Sex roles and depression: A preliminary investigation of the direction of causality

The present study examined the direction of the relation between sex role self-concept and depression. A total of 23 males and 32 females were given the Personal Attributes Questionnaire and the Beck Depression Inventory at two times separated by a 3-month interval. Results of a cross-lagged panel correlational analysis found no evidence for sex role orientation as a cause of depression. Instead, the data suggested that emotional well being precedes self-perceived instrumentality, but the influence of third variables could not be overlooked. The implications of these data are discussed with particular reference to the need for more complex theoretical formulations of the relation between self-perceived instrumentality and adjustment.     

Deep dyslexia in childhood?

Deep dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder in which semantic substitutions (e.g., city read as town) are made in reading single isolated words. In this paper, evidence for deep dyslexic-type errors is presented from the word-recognition responses of six children, aged 7 years and 0 month to 8 years and 9 months, with severe reading disorders. These semantic substitutions occur in the absence of phonological skills. Therefore, it appears that there exists a small subset of developmental dyslexics who at the beginning of acquisition of reading skills are able to engage in semantic processing, but who show severe impairment of phonological processing. The existence of these reading errors indicate that the use of a phonological code is not necessary to extract meaning from the printed word.     

Clinician attitudes toward stuttering: A decade of change (1973–1983)

The attitudes of 674 speech-language pathologists toward stuttering, stutterers, stuttering therapy, parents of stutterers, and related issues were studied during the years 1973–1983. During that period, clinician attitudes were found to shift away from support of the John-sonian concepts, which suggest parental causality and dangers in early intervention. In addition, clinicians became less likely to perceive stutterers as possessing psychologic disorders and misperceptions of their problem and of their interpersonal relationships. However, a significant number of clinician's were found to continue to hold unsubstantiated beliefs regarding the personality of stutterers, their parents, and the efficacy of early intervention with very young stutterers. The results of the study were interpreted as suggesting the need to educate fluency specialists.     

Different methods of lexical access for words presented in the left and right visual hemifields

Right-handed adults were asked to identify by name bilaterally presented words and pronounceable nonwords. For words in the normal horizontal format, word length (number of letters) affected left visual hemifield (LVF) but not right visual hemifield (RVF) performance in Experiments 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. This finding was made for words of high and low frequency (Experiment 6) and imageability (Experiment 5). It also held across markedly different levels of overall performance (Experiments 1 and 2), and across different relative positionings of short and long words in the LVF and RVF (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 demonstrated that the variable affecting LVF performance is the number of letters in a word, not its phonological length. For pronounceable nonwords (Experiment 7) and words in unusual formats (Experiment 8), however, length affected both LVF and RVF performance. The characteristics identified for RVF performance in these experiments also hold for the normal reading system. In this (normal) system the absence of length effects for horizontally formatted words is generally taken to reflect the processes involved in lexical access. Length effects in the normal reading system are thought to arise when lexical access for unusually formatted words and for the pronunciation of nonwords requires the short-term storage of information at a graphemic level of analysis. The characteristics of LVF performance indicate that horizontally formatted words presented to the right cerebral hemisphere can only achieve lexical access by a method that requires the short-term storage of graphemic information. This qualitative difference in methods of lexical access applies regardless of whether the right hemisphere is seen as accessing words in the left hemisphere's lexicon or words in a lexicon of its own.     

Vowel duration in stutterers participating in precision fluency shaping

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which stutters manipulate vowel duration to achieve fluency after participating in Precision Fluency Shaping. Nine stutterers who read an all-voiced sentence fluently before and after therapy were selected for study. Wide-band spectrograms were made of the initial phrase of the sentences, and vowel durations were computed. Results indicated that extended vowel durations were characteristic of the fluency of stutterers posttherapy. The subject that had the highest rate of disfluency after therapy also had the shortest vowel durations. Clinical implications concerning the importance of speech rate during carryover practice are made.     

Group differences in intelligence and speed of information-processing

Three samples of different levels of mental ability, but each of average or above- average intelligence, were administered a battery of reaction time test which measure the speed with which persons can execute various elementary cognitive processes. Discriminant analyses revealed significant differences between the groups in reaction times and intraindividual standard deviations, and univariate analyses indicated that higher ability groups tended to obtain significantly faster mean reaction times and to show significantly less intraindividual variability than lower ability groups. Groups which differed the most in mental ability differed to the greatest extent on the more complex reaction time tests but this pattern was reversed for groups which were relatively close in mean IQ. Generally, the results support the hypothesis that speed- of-processing is an important factor unferlying intelligence, but a number of puzzling findings indicate the need for continued research in this area.     

The assessment of type a behavior in children and adolescents: An overview

The present article presents an overview of the instruments that have been used to assess the Type A behavior pattern in children and adolescents. The development, usage, and psychometric properties of each assessment technique are discussed, with methodological concerns being addressed whenever appropriate. The Matthews Youth Test for Health is the assessment of choice for children, because of its brevity, ease of administration, and adequate psychometric properties. The Hunter-Wolf A-B Rating Scale is desirable only for older, highly literate children. The Adolescent Structured Interview appears to be the most promising device for the adolescent age range. The other adolescent assessment devices are relatively unpopular, difficult to administer, and not always conceptually parallel to existing research on Type A behavior. Recommendations for future research are presented.     

The Novacco Anger Scale and Jenkins Activity Survey as predictors of cardiovascular reactivity

This study investigated the relationship among anger, the Type A construct, and cardiovascular reactivity. The Novacco Anger Scale and the Jenkins Activity Survey (JAS) were used to measure anger proneness and Type A characteristics, respectively. Twenty-four college males were selected from the upper and lower quintiles of the JAS distribution. During the study, the subjects were exposed to varying levels of experimentally induced challenge, while measurements were taken of heart-rate and blood-pressure changes. The results showed a modest but significant correlation between scores on the Novacco Anger Scale and the JAS. More importantly, scores on the Novacco Anger Scale correlated significantly with heart rate and systolic blood pressure under all challenge conditions, while those on the JAS were unrelated to cardiovascular excitability. These results raise questions about the usefulness of the JAS as a predictor of CHD risk. They are also consistent with the beliefs of other investigators that anger and hostility are the most important Type A behaviors in predisposing patients to coronary heart disease. Additional implications of the study are discussed.     

A measure of agreement for use with the Holland classification system

A measure of agreement for partially ordered data is suggested that makes use of the k categories with the highest ranks, the ranks of the remaining categories being disregarded. The proposed measure is applied to the Self-Directed Search in order to evaluate its agreement with occupational preference. Other forms of agreement in the Holland classification system can also be assessed by the proposed measure. Examples are congruence and husband-wife and counselor-client agreement.     

An empirical investigation of self-esteem as a composite construct

Three measures of chronic self-esteem, plus four measures developed to assess situational components of self-esteem (task-specific self-esteem and social self-esteem), were administered to 238 undergraduates at a large, urban university and a community college in the southeastern United States. Evidence for a composite construct of self-esteem was found. Results also indicate task-specific self-esteem correlates as high as .42 (p < .01) with chronic self-esteem and as high as .76 (p < .01) with social self-esteem. Task-specific self-esteem was found to be a better predictor of grade point average than chronic or social self-esteem. Suggestions are made for further research on the situational components of self-esteem to extend current findings.