Michael J. Boivin

Effects of treatment for intestinal parasites and malaria on the cognitive abilities of schoolchildren in Zaire, Africa.

Ninety-seven Zairian schoolchildren were evaluated for cognitive ability, health status, and quality of home environment. Children successfully treated for serious types of chronic intestinal parasites demonstrated significant improvements in K-ABC Spatial Memory, supporting this task as one of the more sensitive measures to changes in general health and neurological integrity. These findings were not obtained for successful treatment of low-grade malaria infection. Children initially negative for intestinal parasites tended to come from more economically and socially favorable home environments. They also demonstrated more dramatic improvements in visual-spatial analysis tasks. The implication is that the home environment factors conducive to chronic infestation with intestinal parasites are markers for favorability of the developmental milieu affecting long-term intellectual development.

Use of the Tactual Performance Test for Cognitive Ability Testing With African Children

Researchers evaluated 195 rural Zairian children between 5 and 12 years of age with the Tactual Performance Test (TPT) used in the Reitan-Indiana Battery. For all of the TPT performance and memory measures, Zairian children with poorer anthropometric indicators of nutritional wellbeing were significantly below the age-matched groups of American and Canadian children. The Zairian children also did not demonstrate the typical improvements between the dominant and nondominant hand trials. Older Zairian children with such decrements tended to do more poorly on the Simultaneous Processing and Nonverbal ability portions of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children. Although probably not appropriate for direct intercultural comparisons, the authors concluded that neuropsychological measures derived from tasks such as the TPT may still be useful in monitoring the longitudinal brain-behavior impact of various health interventions for enhancing intellectual development for African children. One of the most tragic and yet pervasive aspects of psychometric assessment worldwide is the intellectual deficits consistently noted with such testing in low socioeconomic strata of underdeveloped countries and in the more impoverished segments of the industrialized world (Alvarez, 1982; Alvarez, 1983). In explaining this phenomenon, researchers have emphasized the impact of poverty and psychosensory deprivation on the developmental milieu of the child. Such early developmental deprivation results in cognitive ability deficits that can best be ameliorated with specific social, educational, health, and nutritional interventions to enrich this milieu during critical periods of child development (e.g., McKay, Sinisterra, McKay, Gomez, & Lloreda, 1978). Another major approach suggests that the apparent cognitive deficits of the lower socioeconomic groups are more the result of industrial middle-class or Westernized testing of children whose skills actually are better evaluated by more ecologically or culturally appropriate techniques. Thus, the culture fairness of the assessments on which the phenomenon is based is called into question (Helms, 1992). An alternate

The effect of culture on a visual-spatial memory task

The visual-spatial memory ability of 25 Zairian elementary school children was compared with that of 23 Scottish children, using a variation of Kearinss (1976) object placement task. The Scottish children demonstrated significantly better visual-spatial memory than the Zairian children when the easiest (small household objects) of three arrays was presented. The Scottish and Zairian children demonstrated a similar level of visual-spatial ability when the other two arrays (geometric shapes and a variety of natural pieces of wood) were presented, and there were no significant gender differences. Although the Australian Aboriginal childrens performance on the visual-spatial task in Drinkwaters (1976) study was superior to the White childrens performance (Kearins, 1976, 1981), the Zairian childrens performance in this study was not. Perhaps the Aboriginal groups, over countless generations navigating the trackless desert of western Australia, were forced by their environment to develop an aptitude for direction finding that Zairians (whose ecological situation more closely resembles that of Europeans) have not.

The Hebraic Model of the Person: Toward a Unified Psychological Science among Christian Helping Professionals

Because of a duolistic cultural tradition assumed to be biblical, many Christian helping professionals tend to conceptualize an individuals psychological difficulty as originating within either the spiritual, soulish, cognitive, or biological domain, depending on the context in which it occurs. Consequently, various methods of inquiry and treatment are prescribed based on constructs consistent with the perceived origination of the disorder. A Hebraic model of the person, however, conceptualizes the various dimensions of personhood as existing along a mutually interactive continuum in which the divinely inspired aspects of the human condition are directly apparent in the biopsychological aspects, without intermediate metaphysical states or constructs. Furthermore, this holistic interpretation is consistent with the New Testament term soma, often translated as “person.” As such, the Hebraic model vouches for the adequacy of the philosophical assumptions of a psychological science, and it can allow such a perspective to penetrate more thoroughly the analytical and treatment strategies of Christian helping professionals.

Racial Prejudice among Christian and Non-Christian College Students

The relationship between Christianity and racial prejudice was evaluated by means of a questionnaire which included the Shepherd Scale, the Christian Conservatism Scale, and the Multifactor Racial Attitude Inventory. The instrument was administered to two groups of college psychology students, one predominantly Christian and the other predominatly non-Christian (low scorers on the Christian scales). Although the Christian group scored significantly higher on the Shepherd and Christian Conservatism Scales, no significant differences were found between the two groups with respect to racial prejudice. Furthermore, the dimension of Christianity and the dimension of racial prejudice were independent of one another with respect to correlational measures and a principal components factor analysis.

