John E. Taplin

Reasoning with conditional sentences

The nature of the truth function when reasoning with conditional sentences was investigated through an analysis of the evaluations of the truth of four deductive arguments by 56 naive adult S s. This analysis suggested that only 44.7% of these S s consistently assessed the validity of these arguments in a truth-functional manner. Of these S s, the majority appeared to utilize a truth function which was the same as that for a biconditional in propositional calculus. Only two S s consistently produced responses which would be logically predicted for the conditional. This finding is similar to previous findings with children in Piagets concrete operational period.

Cognitive-behavioural predictors of children's tolerance of laboratory-induced pain: implications for clinical assessment and future directions.

This study sought to investigate cognitive-behavioural predictors of childrens tolerance for laboratory-induced cold-pressor pain. It was hypothesised that pain tolerance, as measured by immersion time, would be greater in children who were high in self-efficacy for pain, high in self-reported use of cognitive-coping strategies, and low in emotion-focused coping strategies such as catastrophising. Age and sex differences were also examined in post hoc analyses. Children between the ages of 7 and 14 years (N = 53) participated in the study. Offering partial support for the hypotheses, use of cognitive distraction was found to be associated with greater pain tolerance, while use of internalising/catastrophising was associated with lower pain tolerance. Older boys tended to have greater pain tolerance than younger boys, whereas younger and older girls had intermediate pain tolerance levels. Self-efficacy for pain, in general, was found to be positively correlated with age. The results support efforts to identify children who, because they have lower confidence or lower skills in coping with distress, may need extra support and preparation for painful procedures. Further research is needed to investigate these findings within a clinical pain context.

Vitalism in naive biological thinking.

Vitalism is the belief that internal bodily organs have agency and that they transmit or exchange a vital force or energy. Three experiments investigated the use of vitalistic explanations for biological phenomena by 5- and 10-year-old English-speaking children and adults, focusing on 2 components: the notion that bodily organs have intentions and the notion that some life force or energy is transmitted. The original Japanese finding of vitalistic thinking was replicated in Experiment 1 with English-speaking 5-year-olds. Experiment 2 indicated that the more active component of vitalism for these children is a belief in the transfer of energy during biological processes, and Experiment 3 suggested an additional, albeit lesser, role for organ intentionality. A belief in vital energy may serve a causal placeholder function within a naive theory of biology until a more precisely formulated mechanism is known.

Adjustment to infertility: the role of intrapersonal and interpersonal resources/vulnerabilities

BACKGROUND Great variability exists in the degree of adjustment to infertility, which in turn is known to influence wellbeing. The main objective of this study is to identify intrapersonal [neuroticism, adult attachment style (AAS), perceived internal control, meaning of parenthood and intrinsic religiosity] and interpersonal (social support and marital adjustment) associates of adjustment to infertility. METHOD A cross-sectional analysis of 85 consecutive heterosexual women, attending three infertility clinics in northern India during July 2005-March 2006, participated in the study. A range of scales were used to measure the intrapersonal and interpersonal attributes. The degree of adjustment to infertility was assessed using the Fertility Adjustment Scale. The data were analysed using multiple regression. RESULTS The intrapersonal model (49.3%) explained a larger proportion of variance than did the interpersonal model (28.4%). Perception of children as necessary for marital completion, and the avoidance type of AAS was associated with poorer adjustment and constituted intrapersonal vulnerabilities. In contrast, intrinsic religiosity, sexual satisfaction and familial support were associated with better adjustment and were identified as helpful intrapersonal and interpersonal coping resources. CONCLUSIONS The findings of the study highlight the merit of understanding intra- and interpersonal attributes for achieving better wellbeing outcomes. These findings would also prove valuable for researchers and practioners involved in designing and implementing psychosocial interventions.

Support needs and adaptive behaviors.

We used a prepublication version of the Supports Intensity Scale (SIS), the Adaptive Behavior Scale-Residential and Community, and the Inventory for Client and Agency Planning to examine the relationship between support needs and adaptive behavior for 80 people with intellectual disabilities. Dimensionality of the SIS Support Needs Scale (Section 1) was examined in reference to the three areas of conceptual, social, and practical skills reported by the American Association on Mental Retardation as comprising the adaptive behavior construct. Factor analysis of the adaptive behavior subscales and SIS Support Need Scale offered support for measurement of a common underlying construct. When considered in terms of the three adaptive behavior skill areas, this construct related predominantly to conceptual skills.

Nonverbal categorization in fluent and nonfluent anomic aphasics

Abstract This study aimed to demonstrate that the naming difficulties of a particular group of aphasics, namely, fluent aphasics, are related to an underlying inability to organize feature set information. In order to test this hypothesis, the performance of fluent aphasics, nonfluent aphasics, and a nonaphasic brain-injured control group, was examined on a nonverbal categorization task, which was carefully structured in terms of instance typicality. Scores of visuoperceptual and naming tests were correlated with categorization task errors. As predicted, fluent aphasics showed a significant deficit in performance on the categorization task in comparison with other subjects. Differences in the nature of the errors the fluent aphasics made suggested that their problems were related to difficulties in abstracting the prototype for each category and in sorting category members with reference to these prototypes. For fluent aphasics, but not other subjects, a significant correlation was found between categorization task performance and naming ability.

