Reliability and Validity of the Gamblers Anonymous Twenty Questions

One of the earliest instruments to screen for problem gambling, the Twenty Questions (20Q), was developed within Gamblers Anonymous. This instrument has not received serious research attention, however, and its psychometric properties are generally unknown. This study reports reliability and validity data for this instrument in 3 independent samples totaling 456 participants: two samples of problem gamblers in treatment and a non-treatment sample of problem gamblers. The Twenty Questions was shown to possess high reliability as measured by Cronbach’s alpha. Concurrent, convergent and predictive validity of the 20Q supported the use of this instrument as an acceptable screening instrument. Classification analyses indicated that the 20Q is comparable to the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for pathological gambling in specificity, sensitivity and rates of false negatives and false positives. The 20Q appears to be a reliable and valid measure of problem gambling and warrants continued research attention.     

The Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20): A measure of general psychological distress

The Toronto Alexithymia Scale (Bagby, R. M., Parker, J. D. A., & Taylor, G. J. (1994). The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale-I. Item selection and cross-validation of the factor structure. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 38, 23–32.) is the most commonly used measure of Alexithymia (= difficulties identifying and describing one’s own feelings). Sixty-three persons (34 psychiatric inpatients, 29 healthy controls) first filled in the TAS-20 and were then interviewed about their interpersonal relationships. Two raters coded the emotional experiences that the participants reported during these interviews. Contrary to expectations, participants with higher TAS-20 scores reported more emotions (particularly negative ones), and more different emotions, questioning the validity of the TAS-20 as a measure of Alexithymia. Based on correlation patterns and a joint factor analysis with two well-established measures of psychopathology, it is concluded that the TAS-20 assesses a general psychological distress factor.     

The independence of face identity and facial expression recognition mechanisms: relationship to sex and cognitive style

Two tasks, one mapping the recognition of unfamiliar face identity and the other the identification of six facial expressions were unilaterally presented to field dependent and field independent individuals of both genders. Regardless of sex, field independent subjects showed faster-response times (RTs) in the left visual field (LVF) for face identity and for the identification of disgust and fear and faster RTs in the RVF for the identification of anger. A trend toward LVF superiority was found over the whole sample for the facial expression task; this effect was still present when the face identity task was partialled out, indicating the independence of the underlying mechanisms.     

Effect of donor resources on recipient self-esteem and self-help

A 2 (aid vs no aid) × 2 (high vs low resource potential donor) between subjects design tested the effects of aid and donor resources on recipient self-perceptions and subsequent self-help behavior. The results were characterized by interactions between the two factors. Subjects who received aid from a low resource donor perceived themselves more positively and engaged in less self-help than subjects in the no-aid low resource potential donor condition. In contrast, subjects who received aid from a high resource donor perceived themselves less positively and tended to engage in more self-help behavior than subjects in the no-aid high resource potential donor condition. The relationship between threat to self-esteem inherent in aid and subsequent self-help is discussed in terms of self-esteem theory.     

A note on the analysis of designs in which subjects receive each stimulus only once

In social psychological experiments, the manipulations of interest are often presented to subjects along with, or as part of, some stimulus. An example would be a manipulation of the verbal label associated with a stimulus photograph, in a person perception study. Ordinarily it is not possible for stimuli to be completely crossed with treatments because subjects cannot be exposed to any stimulus more than once. In such designs it is wise to counterbalance the assignment of stimuli to treatment conditions, but this gives rise to difficulties in the analysis of the experimental data. Data from such designs have frequently been misanalyzed in the published literature. This paper presents a method of constructing a counter-balancing scheme to simplify the analysis, and appropriate methods of analysis for both the simplified and the general case. It is emphasized that stimuli are generally best treated as a random factor in such designs, permitting increased generalizability, but the case where the stimulus factor is fixed is also considered.     

Right hemisphere appreciation of prosodic and linguistic indications of implicit attitude

Appreciation of attitudes conveyed through prosodic cues and lexical content was examined in subjects with temporal lobe seizure foci. One task involved auditory judgments of the consistency of verbal and intonational meaning of sentences. Errors on judgments of consistent verbal and prosodic stimuli were not only more frequent in the right temporal group than in left temporals or controls but were strongly related to neuropsychological indices associated with extent of right temporal involvement. Answering questions based on written narratives in which multiple attitude markers were either redundant or conflicting comprised the second task. Right temporal patients as a group had difficulty in answering inferential questions about paragraphs with inconsistent indicators of attitude. Even low-scoring right temporals were able, however, to answer inferential and factual questions when the verbal context markers consistently reinforced a particular attitude.     

Gender associations in the twentieth-century English-language literature

Gender associations may be partly learned from print media, including literature. Using Google Books Ngram corpus, we explored the depiction of male and female characters in the twentieth-century English-language fiction. By analyzing adjective-noun bigrams, we examined adjectives used in association with “man”, “woman”, “boy”, and “girl”. Men were described in more positive terms than women. Girls were depicted more positively than boys at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the tendency reversed in the middle of the century. Boys were described in more masculine terms than girls; however, men were described in similarly masculine adjectives as women. Despite limitations of interpretability of the results, the study presents a possible approach of exploring past characterization of the two genders.     

Some relations of general intelligence and selective attention

General intelligence may set structural feature limitations on three aspects of selective attention: direction, adjustability, and breadth. Amiable hypotheses considered are that subjects of varying intelligence may (1) have some partially fixed tendencies to look at different dimensions of stimuli, (2) have varying rates of adjusting their direction of attention, and (3) have varying upper limits on breadth of attention for tasks demanding it. Data, theory, and methods bearing on these hypotheses were reviewed from the domain of visual discrimination learning.     

20世纪医学发展态势 21世纪医学发展预测--1901～1999年诺贝尔生理学/医学奖综合分析

通过对 190 1～ 1999年诺贝尔生理学 /医学奖综合分析 ,发现生物医学科学的发展规律。并对 2 1世纪医学发展的进行预测 :人类将完成庞大的人体基因组计划 ;攻克各种顽症 ;生产各种人造器官 ,以供移植所需。总结两种治疗疾病的思路 :一种是通过修正致病基因 ,另一种思路可通过器官移植 ,从根本上达到治病的目的