Beyond clinical trials: Generalizing from research to practice.

Suggests that clinical trials, or evaluations of psychotherapy techniques in clinical settings with patient populations, play a pivotal role in treatment research. Well-controlled psychotherapy trials provide a test of what treatment can do under conditions in which procedures such as therapist training and monitoring and the integrity of treatment are optimal. Methods designed to reduce the hiatus in how treatments are implemented, monitored, and evaluated in clinical research and practice include developing standardized assessment and treatment packages that can be implemented by practitioners, altering the manner in which clinical training is implemented and evaluated, training clinicians in strategies to evaluate their own clinical work, and conducting clinical replication case studies as a way to evaluate treatment applications in clinical practice. These alternatives combine standardization, training, evaluation, and clinical practice to help increase the generality of research findings to clinical work and to help merge research and clinical priorities. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parents' management of preschooler's peer relations: Is it related to children's social competence?

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the relation between parents' efforts to initiate and monitor children's peer contacts and qualities of children's peer relations in nonschool and school settings. Parents of 58 preschool children completed logs of their initiation and monitoring practices and of their children's peer contacts in nonschool settings during late preschool. Parents were classified as high versus low initiators, and direct versus indirect monitorers, depending on the form of management they tended to use for children's peer contacts. Information about children's peer relations in school was obtained through observational, sociometric, and teacher assessments conducted during preschool and kindergarten. Parents who initiated a higher proportion of peer contacts tended to have children who possessed a larger number of different play partners and more consistent companions in nonschool settings. For boys but not girls, higher levels of parental initiation were also associated with greater peer acceptance and lower levels of peer rejection in school. Direct or indirect forms of parental monitoring were unrelated to children's peer relations in nonschool settings, but directive styles were predictive of children's social maladjustment in school. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting preschoolers' peer behavior and status from their interpersonal strategies: A comparison of verbal and enactive responses to hypothetical social dilemmas.

The purposes of this study were (a) to compare a verbal and an enactive procedure for assessing preschool children's social strategies in hypothetical situations in terms of their ability to predict social behavior with peers and peer acceptance and (b) to examine some of the psychometric properties of the two assessment methods. Children's responses to a set of hypothetical social situations were elicited both with puppets and props (enactive assessment) and with a set of pictures (verbal assessment). The responses were rated in terms of their friendliness and assertiveness. Enactive friendliness ratings contributed significantly to regression equations predicting teacher and observer ratings of prosocial and aggressive behavior but not to peer group acceptance, whereas the verbal method contributed little predictive power beyond that provided by the enactive ratings. Implications for social skill assessment and intervention with children are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The structure of precocious reading ability.

The purpose of this study was to describe the cognitive correlates of precocious reading achievement and to identify the structure of individual differences in reading subskill patterns that are compatible with precocious achievement. Several oral reading tasks and selected subtests from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised were administered to 87 postkindergarten children whose Peabody Individual Achievement Test reading comprehension scores ranged from the second- to the fifth-grade level. Parents provided information about the children's reading histories. Factor analysis of 11 reading subskill scores yielded results consistent with a hierarchical modification of the hypothesized model. Three specific factors—Speed, Decoding Rule Use, and Graphic Precision—varied independently of superordinate differences in General Ability. Verbal ability, letter-naming speed, and forward and backward digit span each correlated moderately with one or more reading factors. Many aspects of the results were consistent with findings from studies of average, disabled, and autistic/hyperlexic readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ethical and legal issues in AIDS-related practice.

The AIDS epidemic has presented many new ethical dilemmas regarding psychologists' obligations to their clients and third parties. Both ethical and legal norms remain unsettled in regard to most of these dilemmas. In general, psychologists should strive to protect the privacy of their clients and to promote the welfare of individuals affected by AIDS. When compelling interests of third parties lead to a different result, intrusions on clients' interests should be no greater than necessary. Although a lack of training about AIDS may limit psychologists' competence and constrict their duties to people with AIDS, the duty remains for clinicians to obtain training to remediate such gaps in knowledge or skills and to advocate for resources and protection from discrimination for people affected by AIDS. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An investigation of sex discrimination in recruiters' evaluations of actual applicants.

This study investigated whether sex discrimination existed in recruiters' evaluations of applicants in real employment interviews and, if so, whether other variables could explain it. The variables examined were the perceived similarity of the applicant to the recruiter, the interpersonal attraction felt by the recruiter toward the applicant, and the applicant's objectively measured and subjectively measured qualifications. Applicant sex did not directly or indirectly affect recruiters' evaluations of applicants in campus interviews, providing no evidence of sex discrimination. Instead, subjective qualifications had a significant effect on evaluations and also mediated the effects of perceived similarity, interpersonal attraction, and objective qualifications on evaluations. Recruiters saw stronger subjective qualifications in applicants with high scholastic performance whom they viewed as similar to themselves and whom they liked. Perceptions of these qualifications, in turn, were the primary determinant of evaluations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental extrapolation and representational momentum for complex implied motions.

