This study investigated the interactions of facially deformed infants (FD) with their mothers compared to a facially nondeformed control group (FND). All mother-infant dyads were videotaped for 10 minutes during a free play period. Mothers were instructed to spend time with their baby as they normally would. The videotaped interactions of 14 FD dyads and 14 FND dyads were rated by five raters for quality of interactions, amount of vocalization, touch, and face-to-face gaze. The infants were rated on their level of attractiveness from polaroid pictures and videotapes. Mothers also completed a questionnaire which assessed their infants' temperament. Three of the studies' four hypotheses were confirmed. First, the more attractive an infant was, the better his/her interactions with the mother were judged to be. Second, FD infant dyads were rated as significantly poorer in quality of interaction than FND dyads, although FD* dyads did not spend significantly less time vocalizing, touching, or in face-to-face gaze as predicted. A significantly higher percentage of FD infants were judged as having difficult temperament relative to FND infants. Finally, as predicted it was found that infants with difficult temperaments were more likely to exhibit poorer quality interactions than infants with less difficult temperaments. These …

Three groups of goldfish were prepared; naive, avoidance-conditioned and pseudo-conditioned animals. Five pseudo-conditioned fish were avoidance trained later and found to have no measurable acquisition of the avoidance conditioning paradigm. Several protein fractions were found to have significantly different rates of synthesis when compared across groups. The possible involvement of these proteins in the memory storage process was discussed.

Since 2002, the number of veterans enrolled in universities has nearly doubled, although 30-40% of veterans fail to complete their degree. While research efforts to understand the challenges veterans face transitioning from military life to college has increased in recent years, few studies have looked beyond the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Insomnia is the most frequently reported symptom of combat veterans and can have serious implications for college students. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of insomnia and student veteran adaptation to college relative to civilian students. College students (N = 588) were administered a Background Information Questionnaire, the Insomnia Severity Index, the Deployment Risk and Resilience Inventory, and the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire. Results revealed that students with insomnia reported significantly lower adaptation to college than students without insomnia. Student veterans reported better academic and personal-emotional adaptation to college than civilian students, while civilians reported better social adjustment than veterans. Although combat veterans without insomnia scored consistently higher academic adjustment than non-combat veterans and civilian students, when present insomnia seemed to have a greater negative effect on combat veterans’ academic adjustment relative to civilian students. Furthermore, insomnia mediated the relationship between combat …

The current study discussed the development and validation of the Checklist for Differential Diagnosis of Attentional Problems (CDDAP), a tool for use with adults seeking diagnosis and treatment of an Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Normative data are provided on three subject groups (ADHD adults, controls, and adults with other psychiatric disorders). Convergent validity was established with the SCL-90, and criterion validity established through comparing scaled scores with final diagnoses. Overall, this measure was accurate at differentiating adults with ADHD from controls and adults with other psychiatric disorders. Results indicated that the CDDAP was also able to identify other psychiatric disorders with 71 to 92% accuracy, depending on the disorder.

Psychiatric patients, particularly schizophrenics, tend to be less accurate decoders of facial expressions than normals. The involvement of three basic information processing stages in this deficit was investigated: attention; encoding; and processing. Psychiatric inpatients, classified by diagnosis and severity of pathology, and nonpatient controls were administered seven facial cue decoding tasks. Orientation of attention was assessed through rate of diversion of gaze from the stimuli. Encoding was assessed using simple tasks, requiring one contrast of two facial stimuli and selection from two response alternatives. Processing was assessed using a more complex task, requiring several contrasts between stimulus faces and selection from numerous response alternatives. Residualized error scores were used to statistically control for effects of attention on task performance. Processing task performance was evaluated using ANCOVA to control for effects of encoding. Schizophrenics were characterized by generalized information processing deficit while affective disorder subjects evidenced impairment only in attending. Attention impairments in both groups were related to severity of psychopathology. Problems in encoding and processing were related only to a schizophrenic diagnosis. Their decoding deficits appeared attributable to general visuospatial discrimination impairment rather than repression-sensitization defenses or the affective connotation of cues. Adequacy of interpersonal functioning was associated with measures …

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the effectiveness of various secondary reinforcers on the behavior of a hyperactive child. A base rate of appropriate behavior was obtained in a first-grade classroom. The operant techniques employed were secondary reinforcers consisting of monetary reinforcement; monetary paired with peer reinforcement; monetary, peer, and verbal reinforcement combined; and verbal reinforcement only.

