Validity of Treatment Target Progress Ratings as Indicators of Youth Improvement

We examined whether clinical progress ratings on the Monthly Treatment and Progress Summary form (MTPS), an idiographic treatment progress measure, were meaningfully related to changes measured by two separate standardized instruments; the Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS) and the Child and Adolescent Level of Care Utilization System (CALOCUS). Validity coefficients were examined at intake and three-, six-, and nine-month follow-up periods. Samples were selected for each measure and follow-up period from the population of youth receiving services through the Hawaii Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division’s (CAMHD) system of care. Significant youth improvement was evident on all three measures across all follow-up intervals. The type of changes measured by the MTPS and CAFAS were more alike over longer follow-up intervals than changes measured by the CALOCUS. The MTPS captures distinct aspects of client change that overlaps somewhat with CAFAS and CALOCUS measures. The MTPS is a brief client-tailored measure that seems to provide valid, sensitive, and nonredundant client specific treatment outcome information that can be collected on a frequent basis within a complex system of care.     

Rorschach Comprehensive System data for a sample of 240 adult nonpatients from Japan

This article presents Rorschach Comprehensive System (CS; Exner, 1995) results for 240 adult nonpatients living in the central area of Tokyo, Japan. Inclusion/exclusion criteria are described. Interrater reliability statistics at the response level are presented along with scores for CS variables.     

A Psychometric Investigation of the Ohio Scales,Short Form,Problem Severity Domain,Youth- and Caregiver-Report Versions

The current study examined the extent to which the Ohio Scales, Short Form, Problem Severity domain was able to perform as a reliable and valid measure within a large community mental health sample of multiethnic youth and families in Hawai?i. Using a sample of 1,125 youth participants, who were 59.1% male (n = 665), with a mean age of 12.96 (SD = 3.4), confirmatory factor analyses pointed to four factors (Externalizing, Delinquency, Anxiety, Depression), with subscale internal reliabilities varying slightly. The majority of convergence patterns between Problem Severity domain and related Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale subscales were significantly correlated in the expected directions. Problem Severity subscale scores were mostly able to discriminate between youth with and without pertinent mental health diagnoses. Youth- and caregiver-report Problem Severity domain subscale and total scores were significantly correlated in the predicted directions. Finally, significant youth improvement was evident at 3-month follow-up, and Problem Severity intake and 3-month follow-up scores were significantly and positively related to one another. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

     

Concurrent Validity of the Child Behavior Checklist DSM-Oriented Scales: Correspondence with DSM Diagnoses and Comparison to Syndrome Scales

This study used receiver operating characteristic (ROC) methodology and discriminative analyses to examine the correspondence of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) rationally-derived DSM-oriented scales and empirically-derived syndrome scales with clinical diagnoses in a clinic-referred sample of children and adolescents (N = 476). Although results demonstrated that the CBCL Anxiety, Affective, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity, Oppositional and Conduct Problems DSM-oriented scales corresponded significantly with related clinical diagnoses derived from parent-based structured interviews, these DSM-oriented scales did not evidence significantly greater correspondence with clinical diagnoses than the syndrome scales in all cases but one. The DSM-oriented Anxiety Problems scale was the only scale that evidenced significantly greater correspondence with diagnoses above its syndrome scale counterpart —the Anxious/Depressed scale. The recently developed and rationally-derived DSM-oriented scales thus generally do not add incremental clinical utility above that already afforded by the syndrome scales with respect to corresponding with diagnoses. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Effect of Object and Task Properties on Bimanual Transport

The use of both hands simultaneously when manipulating objects is fairly commonplace, but it is not known what factors encourage people to use two hands as opposed to one during simple tasks such as transport. In particular, we are interested in three possible transport strategies: unimanual transport, handing off between hands, and symmetric bimanual transport. In this study, we investigate the effect of object size, weight, and starting and ending position (configuration) as well as the need to balance the object on the use of these three strategies in a bowl-moving task. We find that configuration and balance have a strong effect on choice of strategy, and size and weight have a weaker effect. Hand-offs are most often used when the task requires moving an object from left to right and vice versa, while the unimanual strategy was frequently used when passing front to back. The bimanual strategy is only weakly affected by configuration. The need to balance an object causes subjects to favor unimanual and bimanual strategies over the hand-off. In addition, an analysis of transport duration and body rotation suggests that strategy choice may be driven by the desire to minimize body rotation.     

