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Biomedical subjects

L A French

Publications and source records attributed to L A French.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

Homicide rates among Native American children: the status integration hypothesis.

An analysis of data for all twelve U.S. Indian Health Service areas yielded a positive Spearman's correlation coefficient for the percentage of Native American females in the labor force and the homicide rates per 100,000 population for Native American children (1 month to 14 years), supporting the hypothesis of status integration.

Acculturation↗
PubMed1993

Adapting projective tests for minority children.

Child abuse reporting laws have placed new demands upon law enforcement, human service agencies, and clinicians alike. For the clinician, these demands are compounded when minority children are involved. Few of the standardized measures seem to fit all cultural groups. In our situation the cultural mix involves Hispanic, Mexican, and American Indian children. We found a combination of two projectives, the Draw-A-Person/Draw-A-Family and the Thematic Apperception Test, to fit our multicultural needs. Specifically, we use the D-A-P drawings of the child and his/her family as "plates" and then apply the TAT "tell me a story about this picture" technique.

Child↗
PubMed1993

Locus of control, depression, and anger among African-Americans.

Subjects, 98 African-American college students, were given a measure of belief in locus of control, a self-report measure of depression, and three scales from the Buss and Durkee Hostility Inventory. Depression and belief in control by powerful others correlated only for subjects with low scores on Assaultive, Verbal, and Indirect Hostility. The findings, using nonwhite subjects, replicate a previous study in which the racial composition was not indicated.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Hemispherectomy for intractable seizures: long-term results in 17 patients followed for up to 38 years.

Seventeen patients who underwent hemispherectomy for intractable epilepsy between 1950 and 1971 were reviewed to evaluate outcome for seizure control and the development of late complications. Sixteen had complete resection and in one the frontal pole was preserved. The follow-up period was 19 to 38 years (mean 28 years). One patient was lost to follow-up review 10 years after surgery. Three patients had died but none of the deaths were related to the surgery or to epilepsy. Ten patients had no postoperative complications, and three developed late complications: two had elevated intracranial pressure with enlargement of the remaining lateral ventricle after 13 and 16 years, and one had recurrent bleeding into the cerebrospinal fluid after 6 years. All were treated surgically and have since remained well. Eight patients (47%) had no seizures after surgery and eight (47%) were almost seizure-free. It is concluded that classical hemispherectomy is an effective operation for control of some types of epilepsy. The late complications, which occurred in 17% of the cases in this series, can be successfully treated. This series presents the longest follow-up results after hemispherectomy reported to date.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1992

Myths about aggression and attitudes about the death penalty.

165 college students completed a survey containing a measure of misconceptions about human aggression and attitudinal items on the death penalty from a 1985 Gallup report. Analysis did not provide strong support for the hypothesis that subjects with relatively high numbers of misconceptions about human aggression are more likely than better informed subjects to support the death penalty.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Young children's responses to "when" questions: issues of directionality.

On the basis of the bulk of the available literature, it appears that in talking or reasoning about temporal sequences, preschoolers lack bidirectional flexibility and are limited to forward order, antecedent toward consequent movement. 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds and adults responded to when-questions designed to permit assessment of directional preferences. All questions referred to the second sentence of 3-sentence stories, so that before-type (antecedent to consequent) and after-type (consequent to antecedent) responses were possible for all questions. Children showed a strong preference for giving after-responses. Contrary to claims made in previous literature, preschoolers are quite capable of reasoning from consequences to antecedents when provided with a context, such as responding to when-questions, for which such movement is appropriate. Children's apparent lack of bidirectional reasoning on problems involving temporal sequence may reflect preferred directionality based on conventions associated with particular tasks rather than a lack of flexibility in temporal reasoning per se.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1988

The development of children's understanding of "because" and "so".

Children's (5 years, 8 months to 8 years, 4 months) comprehension of "because" and "so" was assessed on both enactment and sentence completion tasks. The use of a within-subject design permitted performance on each task to be interpreted in terms of performance on the other. The pattern of results provided evidence against a componential model for the acquisition of causal connectives. This model holds that the two meaning components (cause, order) are acquired separately, with the order component being acquired several years later than the causal component. The results also were in accord with predictions derived from a contextual model of children's developing understanding of terms expressing logical relationships. This model posits that the understanding of relational terms is initially context dependent, such that children can understand relational terms when they express familiar relationships, but experience difficulty in forming representations of novel relationships solely on the basis of linguistic input. The lexical components of because and so are understood during the context-dependent stage, and the transition from context-dependent to context-independent understanding does not reflect further lexical development, but rather increasing facility in dealing with decontextualized linguistic input.

Child↗
PubMed1988

The effect of class and collection labels on cardinality, class-inclusion, and number conservation tasks.

3 experiments were carried out to assess Markman's hypothesis that the organizational principles underlying collection concepts facilitate children's performance on cognitive tasks requiring part-whole comparisons. In Experiment 1, the effect of class/collection labels on both cardinality and class-inclusion tasks was assessed. 32 3- and 4-year-olds from 2 populations (suburban middle class and inner-city working class) received both tasks. An additional 32 kindergarten and first-grade children from the 2 populations received the class-inclusion task. For cardinality, there was no difference in performance as a function of label. A facilitative effect of the collection label was found for class inclusion. Experiment 2 assessed the effect of class/collection labels on 28 nursery school children's demonstration of number conservation. Experiment 3 extended the age range and examined the effect of label on 56 kindergartners' and first graders' performance on number conservation. Both experiments failed to replicate Markman's findings. The results of the 3 experiments indicate that the facilitative effect of collection labels appears to be specific to the class-inclusion task. In light of these failures to replicate and the considerable variation in cognitive level among preschoolers, it is suggested that Markman's findings of a facilitative effect of collection labels on conservation and cardinality problems may have resulted from the use of small sample sizes and between-subject designs.

Attention↗