Developmental Steps in Metaphorical Language Abilities: The Influence of Age, Gender, Cognitive Flexibility, Information Processing Speed, and Analogical Reasoning.

Purpose: Metaphor is a specific type of figurative language that is used in various important fields such as in the work with children in clinical or teaching contexts. The aim of the study was to investigate the developmental course, developmental steps, and possible cognitive predictors regarding metaphor processing in childhood and early adolescence.

Method: One hundred sixty-four typically developing children (7-year-olds, 9-year-olds) and early adolescents (11-year-olds) were tested for metaphor identification, comprehension, comprehension quality, and preference by the Metaphoric Triads Task as well as for analogical reasoning, information processing speed, cognitive flexibility under time pressure, and cognitive flexibility without time pressure.

Do we still need IQ-scores? Misleading interpretations of neurocognitive outcome in pediatric patients with medulloblastoma: a retrospective study.

Over the past decades, many studies used global outcome measures like the IQ when reporting cognitive outcome of pediatric brain tumor patients, assuming that intelligence is a singular and homogeneous construct. In contrast, especially in clinical neuropsychology, the assessment and interpretation of distinct neurocognitive domains emerged as standard. By definition, the full scale IQ (FIQ) is a score attempting to measure intelligence.

The covariate-adjusted frequency plot.

Count data arise in numerous fields of interest. Analysis of these data frequently require distributional assumptions. Although the graphical display of a fitted model is straightforward in the univariate scenario, this becomes more complex if covariate information needs to be included into the model.

Potential predictors in neonaticide: the impact of the circumstances of pregnancy.

This study aims to evaluate the psychosocial factors of neonaticide, especially the circumstances before delivery, the relationships of the pregnant women, and their social environment awareness of women's pregnancy. This nationwide study was register-based, comprising all known neonaticides in Austria and Finland between 1995 and 2005. Cases (n = 28) were obtained by screening the death certificates from coroner's departments and by analyzing them along with all further available reports.

Parameter recovery and model selection in mixed Rasch models.

This study examines the precision of conditional maximum likelihood estimates and the quality of model selection methods based on information criteria (AIC and BIC) in mixed Rasch models. The design of the Monte Carlo simulation study included four test lengths (10, 15, 25, 40), three sample sizes (500, 1000, 2500), two simulated mixture conditions (one and two groups), and population homogeneity (equally sized subgroups) or heterogeneity (one subgroup three times larger than the other). The results show that both increasing sample size and increasing number of items lead to higher accuracy; medium-range parameters were estimated more precisely than extreme ones; and the accuracy was higher in homogeneous populations.

Sensitivity to initial values in full non-parametric maximum-likelihood estimation of the two-parameter logistic model.

Parameters of the two-parameter logistic model are generally estimated via the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm by the maximum-likelihood (ML) method. In so doing, it is beneficial to estimate the common prior distribution of the latent ability from data. Full non-parametric ML (FNPML) estimation allows estimation of the latent distribution with maximum flexibility, as the distribution is modelled non-parametrically on a number of (freely moving) support points.

Pervasiveness of the IQ rise: a cross-temporal meta-analysis.

Background: Generational IQ gains in the general population (termed the Flynn effect) show an erratic pattern across different nations as well as across different domains of intelligence (fluid vs crystallized). Gains of fluid intelligence in different countries have been subject to extensive research, but less attention was directed towards gains of crystallized intelligence, probably due to evidence from the Anglo-American sphere suggesting only slight gains on this measure. In the present study, development of crystallized intelligence in the German speaking general population is assessed.

The Newcomb-Benford law in its relation to some common distributions.

An often reported, but nevertheless persistently striking observation, formalized as the Newcomb-Benford law (NBL), is that the frequencies with which the leading digits of numbers occur in a large variety of data are far away from being uniform. Most spectacular seems to be the fact that in many data the leading digit 1 occurs in nearly one third of all cases. Explanations for this uneven distribution of the leading digits were, among others, scale- and base-invariance.

Estimating the proportion of studies missing for meta-analysis due to publication bias.

Objective: A potential problem with meta-analysis concerns missing studies due to publication bias. This paper focuses on one subtype of publication bias, namely selection bias (studies with unfavorable outcomes tend to be suppressed), wherein the main interest is in determining the proportion of unpublished studies.

Methods: As in the well-known trim and fill method, the key assumption is that studies with quantitative outcomes extremely unfavorable for the treatment are not published.

Birthday and birthmate problems: misconceptions of probability among psychology undergraduates and casino visitors and personnel.

Subjective estimates and associated confidence ratings for the solutions of some classic occupancy problems were studied in samples of 721 psychology undergraduates, 39 casino visitors, and 34 casino employees. On tasks varying the classic birthday problem, i.e.

Health-related quality of life in Austrian elementary school children.

Background: Health-related quality of life (HRQL) is frequently used as an outcome criterion to evaluate the quality and effect of different therapies. However, little is known about the HRQL of the general population, the prevalence of specific HRQL problems and about which factors have an impact on HRQL assessments.

Objective: To examine children's HRQL from their own and their parents' perspectives.

The Miandad effect reconsidered: analysis of Pakistan's cricket performance 1952 to 2005.

