Jay Verkuilen

Same Facts,Different Interpretations: Partisan Motivation and Opinion on Iraq

Scholars assume that citizens perform better when they know pertinent facts. Factual beliefs, however, become relevant for political judgments only when people interpret them. Interpretations provide opportunities for partisans to rationalize their existing opinions. Using panel studies, we examine whether and how partisans updated factual beliefs, interpretations of beliefs, and opinions about the handling of the Iraq war as real-world conditions changed. Most respondents held similar, fairly accurate beliefs about facts. But interpretations varied across partisan groups in predictable ways. In turn, interpretations, not beliefs, drove opinions. Perversely, the better informed more effectively used interpretations to buttress their existing partisan views.

The Contribution of Set Switching and Working Memory to Sentence Processing in Older Adults

This study evaluates the involvement of switching skills and working-memory capacity in auditory sentence processing in older adults. The authors examined 241 healthy participants, aged 55 to 88 years, who completed four neuropsychological tasks and two sentence-processing tasks. In addition to age and the expected contribution of working memory, switching ability, as measured by the number of perseverative errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, emerged as a strong predictor of performance on both sentence-processing tasks. Individuals with both low working-memory spans and more perseverative errors achieved the lowest accuracy scores. These findings are consistent with compensatory accounts of successful performance in older age.

Children on the Autism Spectrum: Grandmother Involvement and Family Functioning

BACKGROUNDnThis study investigated associations between the presence of a child with autism or Aspergers disorder in the family, family functioning and grandmother experiences with the goal of better understanding grandparent involvement in the lives of grandchildren on the autism spectrum and their families.nnnMETHODSnMothers and grandmothers of children who were either typically developing or on the autism spectrum completed parallel forms of a grandparent involvement measure. Mothers reported on the functioning of the immediate family. Data were analysed via multilevel modelling with mother-grandmother dyads as the unit of observation.nnnRESULTSnAutism spectrum disorders in children were associated with more flexible family functioning, lower levels of family satisfaction, greater grandmother difficulties and more grandmother information needs.nnnCONCLUSIONSnParticipation of grandparents in diagnostic and treatment meetings and increased communication among family members may facilitate grandparent support and involvement in families with a child on the autism spectrum.

TBscore II: Refining and validating a simple clinical score for treatment monitoring of patients with pulmonary tuberculosis

Abstract Background: The TBscore, based on simple signs and symptoms, was introduced to predict unsuccessful outcome in tuberculosis patients on treatment. A recent inter-observer variation study showed profound variation in some variables. Further, some variables depend on a physician assessing them, making the score less applicable. The aim of the present study was to simplify the TBscore. Methods: Inter-observer variation assessment and exploratory factor analysis were combined to develop a simplified score, the TBscore II. To validate TBscore II we assessed the association between start score and failure (i.e. death or treatment failure), responsiveness using Cohens effect size, and the relationship between severity class at treatment start and a decrease < 25% in score from the start until the end of the second treatment month and subsequent mortality. Results: We analyzed data from 1070 Guinean (2003–2012) and 432 Ethiopian (2007–2012) pulmonary tuberculosis patients. For the refined score, items with less than substantial agreement (κ ≤ 0.6) and/or not associated with the underlying constructs were excluded. Items kept were: cough, dyspnea, chest pain, anemia, body mass index (BMI) < 18 kg/m2, BMI < 16 kg/m2, mid upper arm circumference (MUAC) < 220 mm, and MUAC < 200 mm. The effect sizes for the change between the start of treatment and the 2-month follow-up were 0.51 in Guinea-Bissau and 0.68 in Ethiopia, and for the change between the start of treatment and the end of treatment were 0.68 in Guinea-Bissau and 0.74 in Ethiopia. Severity class placement at treatment start predicted failure (p < 0.001 Guinea-Bissau, p = 0.208 Ethiopia). Inability to decrease at least 25% in score was associated with a higher failure rate during the remaining 4 months of treatment (p = 0.063 Guinea-Bissau, p = 0.008 Ethiopia). Conclusion: The TBscore II could be a useful monitoring tool, aiding triage at the beginning of treatment and during treatment.

Reliability, Validity, and Usability of Data Extraction Programs for Single-Case Research Designs:

Single-case experimental designs (SCEDs) have been increasingly used in recent years to inform the development and validation of effective interventions in the behavioral sciences. An important aspect of this work has been the extension of meta-analytic and other statistical innovations to SCED data. Standard practice within SCED methods is to display data graphically, which requires subsequent users to extract the data, either manually or using data extraction programs. Previous research has examined issues of reliability and validity of data extraction programs in the past, but typically at an aggregate level. Little is known, however, about the coding of individual data points. We focused on four different software programs that can be used for this purpose (i.e., Ungraph, DataThief, WebPlotDigitizer, and XYit), and examined the reliability of numeric coding, the validity compared with real data, and overall program usability. This study indicates that the reliability and validity of the retrieved data are independent of the specific software program, but are dependent on the individual single-case study graphs. Differences were found in program usability in terms of user friendliness, data retrieval time, and license costs. Ungraph and WebPlotDigitizer received the highest usability scores. DataThief was perceived as unacceptable and the time needed to retrieve the data was double that of the other three programs. WebPlotDigitizer was the only program free to use. As a consequence, WebPlotDigitizer turned out to be the best option in terms of usability, time to retrieve the data, and costs, although the usability scores of Ungraph were also strong.

