Development of knowledge bases and the reliability of a decision support system for behavioral treatment consultation for persons with mental retardation: The Mental Retardation-Expert

The development of expert and decision support systems requires the collection, organization, codification, and storage of a body of specialized knowledge. The development, using reconstructive methods, of two such knowledge bases, the first containing the current scientific literature and the second containing an expert’s knowledge, is described for an automated decision support system, the Mental Retardation-Expert. This system provides practitioners with assistance in the treatment of aggressive, self-injurious, and destructive behaviors displayed by individuals with mental retardation or developmental disabilities. The average interobserver reliability of the expert knowledge base ranged from 92.5% to 95.0% when calculated across four clinicians’ assessments of 31 abstracted cases.     

Visual habituation at five months: short-term reliability of measures obtained with a new polynomial regression criterion

Using a new polynomial regression criterion, the authors investigated empirically the short-term reliability of infants' visual habituation measures. Twenty-one 5-month-old infants were tested twice with a 1-day interval. Results revealed many reliable habituation measures, a reliable reaction to novelty measure, and a new reliable measure of interest. The 2nd-order polynomial regression criterion probably produced this improvement because it uses all of the available looking time data.     

Infants' processing of causal and noncausal events at 3.5 months of age.

Infants' processing of causal (direct launching) and noncausal (delayed reaction, launching without collision) events was investigated with 30 infants who were 3.5 months old. The habituation-dishabituation technique was used. Results showed that the infants did not process direct launching as causal. However, their pattern of responding revealed a tendency to key on the spatial and temporal properties of the events. Those findings are discussed in terms of their compatibility with a modular, an information-processing, and a Piagetian framework.     

Perceived risk: an experimental investigation of consumer behavior when buying wine

The purpose of this paper is to investigate differences in expressed attitude as a function of the manner in which information on perceived risk is communicated. The experiments are conducted through a choice‐based questionnaire to reflect the consumer‐oriented decision of the purchase of a bottle of wine based on posted prices. The experiments reported in this paper are based on questionnaires distributed to 323 participants in multiple samples and examine the behavior of people when faced with different information on the probability of loss. The present study demonstrates that changes in the manner in which information is presented, without any underlying change in problem structure, affects observed preferences when buying wine. The impact of perceived risk and character on the willingness to buy and to pay for a bottle is analyzed and show that price habits and perceived risk are the main factors affecting the willingness to pay for a bottle of wine. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Provoked vestibulodynia: Psychological predictors of topical and cognitive-behavioral treatment outcome

Psychological factors have been found to impact the pain experience and associated sexual impairment of women suffering from provoked vestibulodynia (PV). Despite a lack of randomized treatment outcome studies, particularly concerning psychological predictors of outcome, recent studies have shown that topical applications and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) are among the most popular first-line interventions for PV. The present study aimed to determine the extent to which baseline fear-avoidance variables and pain self-efficacy were differentially associated with topical application and CBT outcomes at six-month follow-up. Data were obtained from 97 women who completed a randomized trial comparing these two treatments. Regression analyses revealed that for topical treatment, higher levels of baseline avoidance predicted worse pain and sexual functioning outcomes, whereas higher levels of pain self-efficacy predicted better outcomes. For CBT, higher levels of baseline fear of pain and catastrophizing contributed to higher pain intensity at follow-up, whereas higher levels of pain self-efficacy were associated with less pain. Psychological factors did not predict sexual functioning outcomes for CBT. Consistent with biopsychosocial models of pain and sexual dysfunction, results indicate that psychological factors contribute to pain and sexual impairment following treatment for PV. Specifically, findings suggest that fear-avoidance variables and pain self-efficacy are significant predictors of topical and CBT treatment outcomes in women with PV.     

Corroborating biased indicators: Global and local agreement among objective and subjective estimates of printed word frequency

The internal validity of several types of experiments in experimental psychology and neuroscience depends in part on the possibility of controlling or manipulating critical lexical variables such as word frequency of occurrence. Two ways of estimating this variable are (1) objective frequency counts and (2) subjective ratings of word frequency. Each method produces estimates that generally agree (i.e., they are highly correlated) but that disagree substantially concerning the relative frequency of a number of words. To investigate this issue more closely, the global and local agreement of subjective frequency estimates was examined in detail for a pool of 6,202 words drawn from the OMNILEX database of French words (Desrochers, 2006; www.omnilex.uottawa .ca). The results indicated that objective and subjective frequencies are strongly correlated, subjective frequencies share a significant amount of bias variance with other lexical characteristics (e.g., imageability), and the codeterminants of subjective frequency are in an antagonistic relationship with one another. The implications of these results for the selection of lexical stimuli are discussed, and multiple variables to aid in item selection are reported. Supplemental materials for this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/ content/supplemental.     

Positive and negative instructions in symbolic paired comparisons with the months of the year

Summary We investigated the semantic interpretation of positive (MORE THAN) and negative (LESS THAN) instructions in a symbolic paired comparison task with an overlearned and finite series of stimuli. French-speaking subjects were asked to indicate which member of month pairs occurred PLUS TOT (earlier), PLUS TARD (later), MOINS TOT (less early), or MOINS TARD (less late) in the year. In Experiment 1, the sign of the comparative instruction (MORE vs. LESS) was kept constant, while its attribute (EARLY vs. LATE) varied. In Experiment 2, the attribute of the instruction was kept constant, while its sign varied. The main results indicate that (1) negative instructions (with adverb LESS) yielded longer response latencies than positive ones (with adverb MORE); this difference was particularly salient on the first experimental session but, on subsequent sessions, it was reduced in Experiment 1 and neutralized in Experiment 2; (2) a symbolic-distance effect was observed on response latency and response accuracy with the four forms of the comparative instruction; (3) violations of monotonicity were noted in the symbolic-distance effect when June was used as a reference month in the analysis; (4) the serial-position effect had the form of a double-bowed curve with three stable anchor points around January, June, and December; and (5) the pattern of semantic-congruity effect with negative instructions was the exact reversal of that obtained with positive instructions; that is, if the month pairs occurred early in the year, response latencies were shorter with the instruction less late than with less early, whereas if the month pairs occurred late in the year response latencies were shorter with instruction "less early than with less late. The theoretical implications of these results for Banks' Semantic-coding model and Holyoak's Reference-point model are discussed.