A sequence of static displays implying consistent motions of a pattern induces distortions in memory for the last-observed appearance of the pattern. These memory distortions suggest that there is an internal analogue to physical momentum called representational momentum. Two experiments are reported comparing performance on tasks in which observers must remember the final display with those in which they are instructed to extrapolate the implied motions out to the next step in the sequence. In each experiment, the memory shifts were highly correlated with the actual rates at which the implied motions were extrapolated. In addition, the memory shifts were larger when the mental extrapolations occurred along the same directions of implied motion each time. These findings suggest that the memory shifts depend both on the rate at which the mental extrapolations are performed and on how consistently they are performed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Central sleep apnoea and heart failure (part II)

The three-dimensional (3-D) structure of a RNA pseudoknot that causes the efficient ribosomal frameshifting in the gag-pro region of mouse mammary tumor virus (MMTV) has been determined recently by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) studies. But since the structure refinement in the studies did not use metal ions and waters, it is not clear how metal ions participate in the stabilization of the pseudoknot, and what kind of ion-RNA interactions dominate in the tertiary contacts for the RNA pseudoknotting. Based on the reported structure data of the pseudoknot VPK of MMTV, we gradually refined the structure by restrained molecular dynamics (MD) using NMR distance restraints. Restrained MD simulation of the RNA pseudoknot was performed with sodium ions and water molecules. Our results are in good agreement with known NMR data and delineate the importance of the metal ion coordination in the stability of the pseudoknot. In the non-coaxially stacking pseudoknot, stem 1 (S1), stem 2 (S2), and the intervening A14 involves unconventional stacking of base pairs coordinated by Na+ and/or bridging water molecules. A6 and G7 of loop L1 make a perfect base stacking in the major groove and are further stabilized by coordinated Na+ ions and water molecules. The first 4-nucleotide (nt) ACUC of loop L2 form a sharp turn and the following 4-nt AAAA cross the minor groove of S1 and are steadied by interactions with the nucleotides of S , bridging water molecules and coordinated Na+ ions. Our studies suggest that the metal ion plays a crucial role in the RNA pseudoknotting of VPK. In the stacking interior of S1 and S2, the Na+ ion is positioned in the major groove and interacts directly with the carbonyl group O6 of G28 and carbonyl group O4 of U13 in the wobble base pair U13:G28. The ion-RNA interactions in MMTV VPK not only stabilize the RNA pseudoknot but also modify the electrostatic properties of the nucleotides at the critical parts of the pseudoknot VPK.     

Articulatory-rate context effects in phoneme identification.

Three experiments demonstrated that the pattern of changes in articulatory rate in a precursor phrase can affect the perception of voicing in a syllable-initial prestress velar stop consonant. Fast and slow versions of a 10-word precursor phrase were recorded, and sections from each version were combined to produce several precursors with different patterns of change in articulatory rate. Listeners judged the identity of a target syllable, selected from a 7-member /gi/ki/ voice-onset-time (VOT) continuum, that followed each precursor phrase after a variable brief pause. The major results were: (a) articulatory-rate effects were not restricted to the target syllable's immediate context; (b) rate effects depended on the pattern of rate changes in the precursor and not the amount of fast or slow speech or the proximity of fast or slow speech to the target syllable; and (c) shortening of the pause (or closure) duration led to a shortening of VOT boundaries rather than a lengthening as previously found in this phonetic context. Results are explained in terms of the role of dynamic temporal expectancies in determining the response to temporal information in speech, and implications for theories (e.g., C. A. Fowler; see record 1981-07588-001) of extrinsic vs intrinsic timing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory scanning: Are fixed and varied sets scanned concurrently or successively?

Subjects were timed as they decided whether individually presented probe letters were or were not contained in pairs of memorized sets of one, two, or four letters. One set was fixed in advance of a block of trials, while the other varied from trial to trial. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects responded positively if the probe was in either set and negatively otherwise; in Experiment 3 they made different responses to fixed-set, varied-set, and negative probes. In all three experiments, reaction time (RT) to varied-set probes depended more on the size of the varied set than of the fixed set, whereas RT to fixed-set and negative probes depended more on the size of the fixed set. These results were generally consistent with the hypothesis that scanning of the two sets was at least to some extent concurrent rather than successive, with the fixed set scanned more slowly than the varied set. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)