Subjects, 432 convenience store cashiers, were divided into long-tenure and short-tenure groups. Chi-square analysis of application blank information for a weighting sample drawn from both groups revealed two items which significantly (p < .05) differentiated between the long tenure and short-tenure groups: number of previous jobs and full-time/part-time preference. Response weights were computed for these two items and used to calculate composite scores for the remaining holdout sample. A significant reduction in turnover would have occurred at the highest composite score level, if used as a hiring cut off. Results were tempered by several considerations, including a high percentage of false negatives and an insignificant linear relationship between composite scores and tenure.

Ninety college students served as subjects in research to investigate possible relationships between fear of death, religious doubt, and child-rearing practices. The following hypotheses were tested: 1) contingent childrearing practices would correlate negatively with religious doubt, 2) religious doubt would correlate positively with fear of death, and 3) contingent child-rearing practices would correlate negatively with fear of death. The second hypothesis was supported. Additional analyses revealed that those who changed religious preference from childhood to the present had lower fear of death scores than those who retained the same beliefs. The sample was also divided into religious and nonreligious groups. The religious group as a whole and religious females were found to have scored significantly higher on paternal contingent punishment. Religious individuals in the total sample also scored significantly higher on parental contingent punishment.

The present investigation was concerned with the effectiveness of religion in personality development and the significance of church attendance in ethical and moral control. These concepts were related to specific diagnoses of psychiatric patients to ascertain the effect of religion upon those patients diagnosed as paranoid-type schizophrenics and as sociopaths. In addition, the effect of this variable on other variables related to the patient's past religious experience, such as church attendance, was examined. The religiousness of the patients was measured by a single religious intensity questionnaire.

I analyzed the 2004 and 2006 Health and Retirement Study data to test structural equation models of the quality of life (QOL) construct. The participants (N = 1352) were non-institutionalized individuals aged 42 and older (M = 65.70, SD = 10.88), with an average education of 12.73 years (SD = 2.96) and of varied ethnicities. The results indicated that physical functioning, affective experience, life satisfaction and social support could serve as indicators for a second order QOL factor. Furthermore, the developed QOL model explained 96% of the variance of the CASP-19 (Control, Autonomy, Self-realization and Pleasure), a QOL measure that reflects fulfillment of psychological needs. The results also indicated that Depression and Life Satisfaction are related through reciprocal causation and that Physical Functioning is more likely to cause a change in Depression than the reverse. The results suggest that QOL is a complex, multidimensional concept that should be studied at different levels of analysis.

Family functioning has long been a focus of research in psychopathology. Decades of research has shown that family factors are associated with symptom severity, relapse, functional outcomes, and conversion to psychosis among at-risk individuals. Previous studies suggest family functioning varies across cultures, which raises the possibility that associations between family factors and psychopathology may also differ by culture. Furthermore, family functioning assessment generally involves instruments that have not been systematically validated for use with individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. The current study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (N = 11,138) to: (1) evaluate three family functioning scales (i.e., Family Environment Scale, Child's Report of Parental Behavior Inventory, Parental Monitoring Survey) and the Prodromal Questionnaire – Brief Child version for measurement invariance across racial/ethnic groups; (2) investigate the relations between family factors and psychosis; and (3) compare relations derived from Step 2 between racial/ethnic groups. Full scalar invariance was tenable for the CRPBI and the PQ-BC, providing statistical support for mean comparisons across groups. The FES and the PMQ lacked scalar invariance, which suggests mean comparisons across groups may not be appropriate. The CRPBI and the PMQ are significantly associated with the PQ-BC, and all three family …

It is hypothesized in this study that children reared with "concerned" mothers (N) will display significantly superior intellectual performance and less neurological impairment as compared with children reared with neglectful mothers (MN) and children diagnosed as failure to thrive (FTT, falling below the third percentile in height and weight). The FTT children will show significantly more deficits than both N and MN groups. The participants in this study were forty-five children rigidly matched on all possible variables. F-tests and Newman-Keuls' analyses reveal severe intellectual deficits in both MN and FTT groups. The FTT group displayed significantly more neurological deficits lending support for a nutritional basis of this syndrome as opposed to the traditional psychogenic explanation.

