Given the sensitive topic of drug abuse and the private nature of the family, researchers must overcome a number of methodological obstacles when studying drug abuse and the family. The purpose of this study was to determine whether adolescents would provide honest and accurate answers to drug use questions in the context of their homes with their families participating in the same survey. Although there is no direct objective validation of the self-report measures used in this study, evidence from the analysis of the survey data suggests that adolescent self-reports are, in most cases, reliable and valid, and that the setting in which respondents complete questionnaires does not, in general, result in systematic reporting bias.

Presented in part at DIA 41st Annual Meeting. lune 26-30.2005. in Washington. DC.

Both research participants and patients are presumably offered protection from harm through the processes of informed consent and patient's rights. However, both documents are often written at unacceptably high "college" reading levels, making them incomprehensible to the "average" reader who may be reading at a junior-high reading level. Readability researchers are often unfamiliar with important details of readability software, leading to consistent underestimates of document readability. Most informed consent and patient's rights documents are writtin in a one-size-fits-all style and fail to take into account important differences based on cognitive development. Several strategies are described to improve the quality and effectiveness of these materials.

The informed consentprocess can be viewed as a sales presentation, with the consent form serving as the written advertisement for the drug research. So viewed, drug companies can use basic document design, layout and typography principles from advertising, as well as strategies from the "plain English " movement both to improve recruiting strategies and enhance participant understanding.This article evaluated 12 consent forms for investigational drug studies submitted to a Minnesota hospital institutional review board. Consent form text characteristics were compared to recommendations from the National Cancer Institute. Computer analyses judged the consent forms as difficult to read at a grade 13 to 14 reading level; forms included too many uncommon words, too many words per sentence, and too few active voice sentences, giving a "poor" overall style rating. The 12 forms did not always meet good principles of document design in terms of typeface, paragraph justifcation, and words per line. Several strategies for testing the consent form and reader comprehension were suggested.

The present study employed a Pavlovian-instrumental-transfer paradigm to investigate the role of conditioned fear in appetitive discrimination learning. Each of three Pavlovian training procedures was used to establish a conditioned fear excitor (CS+), a "neutral" CS (CSo), and a conditioned fear inhibitor (CS-). Then, the CSs were administered to rats in the three groups contingent upon the rewarded response in a difficult visual discrimination. In addition, half of each group received shock punishment for each incorrect response. Relative to CSo, CS+ facilitated performance in contrast to the usual interfering effect of conditioned suppressors; conversely, CS-retarded performance even when its reinforcing action (fear inhibition) was potentiated by punishment for the incorrect response. These results, together with other findings showing a reversed ou tcome when the CSs are administered for the incorrect response, indicate that Pavlovian conditioning comprises both general signaling and affective functions, the former reflecting a basic "expectancy" or nominal type of cognitive processing in the rat.Although the present study focused on transfer between Pavlovian conditioning and instrumental learning, it was a direct outgrowth of previous research on shock-right facilitation, i.e., the facilitating effect of mild shock for the food-rewarded response in a visual disc rimination task. This paradoxical effect of punishment has been attributed to the discriminability, or cue function, of the shock (Fowler, 1971; Fowler, Fago. & Wischner, 1971;Fowler & Wischner, 1969). When the stimulus compounds constituting the discrimination alternatives (e.g., T arms) are made similar, expectancy of reward conditioned to the cues in the rewarded arm will generalize to the cues in the nonrewarded arm (and similarly. nonreward expectancy will generalize to the rewarded arm), with the result that performance is retarded. However, when a stimulus. even an aversive one such as shock, is presented in relation to the rewarded response, it can function as a "distinctive" cue to reduce between-arm generalization effects and thus facilitate discrimination-given, of course, that the cue effect of the shock is sufficient to overcome its aversive effect.Two investigations have been designed to separate the cue and aversive components of punishment. In the first of these (Fowler, Goldman, & Wischner, 1968), amobarbital was used to reduce the aversive effect of different intensities of shock administered for the rewarded response in a difficult bright-dim discrimination. The results of this study showed that in *This study was supported in part by Grant~H-08482 from the National Institute of Mental Health, United States Public Health Service, and by Grant GB-24119 from the National Science Foundation. 81contrast to no-drug controls, for which performance was initially facilitated and then retarded across increasing intensities of shock, the discriminative performance of Ss injected with amobarbital improved as an S-shaped function of shock...