterality in Navajo reservation children: dichotic test results depend on the language context of the testing

Language lateralization in 40 Navajo and 20 Anglo fifth graders was assessed via the Dichotic Consonant-Vowel Task (DCVT). One group of Navajo children was tested by an experimenter who spoke only Navajo with them. The other Navajo group and the Anglo group were tested by an experimenter who spoke only English to them. Strong right ear advantages (REAs) were obtained for the Anglo group and for the Navajo group tested by the Navajo-speaking experimenter. The Navajo group tested by the English-speaking experimenter showed minimal, nonsignificant REAs. Previous findings of an absence of REAs in Native American children failed to consider the possibility that this might occur only when the experimenter does not speak the dominant language of the children. Our results are not consistent with the view that Native Americans are more right hemisphere dominant as a function of an "appositional" mode of language and thought.     

Staff support services: Room by the side of the road

Staff Support Services, as done at Emory University Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia, uses the neutrality of the Department of Pastoral Services to meet the support needs of its staff. This model has evolved out of the concern of many departments to centralize and symbolize the availability of these various support services to hospital employees. Using a shepherding model, Emory's Staff Support Services works both within and outside of the room by he side of the road.     

Narcissistic characters with obsessive features: Diagnostic and treatment considerations

Conclusion In sum, in this article a mixed personality disorder is described that combines narcissistic and obsessive-compulsive features. These features include extreme perfectionism, narcissistic cathexis of the intellect, and obsessive-compulsive defenses against underlying narcissistic issues. In therapy, narcissistic characters with obsessive features frequently struggle between a need for engagement with and fear of engulfment by the therapist. Thus, while they may appear extroverted, they often remain aloof, and while they have a strong need to be understood, they frequently reject the therapist’s empathic statements. Therapy of the narcissistic character with obsessive features consists of two stages. In the first phase of treatment, the therapist addresses the patient’s narcissistic issues and provides an appropriate selfobject relationship. In the second phase of treatment (after greater self-development is established), the therapist begins to address the obsessive-compulsive issues of affective expression and control by assuming a more engaged, initiating, and personal stance with the client.     

A New Self-Report Scale for Assessment of Adolescent Psychopathology: Factor Structure, Reliability, Validity, and Diagnostic Sensitivity

This paper describes four studies on self-reported problems in 2,243 adolescent males and females, 12 to 17 years of age. In Study 1, principal-axis factoring of 102 items covering 11 problem domains revealed six factors comprising 49.5% of the variance. Study 2 used confirmatory factor analysis of a 64-item reduced set on a new sample of 408 adolescents. Goodness-of-fit indicators suggested that the six-factor model had excellent fit to the data. Study 3 used data from the 2,157 adolescents used in the first two studies. Coefficient alphas ranged from .83 to .92. Median test-retest reliability for the six factors was .86. There was a consistent structure of the correlation matrix across age and gender. Study 4 was a study of criterion validity, using an additional sample of 86 children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sensitivity and specificity were high, with an overall diagnostic efficiency of 83%. This new self-report scale, the Conners/Wells Adolescent Self-Report of Symptoms (CASS), may provide a useful component of a multimodal assessment of adolescent psychopathology.     

FISH: a commons dilemma simulation

A local-area-network-based commons dilemma (CD) simulation is described. The program usesfishing as its CD metaphor; research participants experience the metaphor through both graphics (fish may be seen in an ocean) and text (CD terms such as “resource regeneration” are translated to fishing terms such as “spawning”). Common CD parameters, such as the availability of the resource, payoff values, the number of harvesters, the rate of regeneration, knowledge about the state of the resource, and awareness of other harvesters’ actions may be varied Other CD parameters that are not yet widely studied may also be varied, such as variability in regeneration rate, uncertainty in the amount of the resource, operating costs necessary to harvest the resource, length of time for the resource to regenerate (spawn), and whether the resource is visible to harvesters. The program worked well in pilot testing and in a study in progress.     

Case-like categories in children: The actor and some related categories

Case categories were investigated using a method in which pictures are presented accompanied by a sentence describing the scene: Preschool children learn to put tokens on the objects in the pictures according to the role each object plays in the scene as described. Generalization trials explore what the children include within the various roles. Children rapidly learn to associate tokens with case-like categories during the training phase, and readily transfer to new stimuli in generalization trials. The experiments demonstrate that children have a broad Actor category. The Actor “does” the action, and Actors are not necessarily animate. However, animacy is a class property of stimuli to which the children were very sensitive. There was evidence that User and Instrument are subcategories of Actor that are differentiated only when a sentence contains both. The data also suggest a Locative category, and Patient as a category of the grammatical object. Finally, the children appeared to treat subjects of predicate adjectives as a separate category, here called the Subject of Attribution, distinct from Actor, and functionally independent of objects of transitive verbs.     

Transformations from adjectives to Scales for the Adjective Check List (ACL): ACLTRANS FORTRAN IV program

The ACLTRANS ANSI FORTRAN IV program transforms the 300 adjectives on the Adjective Check List (Gough, 1950. 1960) into 37 raw and T-standard psychological scales. This program has three advantages over scoring based ob theAdjective Check List Manual (Gough & Heilbrun, 1965, 1980, 1983): ease and speed of computing the raw scale scores; exact partialing of number of adjectives checked from standardized scale scores; and choice of parameter norms for standardization. By using the ACLTRANS program, the researcher can be confident of quick and accurate scoring, as well as appropriate standardization.     

Visibility distances with halogen and conventional headlights

Abstract.— Using visibility distance as a criterion, halogen and conventional continental European high and low-beam headlights were compared in a series of field experiments. On high-beam without opposing light the halogen headlights offered about 25% longer visibility distances than the conventional headlights. With both opposing cars using low-beam there was a slight advantage (<5 m) in favour of halogen headlights. The optimal dipping distance was a function of high-beam system (intensity) rather than low-beam system. Small differences in aiming, atmosphere etc. caused larger differences in visibility distance than did the headlight system.