Young children, adolescents and alcohol - Part II: Reputation enhancement and self-concept

The research reported builds on our earlier work (Houghton, Carroll, & Odgers, 1998) which explored young children's and adolescents' views pertaining to knowledge and awareness of alcohol and alcohol-related issues. In this second study 640 (286 male and 354 female) school students randomly selected from five primary schools and five high schools in Perth, Western Australia participated. Data were obtained using The Which Group picture booklet questionnaire which comprises five parts and utilises illustrations (drawn by a professional children's artist) to gather information about children's and adolescents' orientations towards alcohol risk social situations, reputation enhancement, self-concept, and other related issues. Of the sample, 73% of males and 70.6% of females had tried alcohol, with beer being consumed most often. Significantly more participants in higher Year levels had tried alcohol. Over 90% said they drank at a party. Multivariate analysis revealed that nine of the 11 dependent variables contributed to the significant main effect of alcohol risk group, of which three were self-concept variables and six were reputation enhancement variables. It appears that individuals with the highest levels of orientation to alcohol risk believe that they are liked by their families, are physically attractive and have greater confidence in themselves. They also have higher levels of Admiration of Alcohol Related Activities and also of prosocial activities. While striving to attain a non-conforming reputation these individuals also wish to be ideally perceived by others as conforming. Gender and Age differences are investigated.

Adolescent reputation enhancement: Differentiating delinquent, nondelinquent, and at-risk youths

This research reports the findings of two studies conducted to measure and then investigate differences between delinquent, nondelinquent, and at-risk youths' orientations towards reputation enhancement. In the first study, concerning item selection and scale development, the factor structure and content validity of a potential Reputation Enhancement Scale were tested by examining the item responses of the scale completed by 230 high-school students. In the second study, the scale was validated by comparing the item responses of 80 delinquent, 90 at-risk, and 90 nondelinquent adolescents with the responses of the original students. The instrument was found to be reliable (alphas from .64 to .92), indicating that the factors are dependable across different samples, and the coefficients of congruence were sufficiently high to investigate meaningful group differences. Three second-order factors (Conforming Reputation, Nonconforming Reputation, Self-presentation) were derived from the 15 first-order factors. Although multivariate analyses revealed significant differences between the reputational orientations of delinquent, at-risk, and nondelinquent participants, the self-presentation second-order factor did not differentiate the three groups.

Goals and reputations amongst young children - The validation of the importance of goals and reputation enhancement scales

The aim of the present research was to provide school psychologists with valid instruments with which to assess the goals and reputations of young children. This was achieved by ascertaining whether the factor structures and the second-order factor models of the high school versions of the Importance of Goals (Carroll, et al., 1997) and Reputation Enhancement Scales (Carroll, et al., 1999) could be replicated with a primary school sample. Eight hundred and eighty-six 10 to 12 year old children were administered modified versions of the two scales, which were combined and renamed the Children's Activity Questionnaire. For the two scales, the factor structure proved replicable and reliable with the primary school sample. A comparison between the factor loadings of the primary school and the high school samples using the coefficient of congruence procedure demonstrated similarity indicating that the scales are replicable and able to be used with a younger primary school sample. Structural equation modelling indicated that the second-order factor structure of the Importance of Goals Scale was acceptable but this was not the case for the second-order factor structure of the Reputation Enhancement Scale.

Online monitoring of pulse pressure variation to guide fluid therapy after cardiac surgery

BACKGROUND: The arterial pulse pressure variation induced by mechanical ventilation (Delta PP) has been shown to be a predictor of fluid responsiveness. Until now, Delta PP has had to be calculated offline (from a computer recording or a paper printing of the arterial pressure curve), or to be derived from specific cardiac output monitors, limiting the widespread use of this parameter. Recently, a method has been developed for the automatic calculation and real-time monitoring of Delta PP using standard bedside monitors. Whether this method is to predict reliable predictor of fluid responsiveness remains to be determined. METHODS: We conducted a prospective clinical study in 59 mechanically ventilated patients in the postoperative period of cardiac surgery. Patients studied were considered at low risk for complications related to fluid administration (pulmonary artery occlusion pressure <20 mm Hg, left ventricular ejection fraction >= 40%). All patients were instrumented with an arterial line and a pulmonary artery catheter. Cardiac filling pressures and cardiac output were measured before and after intravascular fluid administration (20 mL/kg of lactated Ringer`s solution over 20 min), whereas Delta PP was automatically calculated and continuously monitored. RESULTS: Fluid administration increased cardiac output by at least 15% in 39 patients (66% = responders). Before fluid administration, responders and nonresponders were comparable with regard to right atrial and pulmonary artery occlusion pressures. In contrast, Delta PP was significantly greater in responders than in nonresponders, (17% +/- 3% vs 9% +/- 2%, P < 0.001). The Delta PP cut-off value of 12% allowed identification of responders with a sensitivity of 97% and a specificity of 95%. CONCLUSION: Automatic real-time monitoring of Delta PP is possible using a standard bedside rnonitor and was found to be a reliable method to predict fluid responsiveness after cardiac surgery. Additional studies are needed to determine if this technique can be used to avoid the complications of fluid administration in high-risk patients.

