Neuropsychological changes in children with cancer: The treatment of missing data in longitudinal studies

Researchers conducting longitudinal studies with children or adults are inevitably confronted with problems of attrition and missing data. Missing data in longitudinal studies is frequently handled by excluding from analyses those cases for whom data are incomplete. This approach to missing data is not optimal. On the one hand, if data are missing at random, then dropping incomplete cases ignores information collected on those cases that could be used to improve estimates of population parameters (e.g., means, variances, covariances, and growth rates) and improve the power of significance tests of statistical hypotheses. On the other hand, if data are not missing at random, then dropping incomplete cases leads to biased parameter estimates and hypothesis tests that may be internally and externally invalid. This study uses three years of follow-up data from a longitudinal investigation of neuropsychological outcomes of cancer in children to demonstrate the problems presented by missing data in repeated measures designs and some solutions. In evaluating potential biasing effects of attrition, the study extends previous research on neuropsychological outcomes in pediatric cancer by inclusion of patients whose disease had relapsed, and by comparison of surviving and nonsurviving patients. Although the data presented have specific relevance to the study of neuropsychological outcome in pediatric cancer, the problems of missing data and the solutions presented are relevant to a wide variety of diseases and conditions of interest to researchers in child and adult neuropsychology.     

Genes and family environment in familial clustering of cancer

Familial clustering of a disease is defined as the occurrence of the disease within some families in excess of what would be expected from the occurrence in the population. It has been demonstrated for several cancer types, ranging from rare cancers as the adenomatosis-coli-associated colon cancer or the Li-Fraumeni syndrome to more common cancers as breast cancer and colon cancer. Familial clustering, however, is merely an epidemiological pattern, and it does not tell whether genetic or environmental causes or both in combination are responsible for the familial clustering. Familial clustering may be due to genetic predisposition to the disease, but exposure to environmental factors — shared by members of some families, but not by members of other families — may also cause familial clustering and hence mimic genetic inheritance in the study of nuclear families. Based on assumptions regarding the individual steps in the biological process starting with exposure to carcinogens and ending with death from disseminated cancer we suggest that genetic and environmental factors may both be involved in most of these steps. The present paper focuses on research methodologies necessary to discriminate between the effect of genes and family environment in the development of cancer.     

A new processing model for predicting performance on Pascual-Leone's test of M-space

A new model is proposed for explaining children's performance on Pascual-Leone's test of M-space. The model differs from Pascual-Leone's in three regards. (1) It assumes that children do not stop sampling a compound stimulus until every simple stimulus in their field of attention has already been noticed and responded to. (2) It assumes that the probability of sampling different combinations of simple stimuli conforms to the laws of Maxwell-Boltzman statistics rather than Bose-Einstein statistics. (3) It assumes that children's ability to detect all the simple stimuli in a compound stimulus is highly dependent both on the relative saliencies of the simple stimuli and on the length of time for which the compound stimulus is exposed. Using the developmental values of M hypothesized by Pascual-Leone, and standard techniques of computer simulation, the new model is used to generate theoretical performance curves for children at four different age levels and seven different levels of stimulus complexity. It is shown that the predicted performance curves for an exposure time of 5 sec provide a reasonable fit to the data originally reported by Pascual-Leone (1970), and that the predicted performance curves for an exposure time of 10 sec provide a reasonable fit to data obtained more recently by Parkinson (1976). Finally, it is shown that the order of children's responses as well as the number of their responses can be predicted. Two conclusions are drawn. (1) The new processing model offers a viable alternative to the model originally proposed by Pascual-Leone. (2) Regardless of which processing model is employed, the M-values originally postulated by Pascual-Leone are valid.     

Transition of Adolescent Political Action Orientations to Voting Behavior in Early Adulthood in View of a Social-Cognitive Action Theory Model of Personality

The political activity and voting behavior of 136 young German adults in 1994 were predicted by their political action orientations measured 7 years before. Respondents belonging to cohorts born in 1971, 1972, and 1973 were surveyed in 1987, 1988, and 1994. The questionnaires measured variables relevant to the social-cognitive action theory model of personality: self-concept of political competence, beliefs about political locus of control, political knowledge, trust in politics, satisfaction with politics, and political activity in everyday life. The results are interpreted with respect to the correlative and absolute stability versus plasticity of the variables from 1987 to 1994, as well as the predictive value of the action theory personality variables for political activities and for voting behavior measured 7 years later. Longitudinal results indicate a high predictive value of self-concept of political competence and political knowledge for political activity and voting in early adulthood. Because only these two personality variables showed relatively high positional stability coefficients from adolescence to early adulthood, the discussion refers to the necessity of early developmental interventions to prevent extreme types of politically uninterested and passive adults. Therefore, the social-cognitive action theory personality model of political participation is extended to a social-cognitive action theory personality model of political socialization in the life span.     

