Semantic and letter fluency in Spanish-English bilinguals.

Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals completed 12 semantic, 10 letter, and 2 proper name fluency categories. Bilinguals produced fewer exemplars than monolinguals on all category types, but the difference between groups was larger (and more consistent) on semantic categories. Bilinguals and monolinguals produced the same number of errors across all category types. The authors discuss 2 accounts of the similarities and differences between groups and the interaction with category type, including (a) cross-language interference and (b) relatively weak connections in the bilingual lexical system because of reduced use of words specific to each language. Surprisingly, bilinguals' fluency scores did not improve when they used words in both languages. This result suggests that voluntary language switching incurs a processing cost. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Public Employee Pension Funds and Social Investments: Recent Performance and a Policy Option for Changing Investment Strategies

Abstract: Public employee pension funds have emerged as major sources of investment dollars for real estate development. The size of these funds has prompted periodic, but intense, interest in diverting some portion of the resources controlled by fund managers into socially desired investments. While there is a wide range of possible investments that could be classified as socially desirable, a commitment of a portion of the available resources to the redevelopment of metropolitan areas could have an important impact on deteriorating communities and areas that have struggled to attract resources from other investors. This article looks at the issue of social investing, past assessments of the investment strategies of pension funds, and then analyzes the real estate investments made by a group of large public employee pension funds in different states. In noting that the support for redeveloping deteriorating areas is, unfortunately, still lagging, a policy option is presented to increase the level of performance and measure its success.     

Comorbidity of anxiety and depression in youth: Treatment implications.

Reviews the empirical literature on the comorbidity of anxiety and depressive disorders in youth, emphasizing prevalence of comorbidity, difficulties in assessment and measurement, familial factors, and developmental differences. The nature of anxiety and of depression in youth is examined (e.g., differentiating cognitive deficiencies from cognitive distortions), and treatment recommendations are presented from a cognitive-behavioral framework. Components of the treatment include affective education, enactive programming, addressing reinforcement difficulties, correcting cognitive distortions, and enhancing problem-solving skills. Peer and familial factors are discussed. Successful treatment of comorbid children relies on a flexible application of these strategies with consideration of the developmental level and particular symptom constellation of the individual child. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of shoulder width, guardrail and roadway geometry on driver perception and behavior

Roadway design is one of the most significant factors that affect driving behavior and perceived safety. The current study tests the combined effects of three roadway design elements – shoulders width, guardrail existence and roadway geometry (curvature) – on objective driving measures (speed and lane position), and subjective measures (perceived safe driving speed and estimated road safety).Twenty two drivers participated in an experiment with a driving simulation. In the first part objective driving data were collected, and in the second part subjective paper–pencil evaluations were requested of the perceived safety of 30 different scenarios that were previously experienced in the simulator. The scenarios consisted of the various combinations of the three roadway design elements.The results showed a significant effect of roadway geometry on both objective and subjective measures. The shoulders width had a significant effect on actual speed, on lane position, and on perceived safe driving speed, but only when a guardrail was present.These findings illustrate the perceptual role of a guardrail in defining the perceived safety margins that various shoulder widths provide. When a guardrail is absent, the width of the shoulder loses much of its benefits and effects on driving behavior. The results also demonstrate that roadway geometry can be used to reduce driving speeds, but at the same time it can have a negative effect on maintaining a stable lane position in sharp curves. Thus, controlling the width of road shoulders and the placement of guardrails seems to be a safer approach to speed and lane position control.     

Decomposing words into their constituent morphemes: Evidence from English and Hebrew.

Participants segmented and shifted a sequence of letters from a source word to a target word and then named the product aloud. Morphemic and nonmorphemic letter sequences (e.g., EN) from phonemically matched words such as HARDEN and GARDEN were compared. In 4 experiments, naming latencies were faster for morphemic sequences than their nonmorphemic controls in both English, in which the morphemic status of the shifted sequence was varied and sequences were appended after the base morpheme (linearly concatenated), and in Hebrew, in which morphological transparency of the root (base morpheme) was varied and 1 morpheme was infixed inside the other (nonconcatenative) so that the phonological and orthographic integrity of the morphemic constituents was disrupted. Moreover, the likelihood with which both affixes and bases combine to form words influenced segment shifting times. In conclusion, skilled readers are sensitive to the morphological components of words whether or not they form contiguous orthographic or phonological units. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Screening for posttraumatic stress disorder: An evaluation of two self-report scales among crime victims.