Genetic sources of covariation among P3(00) and online performance variables in a delayed-response working memory task

Genetic and environmental sources of covariation among the P3(00) and online performance elicited in a delayed-response working memory task, and psychometric IQ assessed by the multidimensional aptitude battery, were examined in an adolescent twin sample. An association between frontal P3 latency and task performance (phenotypic r = -0.33; genotypic r = -0.49) was indicated, with genes (i.e. twin status) accounting for a large part of the covariation ( > 70%). In contrast, genes influencing P3 amplitude mediated only a small part (2%) of the total genetic variation in task performance. While task performance mediated 15% of the total genetic variation in IQ (phenotypic r = 0.22; genotypic r = 0.39) there was no association between P3 latency and IQ or P3 amplitude with IQ. The findings provide some insight into the inter-relationships among psychophysiological, performance and psychometric measures of cognitive ability, and provide support for a levels-of-processing genetic model of cognition where genes act on specific sub-components of cognitive processes.

Adaptive multiscale principal components analysis for online monitoring of wastewater treatment

Fault detection and isolation (FDI) are important steps in the monitoring and supervision of industrial processes. Biological wastewater treatment (WWT) plants are difficult to model, and hence to monitor, because of the complexity of the biological reactions and because plant influent and disturbances are highly variable and/or unmeasured. Multivariate statistical models have been developed for a wide variety of situations over the past few decades, proving successful in many applications. In this paper we develop a new monitoring algorithm based on Principal Components Analysis (PCA). It can be seen equivalently as making Multiscale PCA (MSPCA) adaptive, or as a multiscale decomposition of adaptive PCA. Adaptive Multiscale PCA (AdMSPCA) exploits the changing multivariate relationships between variables at different time-scales. Adaptation of scale PCA models over time permits them to follow the evolution of the process, inputs or disturbances. Performance of AdMSPCA and adaptive PCA on a real WWT data set is compared and contrasted. The most significant difference observed was the ability of AdMSPCA to adapt to a much wider range of changes. This was mainly due to the flexibility afforded by allowing each scale model to adapt whenever it did not signal an abnormal event at that scale. Relative detection speeds were examined only summarily, but seemed to depend on the characteristics of the faults/disturbances. The results of the algorithms were similar for sudden changes, but AdMSPCA appeared more sensitive to slower changes.

Well-formedness judgment: A comparison of offline and online performance in Broca's aphasics

0na eg rcarmitimcaal tfieca tcuorem opfr ethhee nospieornat iodneafli cdietf i(nAitiCoDn )o ft hthaet frequently co-occurs with Broca’s aphasia is above-chance performance on well-formedness judgment tasks for many syntactic constructions, but impaired performance where syntactic binding of traces to their antecedents occurs. However, the methodologies used to establish this aspect of the performance profile of the ACD have been predominantly offline. Offline well-formedness tasks entail extralinguistic processing (e.g. perception, attention, short-term memory, conscious reflection) in varying amounts and the influence of such processes on parsing mechanisms is yet to be fully established. In order to (a) further understand the role of extra-linguistic processing on parsing, and (b) gain a more direct insight into the online nature of parsing in Broca’s aphasia, 8 subjects underwent a series of wellformedness judgment investigations using both offline and online test batteries. The sentence types and error types used were motivated by three current theories about the nature of the ACD, namely, the Trace-Based Account (Grodzinsky, 2000), the Mapping Hypothesis (Linebarger et al., 1983) and Capacity proposals (e.g. Frazier & Friederici, 1991). The results from the present investigation speak directly to the three aforementioned theories and also demonstrate the important role that extralinguistic processing plays during offline assessment. The clinical implications of the different outcomes from the offline vs. online tasks are also discussed.