Richard L. Metzger

Development and validation of the penn state worry questionnaire

The present report describes the development of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire to measure the trait of worry. The 16-item instrument emerged from factor analysis of a large number of items and was found to possess high internal consistency and good test-retest reliability. The questionnaire correlates predictably with several psychological measures reasonably related to worry, and does not correlate with other measures more remote to the construct. Responses to the questionnaire are not influenced by social desirability. The measure was found to significantly discriminate college samples (a) who met all, some, or none of the DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder and (b) who met criteria for GAD vs posttraumatic stress disorder. Among 34 GAD-diagnosed clinical subjects, the worry questionnaire was found not to correlate with other measures of anxiety or depression, indicating that it is tapping an independent construct with severely anxious individuals, and coping desensitization plus cognitive therapy was found to produce significantly greater reductions in the measure than did a nondirective therapy condition.

Sex and coding strategy effects on reaction time to hemispheric probes

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of coding instructions on cerebral laterality differences. Experiment I required 20 subjects (10 female) to use either rehearsal or imagery coding strategies in a recognition task with word probes to the right and left hemispheres. No hemispheric differences were found, but sex of subject was found to be related to coding strategy. Ten subjects (5 female) in Experiment II performed a similar task, except picture probes were used. Subjects using rehearsal coding responded faster to left-hemisphere probes, but faster to right-hemisphere probes when imagery coding was employed. The differing laterality effects in these experiments were attributed to naming responses implicitly required in Experiment II.

Processing global information in briefly presented pictures

SummaryThe effect on object recognition of the processing of the global information in contextually coherent scenes was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1 subjects saw 100 ms presentations of line drawings containing objects that were either usual or unusual given the picture context. Following each exposure they were required to select from among four objects the one that had been contained in the scene. The consistency of the three distractor alternatives with the meaning of the picture was varied. Recognition accuracy was poor for unusual objects and when the distractors were consistent with the picture meaning and did not substantially differ from the performance of subjects who selected response alternatives after being provided with a theme of the picture, without actually viewing the pictures. This supports the conclusion that subjects were responding on the basis of the global information but not the local object information in the pictures. When the exposure duration was increased to 2 s (Experiment 2), processing of local information was apparent for both usual and unusual objects but effects of the global information were still evident.

Central nervous system metastases in women after multimodality therapy for high risk breast cancer.

Background: Central nervous system (CNS) relapse is increasing in breast cancer. This increase may reflect altered failure patterns from adjuvant therapy, more effective systemic therapy with improved control in non-CNS sites, or a resistant breast cancer subtype.Methods: To determine the factors associated with clinical CNS relapse, we examined response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (chemosensitivity), time to relapse and sites of relapse in a cohort of 140 patients without evidence of metastasis at presentation.Results: At 5 years (interquartile range 3–6 years), 44 (31%) patients developed distant metastases, including 13 with CNS metastases. CNS relapse was early (median 24 months after diagnosis) and associated with relapse in bone and liver, suggesting hematogenous dissemination. Those with CNS relapse were younger at diagnosis (40 versus 49 years) and more likely to have lymphovascular invasion in the primary tumor compared with non-CNS metastases. Response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy was not different (69% versus 73% response rate) between the two groups. Extent of residual disease after chemotherapy was strongly associated with relapse outside the CNS but not CNS relapses. The CNS was an isolated or dominant site of metastasis in 8 of 13. Despite treatment, most patients with CNS involvement died of neurologic causes a median of 6 months later.Conclusion: Breast cancers that develop CNS metastases differ from those that develop metastases elsewhere. Both tumor behavior and reduced chemotherapy accessibility to the CNS may contribute to increased CNS involvement in breast cancer patients treated with multimodality therapy.

Do Children "DRM" Like Adults? False Memory Production in Children

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was used to investigate developmental trends in accurate and false memory production. In Experiment 1, DRM lists adjusted to be more consistent with childrens vocabulary were used with 2nd graders, 8th graders, and college students. Accurate and false recall and recognition increased with age, but semantic information appeared to be available to all age groups. Experiment 2 created a set of child-generated lists based on the free associations by a group of 3rd graders to critical items. The child-generated associates were different from those generated by adults; long and short versions of the child-generated lists were therefore presented to 2nd, 5th, and 8th graders and college students in Experiment 3. Second graders exhibited few false memories, whereas 5th graders were similar to adults in low-demand conditions and more similar to younger children in high-demand conditions. Findings are discussed in terms of developmental changes in automatic and effortful processing and the use of semantic networks.

Anxiety, Worry, and the Self

I wonder how people will react to this chapter? Am I going to say something stupid? Will I continue to hold to my convictions and continue to test them under public scrutiny, or will I fear the disapproval of others and avoid presenting these ideas, or, worse, change my ideas to conform to what I think they want to hear?

The nature of processing early in picture perception

SummaryThe present study investigated the availability of information related to object identity and scene context during the initial stages of picture perception. Pictures were presented for 10, 30, 50, 75, 100, 150, 300, or 1000 ms and subjects were asked to determine if a probe was the portion of the scene which had appeared in that location. The probed sections had previously been rated on informativeness and high-, medium-, and low-rated areas were examined. Medium-informative sections were recognized better than high- or low-informative sections. A comparison of sections in the central and peripheral positions of the visual field indicated that medium-informative sections were recognized better in the periphery, while highly informative areas were recognized more accurately at central locations. These results are interpreted as supporting the concept that context develops prior to the identification of objects.

A group-administered lag task as a measure of working memory

The purpose of the present studies was to evaluate the utility of a group-administered version of the n-back, or lag task. Experiments 1 and 2 describe the construction of the task and reveal that the modified lag task (MLT) produces the same performance trends as have been observed in individually administered versions of the lag task; performance decreased significantly as lag conditions increased in difficulty. Experiments 3 and 4 established convergent validity by comparing the MLT to another common working memory task, the operation—word span task, as well as the updated version of this task, the automatic operation span task. The results showed that MLT performance was significantly correlated to scores on both measures. These experiments provide important details about the MLT as a measure of working memory, in a group- or individual-administration setting.

Memory of historical events

Younger (mean age = 20) and older (mean age = 64) adults were asked to recall the dates and make recency judgments for historical events that occurred in each of three time periods between 1862 and 1977. Overall there were no age differences in either the number of correct dates or the number of correct recency judgments. However, younger adults tended to perform better than older adults on events that occurred most recently, and performed significantly better on events that occurred during the respective times of their youth. In addition, somewhat different patterns of performance on the two dependent measures suggested that detailed information about events is lost with time, but that more general information may not decline with time.

Influencesicture context on object recognition

Abstract The effect of sorrounding context on the recognition of objects from briefly presented pictures was investigated. Forty-eight undergraduates saw 100 msec displays of either line drawings containing several objects embedded in context or drawings of object arrays without background context. Following each exposure they were required to select from among four objects the one that had been contained in the picture. Presentation of objects in context aided recognition only when incorrect response alternatives were inconsistent with the picture context. The results suggest that context contributes to the construction of a general characterization of the pictures which provides expectancies regarding the identity of specific objects.