In recent years, organizations have invested increasing financial and labor-related resources on employee training. The assumption is that training will benefit the organization through improved performance which will result in greater efficiency, greater customer satisfaction and, ultimately, increased revenue and profits. Further, employees are assumed to benefit because their improved performance should lead to career advancement and increased compensation. However, measuring the effect of training on employee performance has been problematic due to the difficulty of isolating the effect of training from other human resource management practices and environmental and organizational influences. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to test a model for predicting merit pay increase, job promotion and performance ratings from measures of general and finance training, as well as employee tenure, gender, educational level and organizational level. It was found that while significant contributions (i.e., betas) were made by finance and general training for performance ratings, promotion and merit pay increase, they did not increase the variance accounted for by tenure, organizational level and gender.

Positive psychology has become influential in research and practice. However, some have criticized positive psychologists who focus solely on the virtues of being positive. A tyrannical pressure to be positive may potentially exist in positive psychology, as well as mainstream United States culture. The following study explored perceptions of this theory using focus groups of individuals who differed in coping style, social desirability, and depression. Results suggest that individuals are affected by social pressures to be positive, and the expression of both positive and negative emotions is determined by social pressures, rules, context, and consequences. Although emotional expression, especially negativity, is contraindicated in several social contexts, there are also social, psychological, and physical benefits to all types of emotional expression.

The problem with which this investigation was concerned was that of determining the extent various subgroups of individuals within certain clinical groups would agree in terms of how to rank order Maslow's basic needs.

Marijuana is the second most commonly used substance in the US. A growing literature suggests that socially anxious individuals use marijuana to manage their symptoms in social situations, which may explain why they are also more likely to experience problems. Unfortunately, the majority of the literature is based on research conducted with adult samples or the co-occurrence of diagnoses in adolescent samples. The proposed study sought to test the link between social anxiety (SA) and proxies for ‘real-time' marijuana use behaviors (i.e., use willingness) as well as use-related problems among adolescents. Participants were 69 adolescents (15-17; 55% female) recruited from the community reporting any lifetime marijuana use. Participants were randomly assigned to a novel social rejection or neutral laboratory task and completed measures of SA, marijuana use frequency, and related problems. Consistent with adult findings, main effects of SA and experimental condition on marijuana use willingness were expected to be qualified by an interaction in which the greatest marijuana use willingness would occur among high SA youth post-rejection (H1), SA would be positively related to marijuana use problems (H2), and among adolescents in the rejection condition, marijuana use willingness would be positively correlated with use problems (H3). Only H2 was …

This study sought to determine if visual perceptual training could be effectively used to improve the school readiness skills of kindergarten children.

If mania and depression are part of the same pathological processes, one would predict that episodes of one prospectively increase the odds of episodes of the other. The aim of the present study was to test this hypothesis. For comparison purposes, their relationship was contrasted to the relationship between mania and periods of psychosis. Exploratory analyses also tested the degree to which episodes of each occur with greater frequency over time (i.e., kindling). Participants for the present study came from the Suffolk County Mental Health Project (N = 628), a study of first-admission patients with psychosis. Of these participants, 144 met diagnostic criteria for bipolar I disorder and were analyzed for the current study. Results indicated that mania in a given month predicted depression the following month, even after controlling for other symptoms. The reverse, however, was not the case. Mania and psychosis, in contrast, were found to be robust predictors of one another from month to month. Effects were not due to treatment or demographic differences. These findings provide evidence that mania and depression are weakly related. In contrast, mania and psychosis are more closely linked. Findings are consistent with suggestions that psychiatric nosology regroup mania more closely with …

The proposed study examined the relationship between parental anxiety, measured both subjectively (via self-report questionnaires) and objectively (via salivary cortisol) and the child's feeding progress. Children diagnosed with a feeding disorder were recruited with their parents at Our Children's House at Baylor (n=19; 11 females, 8 males). The patients and their parents were housed in the clinic for an eight-week intensive multidisciplinary pediatric feeding disorder treatment program. Calorie intake was recorded daily as outcome measures of treatment progression. Parental anxiety was measured by the Pediatric Inventory for Parents (PIP), state anxiety on the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), and by salivary cortisol at three different time points. The present study attempted to examine whether parental feeding (phase three of treatment program) would continue to cause a decrease in the child's caloric intake. In averaging ten meals prior to parental feeding in comparison to the average of ten meals following parental feeding, there was no significant difference as measured by a t-test. Paired t-tests examined parental anxiety from time one to time two and found that salivary cortisol increased significantly t(15) = -6.07, p = .000 from Time 1 (M = 2.30, SD = 1.64) to Time 2 (M = 5.24, …