The validity of the Impact of Events Scale (IES) and the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Symptom Scale, Self-Report version (PSS-SR) was examined among crime victims. Both instruments performed well as screeners for PTSD. For the IES, sensitivity ranged between .93 and 1.00; for the PSS-SR, sensitivity ranged between .80 and .90. Specificity for the IES ranged between .78 and .84 and for the PSS-SR ranged between .84 and .88. Some individual items from the 2 scales performed just as well as the total scales. The authors conclude that either of these short self-report instruments or their individual items are suitable as screeners for PTSD, specifically in settings where mental health professionals are unavailable. Cross-validation of these results is necessary because of the small sample size in this study. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A bacteriophage reagent for Salmonella: molecular studies on Felix 01

Felix 01 (F01) is a bacteriophage originally isolated by Felix and Callow which lyses almost all Salmonella strains and has been widely used as a diagnostic test for this genus. Molecular information about this phage is entirely lacking. In the present study, the DNA of the phage was found to be a double-stranded linear molecule of about 80 kb. 11.5 kb has been sequenced and in this region A + T content is 60%. There are relatively few restriction endonuclease cleavage sites in the native genome and clones show this is due to their absence rather than modification. A restriction map of the genome has been constructed. The ends of the molecule cannot be ligated although they contain 5' phosphates. At least 60% of the genome must encode proteins. In the sequenced portion, many open reading frames exist and these are tightly packed together. These have been examined for homology to published proteins but only 1 to 17 shows similarity to known proteins. F01 is therefore the prototype of a new phage family. On the basis of restriction sites, codon usage and the distribution of nonsense codons in the unused reading frames, a strong case can be made for natural selection that reacts to mRNA structure and function.     

Role of temperature and Suwannee River natural organic matter on inactivation kinetics of rotavirus and bacteriophage MS2 by solar irradiation

Although the sunlight-mediated inactivation of viruses has been recognized as an important process that controls surface water quality, the mechanisms of virus inactivation by sunlight are not yet clearly understood. We investigated the synergistic role of temperature and Suwannee River natural organic matter (SRNOM), an exogenous sensitizer, for sunlight-mediated inactivation of porcine rotavirus and MS2 bacteriophage. Upon irradiation by a full spectrum of simulated sunlight in the absence of SRNOM and in the temperature range of 14-42 °C, high inactivation rate constants, k(obs), of MS2 (k(obs) ≤ 3.8 h(-1) or 1-log(10) over 0.6 h) and rotavirus (k(obs) ≤ 11.8 h(-1) or ～1-log(10) over 0.2 h) were measured. A weak temperature (14-42 °C) dependence of k(obs) values was observed for both viruses irradiated by the full sunlight spectrum. Under the same irradiation condition, the presence of SRNOM reduced the inactivation of both viruses due to attenuation of lower wavelengths of the simulated sunlight. For rotavirus and MS2 solutions irradiated by only UVA and visible light in the absence of SRNOM, inactivation kinetics were slow (k(obs) < 0.3 h(-1) or <1-log(10) unit reduction over 7 h) and temperature-independent for the range considered. Conversely, under UVA and visible light irradiation and in the presence of SRNOM, temperature-dependent inactivation of MS2 was observed. For rotavirus, the SRNOM-mediated exogenous inactivation was only important at temperatures >33 °C, with low rotavirus k(obs) values (k(obs) ≈ 0.2 h(-1); 1-log(10) unit reduction over 12 h) for the temperature range of 14-33 °C. These k(obs) values increased to 0.5 h(-1) at 43 °C and 1.5 h(-1) (1-log(10) reduction over 1.6 h) at 50 °C. While SRNOM-mediated exogenous inactivation of MS2 was triggered by singlet oxygen, the presence of hydrogen peroxide was important for rotavirus inactivation in the 40-50 °C range.     

Expert evaluation of traffic signs: conventional vs. alternative designs

Traffic sign comprehension is significantly affected by their compliance with ergonomics design principles. Despite the UN Convention, designs vary among countries. The goal of this study was to establish theoretical and methodological bases for evaluating the design of conventional and alternative signs. Thirty-one conventional signs and 1–3 alternatives for each conventional sign were evaluated for their compliance with three ergonomics guidelines for sign design: physical and conceptual compatibility, familiarity and standardisation. Twenty-seven human factors and ergonomics experts from 10 countries evaluated the signs relative to their compliance with the guidelines. Analysis of variance across alternatives revealed that for 19 of the 31 signs, an alternative design received a significantly higher rating in its ergonomics design than the conventional sign with the same meaning. We also found a very high correlation between the experts’ ratings and comprehension from previous studies. In conclusion, many countries use signs for which better alternative designs exist, and therefore UN Convention signs should be re-examined, and ergonomics experts evaluation can serve as a good surrogate for road users’ comprehension surveys.

Practitioner summary: This study presents theoretical and methodological bases for evaluating the design of UN Conventional and alternative traffic signs. Human factors and ergonomics experts evaluated 31 conventional and 68 alternative road signs, based on ergonomics principles for sign design. Results indicated the need to re-examine poorly designed UN Convention signs.