Standardizing the administration of the Profile of Mood States (POMS): development of alternative word lists

Although standard administration procedures are essential for valid inference making, current Profile and Mood States (POMS; McNair, Lorr, & Droppleman, 1971) protocol forces each examiner, when asked for assistance, to provide subjects extemporaneously with a word or phase that is: (a) synonymous with the original item, (b) located nowhere else on the instrument, and (c) more meaningful to the subject than the original item. The purpose of this article is to describe an empirically based extension of current POMS protocol designed to augment uniformity in administration procedures by providing examiners with a standardized list of alternatives to be referred to when questions concerning the meaning of POMS items arise. A multiphase survey procedure was employed to generate and refine alternative items. A series of alpha (internal consistency) reliabilities, calculated for the POMS subscales after each alternative was substituted, revealed little change in subscale homogeneity resulting from the substitution of the alternatives.     

Lexical integration across saccades in reading

Summary Eye movements were recorded during sentence reading to examine the integration of parafoveal text across fixations. Four viewing conditions were used, each affording full view of the directly fixated word: no preview of the spatially adjacent parafoveal word; preview of its beginning trigram; preview of its beginning four letters; or preview of all its constituent letters. The magnitude of parafoveal-preview benefits (the difference between the no-preview condition and the different parafoveal-preview conditions) was examined as a function of the size of the saccade to the parafoveal target and as a function of the subsequent fixation location at the previewed target. The results revealed no effects of saccade size on parafoveal-preview benefits, but large effects of fixation position during the initial target fixation. Furthermore, parafoveal previews were used during the initial target fixation and during subsequent intratarget refixations. The results support a lexical-text-integration hypothesis which posits that lexical information is integrated across interword fixations and intraword refixations.     

Mindless reading: Eye-movement characteristics are similar in scanning letter strings and reading texts

The purpose of the present study was to compare the oculomotor behavior of readers scanning meaningful and meaningless materials. Four conditions were used—a normal-text-reading control condition, and three experimental conditions in which the amount of linguistic processing was reduced, either by presenting the subjects with repeated letter strings or by asking the subjects to search for a target letter in texts or letter strings. The results show that global eye-movement characteristics (such as saccade size and fixation duration), as well as local characteristics (such as word-skipping rate, landing site, refixation probability, and refixation position), are very similar in the four conditions. The finding that the eyes are capable of generating an autonomous oculomotor scanning strategy in the absence of any linguistic information to process argues in favor of the idea that such predetermined oculomotor strategies might be an important determinant of eye movements in reading.     

Compound word effects differ in reading,on-line naming,and delayed naming tasks

Bimorphemic compound words (e.g.,blueberry), bimorphemic suffixed words (e.g.,ceaseless), and monomorphemic controls (e.g.,arthritis) were read in neutral sentence contexts in Experiment 1. The main result revealed longer first fixation durations on compound words than on control and suffixed words. Different effects emerged when naming tasks were used. An on-line naming task revealed substantially shorter naming latencies for compound words than for control and suffixed words. Naming latencies for compound and control words were equivalent in a delayed naming task. These results indicate that on-line naming latencies and word-viewing durations may yield diverging results. They also suggest that activation of constituent words of compound words occurs independently from the specification of conventional word meanings.     

Parafoveal word perception: A case against semantic preprocessing

The present experiment investigated semantic information extraction in parafoveal word perception. An ambiguous word (bank) was presented in foveal vision, and simultaneously a disambiguating word (water, money) was presented in the parafovea. Subjects were required to make a forced choice between two phrases, and the task was constructed so that a correct choice could be made if semantic information about both the foveal and parafoveal word had been obtained. However, the results indicated that the forced-choice results could be explained by two factors: identification of the parafoveal word and correct guessing. Hence, it was concluded that those models of reading which rely on unconscious semantic preprocessing of parafoveal words were not supported.     

Alcoholics in inpatient,short-term interactional group psychotherapy: an outcome study

The differential outcome of 100 psychiatric inpatients distinguished by the presence/absence of secondary alcoholism was examined in shortterm closed group psychotherapy. Alcoholics did not differ from the general sample in outcome, but displayed distinct active/aggressive personality features. Group outcome was not affected by the presence/absence of alcoholic members.     

Problem-solving in a cooperative task in peach-fronted conures (Eupsittula aurea)

Animal Cognition - Cooperation is a complex behaviour found in many kinds of organisms and occurs between individuals of the same and different species. Several studies have examined the...     

Memory for multidimensional source information

Source memory may comprise recollection of multiple features of the encoding episode. To analyze the simultaneous representation and retrieval of those multiple features, a multinomial memory model is presented that measures memory for crossed dimensions of source information. The first experiment investigated the validity of the new model. The model showed an excellent statistical fit to empirical data, and the parameters of multidimensional source memory were sensitive to manipulations of source similarity on distinct dimensions. The second experiment used the model to test the hypothesis that source memory for individual context attributes is stochastically related in the case of conscious recollection but independent in the case of familiarity-based recognition judgments. The prediction was supported by the introduction of a "remember"-"know" distinction in a multidimensional source memory test.     

Problem solving deteriorates following mood challenge in formerly depressed patients with a history of suicidal ideation

The authors divided 34 participants who had a history of depression into 2 groups, those having previous suicidal ideation or behavior (n=19) and those having no such symptoms (n=15), then compared the 2 groups with a group of participants who had no history of depression (n=22). Assessment of interpersonal problem-solving performance using the Means-Ends Problem-Solving (MEPS) task before and after a mood-induction procedure showed that only those formerly depressed people with a history of suicidal ideation shifted in MEPS performance, producing significantly less effective problem solutions following mood challenge, consistent with a differential activation account of vulnerability for recurrence of suicidal ideation and behavior. The deterioration in effectiveness following mood challenge was moderated by lack of specificity in autobiographical memory.