Pigeons perceive the Ebbinghaus-Titchener circles as an assimilation illusion

A target circle surrounded by larger "inducer" circles looks smaller, and one surrounded by smaller circles looks larger than they really are. This is the Ebbinghaus-Titchener illusion, which remains one of the strongest and most robust of contrast illusions. Although there have been many studies on this illusion in humans, virtually none have addressed how nonhuman animals perceive the same figures. Here the authors show that the Ebbinghaus-Titchener figures also induce a strong illusion in pigeons but, surprisingly, in the other direction; that is, all five successfully trained pigeons judged the target circle surrounded by larger circles to be larger than it really is and vice versa. Further analyses proved that neither the gaps between target and inducer circles nor the cumulative weighted surface of these figural elements could account for the birds' responses. Pigeons are known to show similarities to humans on various cognitive and perceptual tasks including concept formation, short-term memory, and some visual illusions. Our results, taken together with pigeons' previously demonstrated failure at visual completion, provide strong evidence that pigeons may actually experience a visual world too different for us to imagine.     

Trichotomous preferences for gambles

Let G_X be the set of all gambles on a set X of decision outcomes. Trichotomous preferences divide G_X into three disjoint subsets, viz., the set P⁺ of preferable gambles, the set P⁰ of indifferent gambles, and the set P^- of unpreferable gambles. Those preference comparisons are made against the status quo, i.e., the do-nothing alternative. This paper presents and discusses dyadic representations of such trichotomous preferences and identifies necessary and sufficient axioms for the existence of those representations.     

Additive Utilities on Densely Ordered Sets

This paper shows sufficient conditions for the existence of additive utilities without a restricted solvability axiom. Our conditions require that each essential component of the underlying Cartesian product be densely ordered.     

A reversed Ebbinghaus–Titchener illusion in bantams (Gallus gallus domesticus)

A disk surrounded by smaller disks looks larger, and one surrounded by larger disks looks smaller than reality. This visual illusion, called the Ebbinghaus–Titchener illusion, remains one of the strongest and most robust illusions induced by contrast with the surrounding stimuli in humans. In the present study, we asked whether bantams would perceive this illusion. We trained three bantams to classify six diameters of target disks surrounded by inducer disks of a constant diameter into “small” or “large”. In the test that followed, the diameters of the inducer disks were systematically changed. The results showed that the Ebbinghaus–Titchener figures also induce a strong illusion in bantams, but in the other direction, that is, bantams perceive a target disk surrounded by smaller disks to be smaller than it really is and vice versa. Possible confounding factors, such as the gap between target disk and inducer disks and the weighted sum of surface of these figural elements, could not account for the subjects’ biased responses. Taken together with the pigeon study by Nakamura et al. (J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process 34:375–387 2008), these results show that bantams as well as pigeons perceive an illusion induced by assimilation effects, not by contrast ones, for the Ebbinghaus–Titchener types of illusory figures. Perhaps perceptual processes underlying such illusory perception (i.e., lack of contrast effects) shown in bantams and pigeons may be partly shared among other avian species.     

An Evaluation of the Two-Factor Model of Emotion: Clinical Moderators Within a Large,Multi-Ethnic Sample of Youth

The two-factor model of emotion clarifies the complexities of the relationship between anxiety and depression through their varying associations with positive and negative affect. Although this model’s structure has been validated in community samples of children, little research has evaluated the model among clinically referred youth. The present investigation aimed to confirm the two-factor model of emotion within a sample of clinically-referred children (N?=?879) and to investigate potential moderators of the model’s relationships within that group. Structural equation modeling demonstrated excellent fit for the two-factor model, and moderating effects for the model structure were found related to age and diagnostic category. These results support the model’s usefulness in describing patterns of psychopathology and temperament for clinically referred children and suggest the potential for a unified treatment approach to internalizing psychopathology.