Comparing predictive validity in a community sample: High-dimensionality and traditional domain-and-facet structures of personality variation

Prediction of outcomes is an important way of distinguishing, among personality models, the best from the rest. Prominent previous models have tended to emphasize multiple internally consistent “facet” scales subordinate to a few broad domains. But such an organization of measurement may not be optimal for prediction. Here, we compare the predictive capacity and efficiency of assessments across two types of personality-structure model: conventional structures of facets as found in multiple platforms, and new high-dimensionality structures emphasizing those based on natural-language adjectives, in particular lexicon-based structures of 20, 23, and 28 dimensions. Predictions targeted 12 criterion variables related to health and psychopathology, in a sizeable American community sample. Results tended to favor personality-assessment platforms with (at least) a dozen or two well-selected variables having minimal intercorrelations, without sculpting of these to make them function as indicators of a few broad domains. Unsurprisingly, shorter scales, especially when derived from factor analyses of the personality lexicon, were shown to take a more efficient route to given levels of predictive capacity. Popular 20^th-century personality-assessment models set out influential but suboptimal templates, including one that first identifies domains and then facets, which compromise the efficiency of measurement models, at least from a comparative-prediction standpoint. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

高风险婴儿前瞻性纵向研究与孤独症谱系障碍早期识别

孤独症谱系障碍(Autism Spectrum Disorder, ASD)早期识别有助于早期诊断和早期干预的实施, 对于改善ASD儿童发育结果至关重要。高风险前瞻性纵向研究以高风险婴儿(ASD儿童的年幼同胞, 入组年龄小于12个月)作为主要研究对象, 通过对ASD高风险婴儿(24至36个月之间诊断为ASD的高风险婴儿)的早期发育轨迹的描绘和核心症状早期表现的识别, 为ASD早期识别提供了重要依据。未来可以增加被试数量、延长观察时间并密集观察时间点、关注伴发障碍、综合考虑遗传、环境和文化因素影响, 并结合早期干预研究进行深入探索。未来在中国开展相关研究具有重要的科学价值和临床意义。     

The role of prosody in the interpretation of structural ambiguities: a study of anticipatory eye movements

An eye-tracking experiment examined whether prosodic cues can affect the interpretation of grammatical functions in the absence of clear morphological information. German listeners were presented with scenes depicting three potential referents while hearing temporarily ambiguous SVO and OVS sentences. While case marking on the first noun phrase (NP) was ambiguous, clear case marking on the second NP disambiguated sentences towards SVO or OVS. Listeners interpreted case-ambiguous NP1s more often as Subject, and thus expected an Object as upcoming argument, only when sentence beginnings carried an SVO-type intonation. This was revealed by more anticipatory eye movements to suitable Patients (Objects) than Agents (Subjects) in the visual scenes. No such preference was found when sentence beginnings had an OVS-type intonation. Prosodic cues were integrated rapidly enough to affect listeners' interpretation of grammatical function before disambiguating case information was available. We conclude that in addition to manipulating attachment ambiguities, prosody can influence the interpretation of constituent order ambiguities.     

The effect of visual word features on the acquisition of orthographic knowledge

Research with adults has shown that the distortion of visual word features, and in particular of the multiletter features within words, hampers word recognition. In this study, "CaSe MiXiNg" was employed to examine the effect of disrupting visual word features on the acquisition of orthographic knowledge in children. During the training, 18 beginning and 27 advanced readers (in Grades 2, 4, and 5) repeatedly read a set of pseudowords in either lowercase or mixed case. During this training, case mixing appeared to impair reading speed in both reader groups. At posttest, 1 day after the training, case format was either the same as or different from that during the training. Lowercase pseudowords were recognized faster after a lowercase training than after a mixed-case training. In a second study, case was found not to affect the rapid naming of single letters. The combined results suggest that case mixing disrupted the multiletter features in pseudowords and that the disruption of these features can affect the acquisition of orthographic knowledge.     

用“三个代表”重要思想统领伦理学研究工作——学习十六大报告的体会

党的十六大将“三个代表”重要思想和马克思列宁主义、毛泽东思想、邓小乎理论一道确立为我们党的指导思想,并提出必须坚持马克思列宁主义、毛泽东思想和邓小平理论在意识形态的指导地位,用“三个代表”重要思想统领社会主义文化建设。以“三个代表”重要思想为统领,是十三年来我国社会主义文化建设取得重大成就的基本经验。十六大报告提出的关于社会主义文化建设的一系列新的科学论断体现了马克思主义与时俱进的理论品质。作为文化建设战线上的广大伦理学工作者学习和贯彻十六大精神,就是要更加自觉地以“三个代表”重要思想为统领,与时俱进,努力促进伦理学研究工作的开拓创新。