Ethnocentrism among Free Methodist Leaders and Students

An ethnic awareness survey was used to evaluate ethnocentrism in a national sample of denominational lay leaders, clergy, and college students of the Free Methodist Church of North America Those found to demonstrate the greatest degree of ethnocentricity were individuals with little or no college education and/or nonprofessionals from smaller churches. Those demonstrating the least degree of ethnocentricity were college graduates, pastors, conference superintendents, those from inner-city churches, and those involved in professional occupations. Among college students in the sample, senior level students were significantly less ethnocentric with respect to the questionnaire scales than their freshman counterparts. Level of education and the demographic nature of the respondents church and home environment seemed to override the purely theological dimensions of religious and church involvement. The result is a discrepancy between the theological ideals of a church or faith and the way in which social values and attitudes are expressed in day-to-day settings.

Comparison of Locus of Control among Students within a Prison Setting with Students at a Private Liberal Arts College

Differences were assessed between two types of student populations in terms of Collins four-dimensional locus of control. 44 students at a 4-yr. college were compared to 58 college-enrolled inmates at a state penitentiary. Subjects were administered a test based on Collins analysis of the Rotter I-E scale. Data showed the prisoners to be more externally oriented on the dimension of political responsiveness vs unresponsiveness; no significant differences were found regarding difficult vs easy world, just vs unjust world, or predictable vs unpredictable world comparisons. Suggestions were made for further research.

Unilateral and Bilateral Brain Hemispheric Advantage on Visual Matching Tasks and Their Relationship to Styles of Religiosity

Eighty-five undergraduate students were tested in two studies using a computer-based tachistoscopic-type letter- and dot-matching task under various conditions. This task was used to determine the extent to which they displayed unilateral and bilateral brain-hemisphere advantages in the speed and accuracy of their responses. For the letter-matching task in both studies, the intellectual religiosity group displayed a stronger unilateral advantage favoring the right-visual field (RVF) (left brain) than the affective group. Generally, the participants with a more affective style of religiosity had faster reaction times on the matching tasks, especially for correct non-matching responses and on the dot-matching (right-brain) stimulus presentations. The affective groups also tended to have a stronger bilateral advantage for both dots and letter matching compared to the intellectual group. In the second study, the Myers-Briggs personality typology inventory (MBTI) was included in the assessment and was significantly related to the religiosity intellectual/affective dimension. With percent errors as the dependent variable, MBTI feeling-dominant participants displayed a stronger bilateral advantage for dots presentations but not letters, while thinking-dominant respondents on this dimension had a stronger unilateral advantage for letters but not dots. The major implication of these preliminary findings is that enduring religious traits may be anchored in basic brain behavior tendencies that can be measured using neuropsychological laboratory-based tasks.

Choice with Concurrent Interval Schedules of Reinforcement: The Effects of Different Timing Procedures

Using a Findley changeover procedure, two groups of rats were exposed to various concurrent variable-time (VT) schedules of milk presentation. The rules governing the operation of the timers for the stimulus events differed for the two groups with resulting differences in the overall degree of changeover responding but not with respect to time allocation measures, which in both cases consisted of undermatching. When an interrupted VT reinforcement timer was reset upon re-entry of that component, the rats tended to emit changeover responses almost exclusively to the more favorable component. When the VT reinforcement timers were left running regardless of which components the rats selected, changeover responses were significantly more frequent and equally distributed among both the more and less favorable components. In comparing the present results with those from a similar procedure in which shock was used (Deluty & Church, 1978), it is apparent that what is basic to choice in concurrent interval schedules is not matching or some mathematical variation of it. Instead, it is a tendency to optimize on the basis of the favorability of the stimulus events and the contingencies regarding how those events are timed and administered.

The effects of Appetitive Stimulation on the Heart Rate Response of the Rabbit

Abstract The heart rate effects of appetitive stimulation with rabbits have not been as thoroughly documented as the effects of aversive stimulation. Water was used, therefore, as an unconditioned stimulus for water-deprived rabbits, with a Pavlovian conditioning procedure. During habituation, the heart rate response to the unfamiliar sound of the water solenoid activation was initially bradycardia, changing to tachycardia after consistently pairing with water. This initial deceleration coincided with the immobility commonly observed in rabbits when presented with unfamiliar and fear-provoking stimuli. As the stimulus changes were associated with the availability of water, however, a cardioacceleratory response was apparent, which was appropriate in view of the physical activation that usually accompanies drinking behavior. The results were in agreement with Powell and Milligans (1975) and Schneidermans (1974) accounts of stimulus-evoked bradycardia or tachycardia, in which the type of heart rate respon...