MMPI-2 performance of Mexican male university students and prison inmates.

In this study, we compared the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) performance of male university students and incarcerated criminal offenders in Mexico. Our aim was to determine whether the MMPI-2 can effectively differentiate between these two distinct groups on scales that are reflective of antisocial behaviors. Our expectations were highly confirmed across the three sets of scales that we considered: the validity and clinical, content, and supplementary scales. Criminal offenders obtained higher or more pathological scores on such scales as Infrequency (F), Schizophrenia (Sc), MacAndrew Alcoholism Scale (MAC-R), Fears (FRS), and so on. Overall, these findings support further research with such target populations as prison inmates in Mexico and other countries in Latin America.

A cross-cultural study of cognitive development.

This Monograph summarizes a comparative study of recall memory among children from two Guatemalan towns and one American city. The age interval of greatest improvement in serial recall of pictures, words and orientations of dolls varied across settings by as much as 4-6 years, but performance improved with age in all communities. It was suggested that the activation of varied strategies to aid recall memory emerged in all children during the preadolescent years, but environmental factors, as yet unspecified, determined both the slope of the growth function and its asymptotic level.