Burnout and depression: Label-related stigma, help-seeking, and syndrome overlap

We investigated whether burnout and depression differed in terms of public stigma and help-seeking attitudes and behaviors. Secondarily, we examined the overlap of burnout and depressive symptoms. A total of 1046 French schoolteachers responded to an Internet survey in November-December 2015. The survey included measures of public stigma, help-seeking attitudes and behaviors, burnout and depressive symptoms, self-rated health, neuroticism, extraversion, history of anxiety or depressive disorder, social desirability, and socio-demographic variables. The burnout label appeared to be less stigmatizing than the depression label. In either case, however, fewer than 1% of the participants exhibited stigma scores signaling agreement with the proposed stigmatizing statements. Help-seeking attitudes and behaviors did not differ between burnout and depression. Participants considered burnout and depression similarly worth-treating. A huge overlap was observed between the self-report, time-standardized measures of burnout and depressive symptoms (disattenuated correlation: .91). The overlap was further evidenced in a confirmatory factor analysis. Thus, while burnout and depression as syndromes are unlikely to be distinct, how burnout and depression are socially represented may differ. To our knowledge, this study is the first to compare burnout- and depression-related stigma and help-seeking in the French context. Cross-national, multi-occupational studies examining different facets of stigma are needed.

Modeling Polytomous Item Responses Using Simultaneously Estimated Multinomial Logistic Regression Models

Survey items with multiple response categories and multiple-choice test questions are ubiquitous in psychological and educational research. We illustrate the use of log-multiplicative association (LMA) models that are extensions of the well-known multinomial logistic regression model for multiple dependent outcome variables to reanalyze a set of items from a large political psychology survey. In particular, LMA models are shown to provide a useful analysis of items when the proper scoring rule for them is unclear. They also clearly reveal the performance of the items when instructions were altered to suppress “Don’t know” responses. LMA models can be fit rapidly using commonly available software.

Towards a Theory of Learning for Naming Rehabilitation: Retrieval Practice and Spacing Effects

PurposenThe purpose of this article was to examine how different types of learning experiences affect naming impairment in aphasia.nnnMethodsnIn 4 people with aphasia with naming impairment, we compared the benefits of naming treatment that emphasized retrieval practice (practice retrieving target names from long-term memory) with errorless learning (repetition training, which preempts retrieval practice) according to different schedules of learning. The design was within subjects. Items were administered for multiple training trials for retrieval practice or repetition in a spaced schedule (an items trials were separated by multiple unrelated trials) or massed schedule (1 trial intervened between an items trials). In the spaced condition, we studied 3 magnitudes of spacing to evaluate the impact of effortful retrieval during training on the ultimate benefits conferred by retrieval practice naming treatment. The primary outcome was performance on a retention test of naming after 1 day, with a follow-up test after 1 week.nnnResultsnGroup analyses revealed that retrieval practice outperformed errorless learning, and spaced learning outperformed massed learning at retention test and at follow-up. Increases in spacing in the retrieval practice condition yielded more robust learning of retrieved information.nnnConclusionnThis study delineates the importance of retrieval practice and spacing for treating naming impairment in aphasia.

Friends and foes in the lexicon: homophone naming in aphasia.

The study of homophones--words with different meanings that sound the same--has great potential to inform models of language production. Of particular relevance is a phenomenon termed frequency inheritance, where a low-frequency word (e.g., deer) is produced more fluently than would be expected based on its frequency characteristics, presumably because of shared phonology with a high-frequency homophone counterpart (e.g., dear). However, prior studies have been inconsistent in showing frequency inheritance. To explain this inconsistency, we propose a dual nature account of homophony: a high-frequency counterpart exerts 2 counterposing effects on a low-frequency homophone target during the 2 main stages of naming: (a) a detrimental impact during semantically driven lexical retrieval; (b) a beneficial impact during phonological retrieval. In a study of naming in participants with chronic aphasia followed by computational investigations, we find strong evidence for the dual nature account of homophony.

Effects of Noun-Verb Conceptual/ Phonological Relatedness on Verb Production Changes in Broca's Aphasia.

Background: Individuals with Brocas aphasia show better performance on nouns than on verbs, but the distinction between nouns and verbs is not always clear; some verbs are conceptually and/or phonologically related to nouns, while others are not. Inconsistent results on effects of noun–verb relatedness on verb production have been reported in the literature. Aims: We investigated (1) whether verb instrumentality (a conceptual relationship to nouns) or homonymy (a phonological relationship to nouns) would affect verb production in individuals with Brocas aphasia and (2) whether conceptual/phonological noun–verb relationship would affect responsiveness to aphasia therapy that focused on verb production. Methods & Procedures: Three English-speaking individuals with Brocas aphasia produced 96 verbs in sentences in response to picture stimuli. The target verbs included those that use an instrument and those that do not (e.g., to hammer vs. to yawn) and verbs that are phonologically identical to a related noun (e.g., to comb vs. a comb), morpho-phonologically related to a noun (e.g., to grind vs. a grinder) and those that are not morphologically related to a noun (e.g., to lean). The participants’ verb retrieval ability was assessed before and after a 4-week period of aphasia therapy. Outcomes & Results: The participants produced more accurate instrumental than non-instrumental verbs both pre- and post-treatment. They also produced more verbs correctly that are homonyms with nouns than verbs that are phonologically related or unrelated to nouns before treatment. However, the effect of homonymy was not observed following treatment. Conclusion: Individuals with Brocas aphasia were more accurate in their production of verbs that were conceptually and phonologically related to nouns than on verbs that were not. The performance of verb production improved significantly after therapy. We interpret the results to indicate that, whereas prior to treatment, the participants relied on phonologically related nouns to retrieve the target verbs, this reliance on knowledge of nouns decreased following therapy that was designed to improve verb production.