Outcomes of post-acute rehabilitation for persons with brain injury.

OBJECTIVES: To examine the impact of multifaceted rehabilitation services on functional outcomes after traumatic brain injury (TBI) for individuals with significant physical and cognitive difficulties, as well as those with added behavioural complications. DESIGN: Cohort, non-randomized, intervention study with a pre-test-post-test, follow-up design. SETTING: Community integrated post-acute rehabilitation centre. PARTICIPANTS: Individuals with primarily severe TBI receiving post-acute neurorehabilitation services (NR, n = 129) as well as similarly impaired individuals with additional antagonistic/disruptive behaviours receiving neurobehavioural services (NB, n = 76). INTERVENTIONS: Multi-faceted behavioural and cognitive therapy methods delivered individually and in groups. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: The Functional Area Outcome Menu (FAOM), a behaviourally anchored 5-step scale rated by rehabilitation teams at three time periods. CONCLUSIONS: The rehabilitation treatment model achieved significant functional gains of approximately 1.5 levels for neuropsychologically-impaired adults with and without associated behavioural and substance problems.

Reliability and validity of single-item self-reports: with special relevance to college students' alcohol use, religiosity, study, and social life.

The authors tested the assumption that single-item measures have unacceptably low reliability and validity. On 2 occasions 11 weeks apart, college students reported on the frequency and quantity of alcohol consumption, 2 religious behaviors, time of study and of socializing (focal items), and other qualities and characteristics. Most test-retest reliabilities were good to excellent; objective facts were more reliable than subjective evaluations; and target items had good validity when correlated with 2-week nightly log records of corresponding behaviors in a multimethod multitrait matrix. The exception was self-reported study, with relatively low reliability and validity, suggesting the non-trait-like quality of this behavior. Single-item measures may be better than commonly thought.

Note on consensual assessment technique in creativity research.

Amabile's Consensual Assessment Technique is commonly used in research on creative products. This study evaluates a modification of that technique which may facilitate research on creative products by calibrating nonexpert judges to expert judges in previous studies. University students (N=200; 59% women, M=22.3 yr. of age, SD=5.5) devised drawings to the Test of Creative Thinking-Drawing Production stimulus. These drawing products were rated by five artist-judges using the CAT and five psychologist-judges who first viewed 16 examples of the range of drawings in a previous study, referred to here as the modified consensual assessment technique. The 20 ratings of product creativity loaded on a single principal component, and the mean ratings correlated .91. Finally, the correlations of these ratings with other measures of creativity were nearly identical. Thus, a slight modification of the technique may be useful in programmatic research when the creativity task is not modified across studies and participants are like the present sample rather than from groups with specialized training or artistic talent.

"A picture's worth a thousand words": language use in the autophotographic essay.

The authors applied Pennebaker's Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program to autophotographic essays addressing the question, "Who are you?" to test hypotheses about individuality and social connectedness. Specifically, the authors tested whether insight-oriented words would correlate with individuality ratings, defining essays that portray unique persons who creatively explore the self. Second, the authors tested whether connectedness, operationalized by photos of people-touching and self with others, would correlate with social process words. In 164 student photo essays, greater linguistic cognitive complexity characterized individuality, even when controlling for needs for cognition and uniqueness, and verbal intelligence. Connectedness predicted social words. These findings show that autophotography essays do capture complex self-reflective thought and suggest LIWC may be a valuable tool for understanding the expression of individuality and relatedness.

Value correlates of collegiate alcohol abuse.

This study tested whether problematic alcohol use correlates with different values clusters in the Schwartz Values Survey. Participants were 156 midwestern university students (M=21.6 yr., 63% women). We used two alcohol-use assessment methods, one involving behavior checklist reports with a questionnaire, the other a two-week daily log procedure. Although exploratory in nature, we took as most important those relationships between alcohol use and values which replicated across both measures. Those who drank frequently and problematically were most likely to endorse a hedonistic and stimulation-seeking values system.

Applying the big five personality factors to the impostor phenomenon.

The purpose of this study was to relate the impostor phenomenon (IP) to the Five-factor model of personality. A sample of 190 college students (79 men, 111 women) completed the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale (Clance, 1985), the Perceived Fradulence Scale (Kolligian & Sternberg, 1991), and the NEO-Personality Inventory-Revised (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Results of correlational and regression analyses support the predicted relations of imposter measures with high Neuroticism and low Conscientiousness. Facet-level correlations showed that depression and anxiety were particularly important characteristics of those with imposter feelings as well as low self-discipline and perceived competence. Implications for treatment and future research on the IP are discussed.

Physical attractiveness, social connectedness, and individuality: an autophotographic study.

In a sample of 125 college students, the author tested the hypothesis that, relative to less attractive peers, the physically attractive participants would depict greater social connectedness in self-descriptive photo essays. To document discriminant validity, the author also hypothesized that the correlation between physical-attractiveness ratings and the richness (i.e., individuality ratings) of photo essays would be near zero. The results confirmed both predictions and supported the convergent and discriminant validity of information from autophotographic essays. Thus, the attractive participants depicted themselves as very socially connected; however, they were neither more conventional-superficial nor more individualistic-creative than their less attractive peers in their photo essays.

The measurement of children's sleep disturbances and somatic complaints following a disaster

Child-victims of a lightning-strike disaster were interviewed and their mothers completed a checklist describing their adjustment in term of sleep disturbance and somatic complaints. Results showed that a number of children experienced significant sleep and somatic problems and that, in keeping with this study's purpose, the checklist is a reliable and valid measure of children's emotional distress

Psychological-Mindedness, Psychological-Construing, and the Judgment of Deception.

This study examined the relationships among several measures of psychological thinking which, in a figurative sense, required "reading between the lines of behavior." Primary measures included psychological-construing (describing another person in psychological terms), the ability to "see through" and explain defense mechanisms, and detecting a bogus thief by means of "suspects" responses to a word association test. Secondary measures were personality-trait measures of psychological-mindedness. Contrary to prediction, the primary measures failed to relate meaningfully to each other. Nor did they correlate with the secondary measures. However, the latter tests were significantly intercorrelated, at least in part because of a common relationship with the tendency to self-ascribe favorable qualities. As a group, the Ss were fairly successful judges at the thief detection task, with nearly 60% performing at a level significantly better than chance. Finally, women surpassed men at the psychological-construing and defense-understanding tasks. It was concluded that psychological-mindedness is not a unitary characteristic of persons.