Family Conflict and Children's Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior: Protective Factors

The current investigation examined whether the positive association of family conflict to adolescent depression and conduct problems is attenuated by maternal, paternal, and peer attachment, and maternal and paternal monitoring, within a low-income, multiethnic sample of 284 adolescents. Parental attachment and monitoring moderated the link from family conflict to conduct problems but not depression; the relationships among family conflict, the hypothesized protective factors, and conduct problems were further modified by adolescent gender but not ethnicity. In general, higher levels of the hypothesized protective factors attenuated the relationship between family conflict and conduct problems for girls but exacerbated this relationship for boys. These findings suggest that, in general, parental attachment and monitoring served as protective factors for girls while serving as additional risk factors for boys in conflictual families.     

Conducting clinical research in Polish conditions

This paper comments on Polish legal guarantees for diseased persons with reference to the hazards that accompany experimental treatment. While acknowledging that participation in a clinical research program provides patients with additional opportunities for advanced treatment, the paper also points out that systems for monitoring patients participating in experimental treatment require improvement. This paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference on the subject of ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005.     

Sublexical and morphological information in speech processing

Three experiments investigated the impact of syllabic boundary information and of morphological structure on performance in a sequence-monitoring task. In sequence monitoring, participants detect pre-specified sequences of phonemes in spoken carrier words. Sequences corresponded to the first syllable of the carrier word, to its first morpheme, or simultaneously to both. The data from Experiments 1 and 2, using different variants of the monitoring task, showed a strong impact of syllable boundary cues on monitoring latencies. An effect of morphological match between targets and carrier words was also evident. Experiment 3, in which parts of the spoken carrier words were cross-spliced, revealed that syllabic boundary information takes precedence over morphological information. The results are in line with an early process of speech processing, in which syllabic cues are used to aid lexical access. The morphological effect is better understood as a later, probably lexical, contribution of morphological decomposition to monitoring performance.     

Evidence for an Error Monitoring Deficit in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

We studied error monitoring in ADHD and control children in a task requiring inhibition of a motor response. The extent of slowing following successful (stopped) and failed (nonstopped) inhibition was compared across groups. We also measured the time required to inhibit a response (stop signal reaction time, SSRT). Compared to controls, ADHD participants slowed less following nonstopped responses. Slowing did not vary with comorbid reading, oppositional, conduct or anxiety disorder, sex or ADHD subtype. Slowing after nonstopped responses was marginally, although significantly correlated with total ADHD symptoms and with age. ADHD participants had significantly longer SSRT than controls, but SSRT was not significantly correlated with slowing. The apparent deficit in error monitoring in ADHD and its independence from the inhibition deficit observed in ADHD has implications for executive control models of ADHD, performance problems associated with the disorder and for component theories of executive control.     

Reality monitoring and metacognitive beliefs related to cognitive confidence in obsessive-compulsive disorder

The present study investigated general reality monitoring ability, and selective reality monitoring ability for anxiety relevant actions in a group of individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and a group of non-anxious controls. In addition, reality monitoring confidence was assessed, as well as specific meta-cognitive beliefs related to cognitive confidence (by means of the Meta-Cognitions Questionnaire (MCQ)). No differences were found between both groups in actual reality monitoring ability. Unlike previous studies, the reality monitoring task included actions that were related to the individual concerns of the OCD patients and were ideographically selected. Nevertheless, no differential reality monitoring effect was observed for the anxiety relevant stimuli. Data from the MCQ, however, revealed that OCD patients had less overall confidence in their memory for actions and their reality monitoring ability. Analysis of the confidence ratings of the reality monitoring task showed that this reduced confidence was restricted to the neutral actions. No differences were observed for patients that reported low or high frequencies of checking behaviour. The whole of these data do not support memory deficit models of OCD, but are in line with recent emphasis on the importance of memory confidence and other meta-cognitive beliefs in OCD.     

The quantity and quality of marital interaction related to marital satisfaction: A behavioral analysis

An assessment instrument is presented for the evaluation of the quantity and quality of dyadic interaction, as well as for the daily recording of behaviors presented and omitted which influence marital satisfaction. Comparison of data from ten happy couples and from ten couples entering therapy indicated two distinct dysfunctional patterns among distressed couples, with significantly different patterns of time-together and positive/negative ratios differentiating the happy versus therapy groups. Independent behavioral recording for 14 consecutive days significantly increased husband-wife agreement on a traditional adjustment questionnaire without significantly increasing or decreasing the level of satisfaction being assessed. There was no difference between groups as to interspousal agreement on amount of time together. However, the happy couples agreed on daily quality ratings of the 72 15-minute segments significantly more often than did the distressed couples. Couples at the extremes of the happy-distressed continuum reported rewarding and punishing, respectively, in response to the partners presence, regardless of behaviors emitted. Midrange happy couples defined "pleasant" as positive behaviors presented; midrange distressed couples defined "pleasant" as negative behaviors omitted. Theoretical and clinical implications of behavioral analysis of sequential patterns are discussed.     