The study examined relations between a cross-cultural geographically mobile childhood and adult cultural identity, attachment to cross-cultural identities (CCIs) and self-esteem. CCIs are loosely defined identities (e.g., third culture kids [TCKs], military brats, missionary kids) that describe some individuals' childhood cross-cultural experience. The 475 participants spent at least two years before age 18 in a culture different from their parents' and completed an online survey including childhood cross-cultural experiences, Cultural Homelessness Criteria, Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale, and Self Label Identity Measure (SLIM) that captured strength of affirmation, belonging and commitment to any CCI. Cultural homelessness (CH) was related to lower self-esteem; higher SLIM scores was related to higher self-esteem and lower CH. TCKs reported lower self-esteem than non-TCKs and older participants experienced less CH and higher self-esteem. SLIM scores buffered the CH-self-esteem relationship, whereas a TCK CCI and having more cross-culturally experienced social networks did not.

It has long been recognized that childhood bereavement is a risk factor for depression in adulthood. Research also has consistently demonstrated that parental depression is linked to poor parent-child relationship quality. The current study examined whether bereavement in childhood increases likelihood of current depressive symptoms among parents and explored whether this vulnerability in the parent then alters the quality of the parent-child relationship. Archival data for a sample of 86 families (N=176 parents) are drawn from the Family & Kid Connection project led by Dr. Shelley Riggs. Instruments utilized include the Background Information Questionnaire, the Symptom Assessment-45 Questionnaire, and the Parenting Relationship Questionnaire. Using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model, Multilevel Modeling procedures explored the hypothesis that parental depression mediates the association between parents’ childhood bereavement and their perception of the parent-child relationship. Results show a significant relationship between parental (actor) depressive symptoms and parent-child attachment, indicating the need for therapeutic interventions targeting the parent-child relationship, and not just parents, for parents suffering from depression.

The present investigation sought to explore the efficacy of stress inoculation in the management of pain with severely burned adults. Subjects were 16 adult burn patients randomly assigned to either the stress-inoculation or no-treatment comparison group. The focus of the analysis was the amount of change or improvement from pretreatment to posttreatment periods. The stress-inoculation group showed significant improvement on all nine dependent measures, while the no-treatment group improved significantly on only two (physical and emotional self-ratings). The overall comparison of the amount of change between groups revealed that the stress-inoculation group showed significantly greater improvement in pain management than the no-treatment group during this time. It was concluded that stress inoculation, as a flexible treatment package, was efficacious in the management of pain experience of burn patients.

Five chemicals indigenous to the dental office environment that may cause toxic effects are formaldehyde, phenol, acrylic, mercury, and nitrous oxide. These chemicals create abnormal stress on physiological and psychological systems of the body resulting in symptomatology and pathology when the body defenses can no longer maintain homeostasis by adaptation. This study demonstrated serious behavioral consequences of chemical and heavy metal exposure. This study provided evidence that a significant percentage of dental office personnel who are exposed to the dental office chemicals show psycho neurological dysfunction. It was concluded that these individuals suffer adverse reactions to the chemicals in their work environment. The problem areas included perceptual motor difficulty in cognitive functioning, concern with bodily functions, despondency, and interpersonal problems.

The most effective and useful way to diagnose and subtype depression has been a long debated topic which even now does not have a definite answer. The biopsychosocial approach to diagnosis may be a solution to this problem by linking various etiologies to symptom presentation. The biopsychosocial model, in regard to depression, takes into account biological risk factors/contributors, psychological or cognitive risk factors/contributors, and social risk factors/contributors to depression when making diagnosis and subtyping determinations. However, the most effective way to use this model in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of depression is not yet clear. In this study, the utility of the biopsychosocial model as an effective approach to conceptualizing and treating depression was assessed by testing hypotheses that showed that etiological contributors are related to the presence and differential presentation of depression, and that these etiologically-based subtypes of depression respond differently to different forms of treatment. These hypotheses were tested using data from the National Comorbidity Survey - Replication (NCS-R). Results showed that the biopsychosocial model can effectively predict the presence, severity and chronicity of depression, and may inform specific biopsychosocially-based subtypes. No conclusions could be drawn regarding success in treatment based on the biopsychosocial model. Future directions …