Adolescent response to the death of a parent

Participants in the present study, while between the ages of 12 and 19, had a parent die. The death had occurred not less than 6 months and not more than 5 years prior to psychological testing and interview. The effects of loss, as assessed by the Beck Depression Inventory and other measures, were considered in relation to a number of independent factors. Factors found to influence healthy adaptation included high levels of informal social support postloss, good relations with the surviving parent prior to loss, a balanced personality style, and presence of religious beliefs.Received Ph.D. in psychology from University of Toronto. Research interest is applied clinical research.     

Against canons: Liberating the social sciences

She is author of The Origins American Social Science,a study of economics, sociology, political science, and history from their eighteenth-century roots to 1929.     

Cardiac sarcoidosis with spontaneous rupture of the right ventricle

A 56-year-old woman died suddenly and unexpectedly of a cardiac tamponade due to spontaneous rupture of the right ventricle. The cardiac rupture occurred on the basis of clinically unsuspected cardiac sarcoidosis. Sudden death due to spontaneous rupture of a cardiac chamber is a previously unreported complication of sarcoidosis.     

Characteristics of married and unmarried adolescent mothers and their partners

In a middle-class, urban-clinic sample of 275, mostly Caucasian, adolescent mothers and their partners living in Utah, three groups were identified and their psychosocial characteristics were compared. Couples married at the time of conception (N=22) enjoyed more positive responses from prospective grandparents and earned more than couples not married at the time of conception. On the other hand, these initially married youths were much more likely to be high-school dropouts, which suggests limits in their lifetime earning capacities, and they were not more likely to identify one another as sources of emotional support. Couples who married between conception and delivery (N=110) reported that prospective grandparents responded less favorably to news of the pregnancy than did relatives of the initially married couples, but while their current salaries were lower, they were much more likely to be continuing with their education. Those who married after conception also had fewer antisocial and conduct disorders than young men and women who chose to continue in a dating relationship (N=29). Overall, the couples who married after conception appeared to face less severe problems than either the initially-married couples or the steady daters.This research was supported by grant number APR 000922-02-0 from the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs to Drs. Elster and Lamb.where he and Dr. Lamb conduct research on pregnant teens, teenaged parents, and their children. Ms. Peters and Mr. Kahn are graduate students in School of Education at the University of Utah, while Ms. Tavare is a biostatistician at the University of Utah Medical Center.     

Determination of the predictive validity of the assessment center approach to selecting police managers

In recent years, assessment centers have become an increasingly popular approach to selecting and promoting police managers. Yet few empirical studies have been conducted on the validity of these assessment centers. The intent of this investigation was to conduct one of the first criterion-related validity studies of an assessment center in law enforcement. Findings indicate that this center was capable of differentiating between effective and ineffective managerial performance, as measured by a follow-up evaluation of performance two years later. The study also revealed that the dimensions of communication skills and interpersonal skills were the major determinants of assessment ratings. In addition, a closer analysis of the conduct of the assessment center suggests that its effectiveness cannot be attributed to the commonly cited assessment factors contributing to the success of assessment centers in the private sector.     

Some empirical parameters of formal thinking

Sixty-five undergraduates were tested on five formal thinking tasks and the verbal and figural sections of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The percentage of students operating at the formal level for three of the four ordinally scored formal problems was significantly above the 50% figure usually reported with a more intellectually representative sample of adolescents. It was suggested that the norms developed by Piaget for formal tasks were more suitable for a cognitively superior population. The low intercorrelations between formal tasks were reflected by the failure of a unified factor of the formal operations to emerge. The superior male performance on formal tasks was interpreted in terms of a social role hypothesis and the limited scientific subject matter of the problems.