In 2004 Abbasi and Khan reported an enduring influence of a 1986 Pakistani landmark victory in cricket over India on subsequent matches up to 2003. The present study reconsidered the significance and the specificity of this phenomenon, denoted as the "Miandad effect." All 659 Pakistani cricket encounters with India and other frequently played opponents up to 2005 which yielded a winning team were included in the analysis.

Testing the Rasch model by means of the mixture fit index.

Rudas, Clogg, and Lindsay (RCL) proposed a new index of fit for contingency table analysis. Using the overparametrized two-component mixture, where the first component with weight 1-w represents the model to be tested and the second component with weight w is unstructured, the mixture index of fit was defined to be the smallest w compatible with the saturated two-component mixture. This index of fit, which is insensitive to sample size, is applied to the problem of assessing the fit of the Rasch model.

Mixture analysis of longitudinal binary data.

The dependence of longitudinal binary outcomes on covariates and the covariation observed between them is often modelled by (multivariate) logistic and probit models, respectively, assuming specified association structure or random effects. Alternatively, latent class models may be used that capture the covariation by assuming heterogeneity of the observational units regarding their reaction tendencies while postulating independence within classes. In the presence of a few categorical covariates, the multi-group method of latent class analysis allows one to relate the class sizes and the class-specific response probabilities to these covariates.

Modeling data from water-level tasks: a test theoretical analysis.

The water-level tasks were invented by Piaget to diagnose the level of mental development of spatial abilities, especially behavior of liquids. It has become usual practice to dichotomise water-level responses by the subjects into right vs wrong using a certain tolerance limit (departure from the horizontal measured in degrees) and to fit a mixture of binomials to the raw scores resulting from a series of water-level tasks. The present study questions this procedure.

Latent class model diagnosis from a frequentist point of view.

This is in response to Garrett and Zeger (2000, Biometrics 56, 1055-1067) who, within the Bayesian framework, developed mainly graphical methods for latent class model diagnosis. Possible problems with this approach, and with its application to both generated and empirical data, are pointed out. The impact of the proposed tools cannot be understood by their reader, as no comparisons are made to results obtainable using established methods for latent class model diagnosis; this applies especially to overall goodness-of-fit tests, for which alternatives (bootstrap, Rudas-Clogg-Lindsay index of fit) are mentioned.

Maternal bonding behaviour in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, considering premorbid personality traits.

Objective: Bonding between mother and child is described as a complex two-way process ensuring the needs of the child for nurture and protection. As such, it is dependent on the contribution of mother and child [1-3] whereby characteristics of personality of the child may have consequences on maternal bonding behaviour. In the current study the perception of maternal behaviour, premorbid personality traits and relationships between maternal behaviour and personality traits were investigated in schizophrenic and schizoaffective patients and their same-sex, healthy siblings.

Misspecifying latent class models by mixture binomials.

Four scenarios of homogeneity/heterogeneity with respect to the performance of the subjects and the task difficulties are considered: first, the unconstrained latent class model providing for heterogeneity with respect to both; second, the mixture binomial assuming constant task difficulty within each mixing component, but different levels of performance of the subjects; third, the model of independence which is equivalent to the one-class latent class model allowing for different task difficulties but no variability of the subjects; and fourth, the binomial with success probability constant across tasks and subjects. It is shown that both over- and underdispersion may arise in latent class models of which the other three are special cases. As a consequence, the latent class model and the mixture binomial may generate nearly indistinguishable score distributions where overdispersion is present.

Neurodevelopmental schizophrenia: obstetric complications, birth weight, premorbid social withdrawal and learning disabilities.

Neurodevelopmental schizophrenia seems to be caused by impaired cerebral development and is supposed to be associated with obstetric complications (OCs), poor premorbid adjustment, schizotypal or schizoid personality traits and negative symptoms. In the present study, 36 schizophrenic and schizoaffective patients and their same-sex, healthy siblings were recruited. They were diagnosed according to DSM-III-R, using structured psychiatric interviews and a consensus of 2 psychiatrists.

Rater agreement and the generalized Rudas-Clogg-Lindsay index of fit.

Rudas, Clogg and Lindsay proposed a new index of fit for contingency table analysis. Using the two-component mixture, where the first component with weight (1-w) represents the model to be tested and the second component with weight w is unstructured, the RCL index of lack of fit was defined to be the smallest mixing weight w(*) being compatible with the two-component mixture to be saturated. This index of fit, which is not sensitive to sample size, is applied to the problem of assessing agreement between two raters whereby three hypotheses (pure agreement, quasi-independence, independence) are considered.

Quality of life and psychosocial adjustment of young patients after treatment of bone cancer.

Background: The aim of this study was to collect information about the psychosocial situation of young patients after multimodality therapy for bone cancer.

Methods: Selection criteria for patients were ages 15-30 years, tumor localization at the extremities, and an interval of at least 1 year since the end of treatment. Of 110 patients, 60 were willing to participate.

Latent class analysis in medical research.

In the introduction we give a brief characterization of the usual measures for indicating the quality of diagnostic procedures (sensitivity, specificity and predictive value) and we refer to their relationship to parameters of the latent class model. Different variants of latent class analysis (LCA) for dichotomous data are described in the following: the basic (unconstrained) model, models with parameters fixed to given values and with equality constraints on parameters, multigroup LCA including mixed-group validation, and linear logistic LCA including its relationship to the Rasch model and to the measurement of change in latent subgroups. The problem with the identifiability of latent class models and the possibilities for statistically testing their fit are outlined.