Cognitive, perceptual, and personal-social development of prematurely born preschoolers

This study was designed to determine possible differences in the cognitive, perceptual, and personal-social development of prematurely and maturely born 3-yr.-olds which might foreshadow later learning problems. The subjects were 40 prematurely born graduates of a neonatal intensive care unit (birth weight less than 2,500 gm, less than 37 wk. gestation) matched on the pair-level with full-term controls on sex, race, post-conceptual age, and socioeconomic background. All subjects were singletons and parity was matched at the group level. No differences were found between the groups on tests of higher mental processes including the General Cognitive, Verbal, Quantitative, and Memory Scales of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities, and researcher-devised measures of problem-solving competence. No differences in parental reports of personal-social development were noted. Prematures did not perform as well as controls on perceptual performance tasks, and this difference was interpreted as reflecting relatively impaired visual-motor coordination.     

A detailed study of sequential saccadic eye movements for normal- and poor-reading children

This paper presents the results of an in-depth study of parameters characterizing sequenced saccadic eye movements for a group of dyslexic children and a comparative normal control group with ages in the range greater than 8.0 yr. and less than 13.0 yr. No parameters were statistically different for the two groups, which supports the findings of Brown, et al. and contradicts the findings of Pavlidis. Our results indicate that sequenced saccadic eye movements are not diagnostically useful for early detection of dyslexia.     

“Honey,Won't You Please Stay Home”

The mass return to campus by the mature woman has become commonplace at colleges and universities across the country. According to the Bureau of the Census, almost 800,000 adults 35 years of age and over were enrolled in or attending college in October 1972 and “over half (53 percent) were women” (Young 1973, p. 39), the overwhelming majority of whom were going to college part-time. Many of these women find that their decision to return to school after an extended interruption of their formal education is both serious and significant, changing not only their own values, perceptions, and self-images but also giving rise to stress and change in their relationships with their families. The 1973 report of the National Advisory Council on Extension and Continuing Education concludes with the statement, “Perhaps most importantly, continuing education programs for women have revitalized the idea that the most important kind of learning results in changes in life styles and in self-image and often requires long and difficult struggle” (Mulligan 1973, p. 17). These changes and the consequent long and difficult struggle often prove to be disturbing, disrupting, disabling, or even disastrous.     

Adjustment to chronic low back pain--the relative influence of fear-avoidance beliefs, catastrophizing, and appraisals of control

The present study investigated the relative extent to which patients' adjustment to chronic low back pain (CLBP) was influenced by their fear-avoidance beliefs, their tendency to catastrophize, and their appraisals of control. Eighty-three CLBP patients completed a series of self-report measures before participating in a physical therapist-led intervention. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that patients' perceptions of their ability to decrease pain explained a small, but statistically significant, proportion of the variance in pain intensity. In addition, patients' levels of catastrophizing, as well as their fear-avoidance beliefs about both work and physical activity, were independently associated with levels of disability. Interestingly, however, when exploring the relative predictive utility of these three psychological factors, it became evident that fear-avoidance beliefs about physical activity (FABs-PA) were the only significant predictor of patients' disability. Specifically, those patients who exhibited higher levels of FABs-PA tended to report greater levels of disability, even after adjusting for age, sex and pain intensity.     

Error monitoring dysfunction across the illness course of schizophrenia

Response monitoring abnormalities have been reported in chronic schizophrenia patients, but it is unknown whether they predate the onset of psychosis, are present in early stages of illness, or are late-developing abnormalities associated with illness progression. Response-synchronized event-related potentials (ERP) recorded during a picture-word matching task yielded error-related negativity (ERN), correct-response negativity (CRN), and error positivity (Pe) from 84 schizophrenia patients (SZ), 48 clinical high risk patients (CHR), and their age-matched healthy controls (HC; n = 110 and 88, respectively). A sub-sample of 35 early illness schizophrenia patients (ESZ) was compared to 93 age-matched HC and the CHR patients (after statistically removing the effects of normal aging). Relative to HC, 1) SZ, ESZ, and CHR had smaller ERNs, and 2) SZ and ESZ had larger CRNs and smaller Pes. Within the SZ, longer illness duration was associated with larger CRNs but was unrelated to ERN or Pe. CHR and ESZ did not differ on ERN or CRN, although Pe was smaller in ESZ than CHR. These results indicate that while ERN, CRN, and Pe abnormalities are present early in the illness, only the ERN abnormality is evident prior to psychosis onset, and only the CRN abnormality appears to worsen progressively over the illness course. Brain regions subserving response monitoring may be compromised early in the illness and possibly during its clinical prodrome.     

Police Overestimation of Criminal Career Homogeneity

Police presumptions about criminal career trajectories have been little studied. The exploratory study reported here involved 42 police staff of varying rank and experience. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire that asked them to predict the type of offence that an individual with a specified prior record would most probably commit next. Participating police personnel substantially overstated the homogeneity of criminal careers, that is, the nature of prior offences determined their prediction of their next offence more than available official data would deem reasonable. An incidental finding was that officers who rated the probability of further offending highest were also those who thought criminal careers most specialised. The implications for operational police decision‐making were discussed and held to be profound. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The sensitivity of a palm-based psychomotor vigilance task to severe sleep loss

In this study, we evaluated the sensitivity of a 5-min personal digital assistant-psychomotor vigilance test (PDA-PVT) to severe sleep loss. Twenty-one participants completed a 10-min PVT-192 and a 5-min PDA-PVT at two hourly intervals during 62 h of sustained wakefulness. For both tasks, response speed and number of lapses (RTs > 500) per minute significantly increased with increasing hours of wakefulness. Overall, standardized response speed scores on the 5-min PDA-PVT closely tracked those of the PVT-192; however, the PDA-PVT was generally associated with more lapses/minute. Closer inspection of the data indicated that when the level of sleep loss and fatigue became more severe (i.e., Day 3), the 5-min PDA-PVT was not quite as sensitive as the 10-min PVT-192 when 2- to 10-sec foreperiods were used for both. It is likely, however, that the observed differences between the two devices was due to differences in task length. Thus, the findings provide further evidence of the validity of the 5-min PDA-PVT as a substitute for the 10-min PVT-192, particularly in circumstances in which a shorter test is required and/or the PVT-192 is not as practical.