Loneliness and social monitoring: A conceptual replication of Knowles et al.

Contrary to the claim that loneliness routinely impairs the decoding of social cues such as emotion displays, Knowles, Lucas, Baumeister, and Gardner (2015) proposed that lonely adults “choke under pressure,” experiencing impairments only when social monitoring is framed as diagnostic of general social skill. In four experiments, Knowles et al. showed that lonely individuals performed worse than nonlonely individuals at decoding social cues when the decoding task was framed as a test of social aptitude, but not when it was framed as a test of academic aptitude. The studies were small (N's ranging from 78 to 203), and all employed a convenience sample of mostly female undergraduate students, impairing both statistical power and external validity. In addition, the lack of a true control group precluded the studies from establishing whether loneliness inhibits social monitoring ability if no frame is offered. This study conceptually replicates the central hypothesis of Knowles et al. using a sample of adults that is substantially larger and more diverse demographically and geographically, and using a true control group in addition to the comparison group. Results revealed a significant main effect of loneliness on social monitoring ability but did not replicate the choking under pressure phenomenon.     

Hysteresis behaviour of psychobiological variables during exercise

ObjectivesThe rating of perceived exertion (RPE) and the heart rate (HR) have been widely studied and monitored during exercise, but their hysteresis behaviour is still unexplored. Our aim was to study the hysteresis behaviour of RPE and HR in triathletes and non-athletes.DesignCross-sectional study.MethodEighteen triathletes at different competitive levels (elite n = 9, non-elite n = 9) and ten students were tested while cycling and running, using a pyramidal protocol (incremental/decremental workloads). The hysteresis area, considered positive when values of the dependent variables (RPE and HR) at the same workload were higher in the decremental phase than in the incremental phase, and vice versa for the negative areas, was calculated in all tests. The Wilcoxon matched-pairs test and Kruskal Wallis ANOVA were applied to detect intra- and inter-group differences, respectively, of RPE and HR values during the incremental and decremental phases, as well as between cycling and running.ResultsThe following results were observed: a) an incoherent relationship of RPE with HR and workload, b) positive hysteresis areas of RPE and HR in all groups during cycling and running, c) a partial negative hysteresis area of RPE, but not of HR, in the triathlete groups, d) larger hysteresis areas of RPE and HR in students than in triathletes, and e) larger hysteresis areas in cycling than in running.Conclusionsthe study of the hysteresis behaviour of RPE and HR reveals the history dependency of both variables, highlights their incoherent or non-unique relationship during a pyramidal exercise, and questions their widely assumed linear association to workload intensity. The hysteresis area is proposed as a new non-invasive marker of exercise stress and tolerance that should be further investigated.     

Effects of training, prompting, and self-monitoring on staff behavior in a classroom for students with disabilities

This study extended the limited research on the utility of tactile prompts and examined the effects of a treatment package on implementation of a token economy by instructional assistants in a classroom for students with disabilities. During baseline, we measured how accurately the assistants implemented a classroom token economy based on the routine training they had received through the school system. Baseline was followed by brief in-service training, which resulted in no improvement of token-economy implementation for recently hired instructional assistants. A treatment package of prompting and self-monitoring with accuracy feedback was then introduced as a multiple baseline design across behaviors. The treatment package was successfully faded to a more manageable self-monitoring intervention. Results showed visually significant improvements for all participants during observation sessions.     

The role of collaborative planning in children's source-monitoring errors and learning.

The aim of this research was to provide empirical evidence for a cognitive process that may contribute to children's learning from another person. A cornerstone of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory is that knowledge is internalized from others; however, the cognitive processes that support this transformation are underspecified. In a series of three studies, kindergarten children (mean age 5 years 8 months) participated in a categorization task with an adult in several collaborative and noncollaborative conditions and then were tested on their memory of who had performed which actions in the task. After the memory task, children were asked to recategorize the items on their own. Source-monitoring patterns and children's learning varied across conditions according to predictions. A measure of recoding was related to children's planning language that, in turn, predicted learning among the children. The results suggest that one process that contributes to children's internalization of knowledge may involve recoding of agent information and that recoding can be indexed by source-monitoring performance.