Changes in affect and state anxiety across an in vitro fertilization/intracytoplasmic sperm injection cycle

OBJECTIVE To identify pattern of change in average positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and state anxiety (St ANX) across three biological end points of an IVF/intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) procedure and to examine whether the pattern varied across sociodemographic and biomedical subgroups. DESIGN Longitudinal follow-up study of PA, NA, and St ANX at three different time points: before start of study, before ovum pick-up (OPU), and before embryo transfer. SETTING Three infertility centers in northern India. PATIENT(S) Baseline data were obtained from a consecutive sample of 85 women. However, final analysis was done on data obtained from 74 women who reached the embryo transfer stage and completed the questionnaires at both OPU and embryo transfer. INTERVENTION(S) The PA, NA, and St ANX scores. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S) Change in PA, NA, and St ANX scores at three stages of the treatment: baseline (T(0)), before OPU (T(1)), before embryo transfer (T(2)). RESULT(S) The PA scores before OPU and embryo transfer were significantly lower than those at baseline. The mean NA and St ANX scores before OPU and embryo transfer were significantly higher than baseline scores. Furthermore, mean NA before embryo transfer was significantly higher than mean NA before OPU. The PA and St ANX scores showed statistically insignificance within cycle variations. Furthermore, the mean PA and St ANX for a subgroup of women who reported more than moderate level of burden were less variable. CONCLUSION(S) The OPU and embryo transfer stages are more stressful than the baseline stage for most women across various sociodemographic and biomedical subgroups. Women with more than a moderate level of financial burden were relatively more stable.

Construct and criterion validities of the Service Need Assessment Profile (SNAP): A measure of support for people with disabilities

Abstract Background The Service Need Assessment Profile (SNAP) measures individual functional needs in areas of daily living. It produces a support profile, detailing the time allocations for staff support to assist in each area of need. The Supports Intensity Scale (SIS) is a support needs assessment scale designed to provide an objective measure of a persons need for support in medical, behavioural, and life activities. SIS can be used for individualised support planning, clinical judgements regarding support needs, resource allocation and financial planning. The Inventory for Client and Agency Planning (ICAP) assesses adaptive and maladaptive behaviours and gathers additional information to determine type and amount of special assistance that people with disabilities need. Method This study evaluated the construct and criterion validities of SNAP in relation to the SIS and ICAP, using assessment data from 114 individuals with a range of disabilities and levels of severity. Results Construct and criterion validities were supported for the SNAP by high correlations with SIS, ICAP, and staff estimates of support needs and by its capacity to discriminate between sub‐groups in expected ways. Conclusions The results provide support for the use of SNAP as a support needs instrument.

Developmental changes in categorization processes: knowledge and similarity-based modes of categorization

Abstract This study examined the interaction between preexisting knowledge and similarity-based information in the learning of two artificial social categories. Six-and 11-year-old children were taught to sort sets of biographical descriptions into one of two overlapping categories. Some subjects were given category labels which were expected to activate the childrens prior social knowledge. Following acquisition of the categories a transfer set was presented which contained old, new, and prototypical instances. Categorization accuracy for these test items was measured against predictions derived from two similarity-based categorization models and an empirically derived measure of each age groups prior knowledge of the social categories. Although the older children were found to have a different level of prior understanding of the experimental categories than the 6-year-olds, both age groups exhibited a significant influence of prior social knowledge on test-phase responding. In both groups, however, the similarity of a test item to a modal prototype also independently influenced categorization accuracy. Further analysis of test-phase responding indicated that the influence of prior knowledge on concept formation could not always be reduced to a reweighting of the features that enter into similarity computations.

Nonword Facilitation in a Lexical Decision Task

It has been reported in previous experiments that in a lexical decision task, sentence contexts facilitate decisions for nonword targets relative to a neutral context condition (e.g., Schuberth & Eimas, 1977). The present three experiments investigated possible explanations for this nonword facilitation effect, using moderately predictable sentence contexts. Results provided support for the view that nonword facilitation stems from an overestimate of the baseline decision latency when a neutral context condition and sentence context conditions are intermixed. Specifically, it was suggested that context affects a post-access decision stage during which sentential meaningfulness is used as a basis for making wordnonword discriminations and that nonword facilitation stems from an extra processing stage required for targets following a neutral context. Implications of this interpretation for the effects of sentence context on the recognition of words are discussed. Recent studies of word recognition have emphasized the role played by semantic context (e.g., Becker, 1980; Schuberth & Eimas, 1977; Stanovich & West, 1981). In particular, it has been suggested that the processes involved in recognizing a word may be fundamentally different for a word presented in isolation and for a word presented in a sentence context. These studies have typically presented words following a semantically congruous sentence context (e.g., The boy swam under the BRIDGE) or an incongruous sentence context (e.g., The cook baked the BRIDGE) and have found that the response to a target word is faster in the former condition. Many investigators have discussed this effect in terms of facilitation and inhibition effects, where facilitation refers to faster response latencies to words following a congruous context relative to a semantically neutral context,