A Cross-Cultural Study of Depression in the Aftermath of a Natural Disaster

This study evaluated the extent and severity of depressive symptoms among adults (n=1015) in Armenia one year after the 1988 earthquake, using an Armenian translation of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-Arm). Earthquake surivivors had higher levels of depression than did their non-earthquake counterparts. For both the quake and non-quake regions, women were found to have higher scores on the BDI-Arm than men, and persons between the ages of 31–55 reported significantly higher depressive ratings than individuals who were 17–30. Interactions between the quake and non-quake areas and gender indicated that women in both areas reported significantly more depressive symptoms than men. The psychometric properties of the BDI-Arm compared favorably to those defined by North American studies.     

Supervisory styles index: Examining supervisees' perceptions of Supervisory Style

The goal of this research was to develop an instrument, the Supervisory Styles Index (SSI), that would examine supervisory style. Style has been described as the way in which the personality and convictions of the supervisor are demonstrated in the supervisory relationship (Leighton, 1991). This study focuses on the interplay between supervisory style and the influence of sex and gender. The findings of this study reveal that female supervisees discern their supervisors to be more self-disclosing than do male supervisees. Implications of the findings and utilization of the index are discussed.Portions of this paper were presented at the 52nd annual conference of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, Chicago, Illinois, November, 1994.     

Religion and politics among Arab seafarers in Britain in the early twentieth century

For the communities of Arab seafarers who settled at British ports, religion and politics were two domains that remained closely intermeshed throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A number of international Islamic organizations were active among the Arab seafarers during this time. The Islamic Society and the Western Islamic Association were active among these Arab seafaring communities during periods of acute tension and unrest. After the 1919 race riots, the Islamic Society called for reconciliation and understanding rather than resistance, and in 1930 the Western Islamic Association sought to counter the activities of those Arabs who chose resistance and solidarity with the Communist‐led Seamen's Minority Movement. The North African‐based ^c Alawi tariqa creaud something of a religious revival among the Arab seafarers during the 1930s and 1940s. Its efforts appear to have been welcomed and supported by the British authorities as a useful counter to Communist propaganda.     

The duration and perceived intensity of sucrose taste

Thirty-two subjects judged the perceived intensity of each of four concentrations of sucrose over 2 min. Stimuli were either sipped and expectorated or flowed over the subject’s extended tongue. Ratio judgments on a line scale and category ratings were made. Sixteen of the subjects had had extensive training in judging the sensory attributes of food products, and another group of 16 subjects were untrained. The perceived intensity of sucrose rose to a peak within 5 or 10 sec, and then declined over 2 min. In both the sip and the flow conditions, the taste disappeared completely for 26 of 32 subjects. Stronger concentrations were perceived as having greater peak intensities and longer lasting taste. The differences between concentrations were enhanced when sipped rather than flowed over the tongue. Judgments of intensity and duration were largely unaffected by the training level of subjects and the use of different rating scales.     

Uncovering Substantive Patterns in Student Responses in International Large-Scale Assessments—Comparing a Latent Class to a Manifest DIF Approach

In this study, we contrast results from two differential item functioning (DIF) approaches (manifest and latent class) by the number of items and sources of items identified as DIF using data from an international reading assessment. The latter approach yielded three latent classes, presenting evidence of heterogeneity in examinee response patterns. It also yielded more DIF items with larger effect sizes and more consistent item response patterns by substantive aspects (e.g., reading comprehension processes and cognitive complexity of items). Based on our findings, we suggest empirically evaluating the homogeneity assumption in international assessments because international populations cannot be assumed to have homogeneous item response patterns. Otherwise, differences in response patterns within these populations may be under-detected when conducting manifest DIF analyses. Detecting differences in item responses across international examinee populations has implications on the generalizability and meaningfulness of DIF findings as they apply to heterogeneous examinee subgroups.     

Adapting efficiency of salt-sucrose mixtures

Previous studies had observed that NaCI-sucrose mixtures cross-adapted solutions of their unmixed components just as effectively as adaptation to the components themselves, while quinine-sucrose mixtures were not as effective in cross-adapting their components. The present study investigated whether these effects were due to the different tastants involved or to different conditions of stimulation and adaptation employed. Adaptation to NaCI-sucrose mixtures using the conditions of the quinine-sucrose study resulted in perfect cross-adaptation of NaCI saltiness by the mixture, but only partial adaptation of sucrose sweetness by the mixture. A second study attempted to reconcile this remaining difference by examining the stimulation parameters of flow rate, temperature, and area stimulated. As flow rate and area were decreased, the difference between mixture adaptation and self-adaptation of sucrose was attenuated. Mixture suppression may depend upon the tastants mixed and the parameters of stimulation, and may be the result of several physiological mechanisms.     

Evidence for neural inhibition in bittersweet taste mixtures.

Three lines of evidence from psychophysical experiments implied that mutual suppression of bitter and sweet tastes is due to neural inhibition rather than chemical interactions in solution or competition of molecules for common receptor sites. Removal of sweetness from bittersweet mixtures caused the bitterness to increase. This was accomplished by adaptation to sucrose or by treatment with Gymnema sylvestre, neither of which affect the concentration of sucrose on the tongue. Such increases in the bitterness of mixtures, independent of the concentration of the sweet masking substance, are difficult to reconcile with suppression by means of chemical interactions. Similar dependence of suppression on perceived intensity (and independence from concentration) was observed with mixtures of phyenylthiocarbamide and sucrose. Tasters of phenylthiocarbamide showed stronger suppression of sweetness than nontasters. This result was also inconsistent with molecular interactions causing suppression, which would have resulted in the same degree of suppression for the two groups. Instead, these findings support neural explanations of mixture suppression, such as antidromic inhibition or occlusion.     

Recognition of common odors,pictures, and simple shapes

Recognition of common odors and simple shapes decayed in a similar manner over the course of 4 months. Recognition of complex pictures was uniformly higher than recognition of the odors and simple figures, although the distractors for these stimuli were much less similar than for the odors or simple shapes. Recognition of these common odors was the same as recognition performance on single chemicals used in previous studies. These results suggest that simple chemicals and complex familiar odors are encoded or remembered in a similar fashion, and that visual stimuli exist which are encoded in a similar manner to odors, possibly as unitary images with few features.     

Recovery of subsampled dimensions and configurations derived from napping data by MFA and MDS

Napping is a multivariate sensory method in which participants physically place stimuli on a large sheet of paper and orient them so that the distance between pairs represents a measure of dissimilarity. The two-dimensional nature of the task may be a limitation to the ability of this and similar methodologies to recover information about complex stimuli. In the first investigation, eight simulated three-dimensional stimuli were created with two different levels for each attribute. Simulated napping experiments had groups of participants attend to two of the dimensions with different probabilities. Multiple factor analysis (an analytical multivariate statistical procedure that can be thought of as a principle components analysis on the individuals) and MDS-INDSCAL (a variation on multidimensional scaling that finds a common configuration through reducing a stress measure associated with lack of fit) recovered full dimensionality from these data, although MFA had trouble when attention was the most unbalanced. In the second experiment, a human napping experiment was designed using custom three-dimensional stimuli: shapes with two levels each of size, color, and shape attributes. This experiment confirmed the results of Experiment 1, as both MDS-INDSCAL and MFA analyses again recovered the full dimensionality of the stimuli.