The endorsement of irrational beliefs in a general clinical population

Burgess' Attitude and Belief Scale, a measure of Ellis' irrational beliefs, was administered to a large sample of outpatients. All 13 subscales demonstrate very adequate internal consistency. A factor analysis yielded one factor accounting for 83% of the variance, which was labeled irrationality. Clients endorsed focused items more than overgeneralized items, self-referential items more than non-self-referential items, and preferential items more than irrational items. Clients also received higher scores on the irrational process of demandingness than they did on the irrational process of awfulizing, self-worth and low frustration tolerance. The results were consistent with new formulations in Rational-Emotive theory. Suggestions were made for the construction of measures of irrational beliefs.     

“Anchor-range” results with “same” and “different” responses and similar and dissimilar stimuli

Summary Blocks of pairs of dissimilar (anchor-like) circles were unexpectedly followed by single pairs of similar circles and vice versa. The dissimilar circles were 3 and 10 mm in diameter, and the similar circles were 3 and 5 mm, 5 and 7 mm, and 7 and 10 mm in diameter. In a second experiment, the dissimilar and similar circles did not overlap in size (e.g., they were 1.5 and 5 mm and 7 and 10 mm, respectively). The same responses to the unexpected same pairs of similar circles were faster than the same responses to the identical pairs in the blocks. In contrast, the different responses to the unexpected different pairs of similar circles were slower than the different responses to the identical pairs in the blocks. Similar stimuli accelerate same responses and slow down different responses. So the time results (and the error results as well) suggest that the context of the block dissimilar circles increased the perceived similarity of the unexpected similar circles. These anchor-range results are not explained by Thurstonian theories, which are based on the absolute properties of stimuli. Instead, they imply that the relation between the similar circles in the context of the relation between the dissimilar circles affected performance.     

Tomboys and sissies: Androgynous children?

Psychological studies of masculinity-femininity in children have paralleled those done with adults, which often consider deviations from masculinity for males and femininity for females as abnormal and perhaps pathological. Children who demonstrate cross-sex behaviors, however, may become androgynous adults whose cross-sex behaviors mean flexibility, not pathology. This study had two purposes: (1) to identify potentially androgynous children as those labeled by their peers as tomboys and sissies; (2) to compare personality characteristics of androgynous children with those of peers. Subjects were 312 elementary school children in a midwestern city. Results indicate that the labels tomboy and sissy are not necessarily indicators of androgynous children, but important social behaviors are related to the labels. For males, the possibility of frustrated creativity was raised.     

Involuntary retrieval in alphabet-arithmetic tasks: Task-mixing and task-switching costs

This study explores the effects of memory retrieval in task switching. To this end, item-specific stimulus-to-task mappings were manipulated in two alphabet-arithmetic experiments. Letter-stimuli were presented and the responses were verbal letter names. The task was either to name the next letter in the alphabet, (e.g., C D, task plus), or to name the preceding letter (e.g., C B, task minus). The mapping of individual stimuli to the two tasks (and thus to responses) was either consistent (CM) or varied (VM). In Experiment 1, performance was worse for VM items relative to CM items, indicating item-specific task-mapping effects. These task-mapping effects also contributed to mixing costs (i.e., worse performance in mixed-task blocks than in pure-task blocks) but not to switch costs (worse performance in task-switch trials than in repeat trials within mixed blocks). Experiment 2 manipulated pure and mixed tasks between-participants, and the data again showed differential effects of the task-mapping manipulation on mixing costs and switch costs. This suggests that, in these memory-dependent, alphabet-arithmetic tasks, interference due to involuntary task (and/or response) retrieval primarily increases general multi-task effects, such as maintaining activation of the current task.     

The family as portrayed on prime-time television, 1947–1990: Structure and characteristics

Successful family series across four decades of American prime-time television were examined. Family portrayals were defined as either conventional or nonconventional. Conventional families were categorized as couples without children and couples with children. Nonconventional families were categorized as single parent or contrived. Additional family characteristics were also recorded including sex of single parent, reason for singleness, social class status, females employed outside the home, live-ins, race, and whether the presentation was dramatic or comedic. The data show a trend toward more equal presentation of conventional and nonconventional families, few divorced or female single parents, and few minority families. Implications of findings are discussed and future research questions suggested.     

Development of Gender Differences in Children's Responses to Animated Entertainment

This study examined gender differences in children's responses to animated scenes from an action adventure versus a sad film, and to animated previews of a prototypical male versus female movie. Females were more likely than males to express sadness in response to the sad scene, and gender differences in intensities of sadness increased with age. Children were much more likely to stereotype the male preview as most liked by other boys, whereas the majority of children perceived the female preview as liked by either gender equally. In terms of enjoyment of the male and female previews, gender differences in enjoyment of the male preview were apparent only among children who perceived the film as more appealing to boys, and gender differences in enjoyment of the female preview were apparent only among children who perceived the film as more appealing to girls. Implications for children's programming are discussed.     

Partially-Ordered (Branching) Generalized Quantifiers: A General Definition

Following Henkins discovery of partially-ordered (branching) quantification (POQ) with standard quantifiers in 1959, philosophers of language have attempted to extend his definition to POQ with generalized quantifiers. In this paper I propose a general definition of POQ with 1-place generalized quantifiers of the simplest kind: namely, predicative, or cardinality quantifiers, e.g., most, few, finitely many, exactly , where is any cardinal, etc. The definition is obtained in a series of generalizations, extending the original, Henkin definition first to a general definition of monotone-increasing (M) POQ and then to a general definition of generalized POQ, regardless of monotonicity. The extension is based on (i) Barwises 1979 analysis of the basic case of M POQ and (ii) my 1990 analysis of the basic case of generalized POQ. POQ is a non-compositional 1st-order structure, hence the problem of extending the definition of the basic case to a general definition is not trivial. The paper concludes with a sample of applications to natural and mathematical languages.     

The treatment of adolescents and their families in cultural transition: Issues and recommendations

Increasing numbers of immigrant families with adolescent children are seeking therapy because of intergenerational conflicts specific to the adolescent separation-individuation phase of the life cycle and transitional problems related to immigration and cultural transition. Three types of adolescent immigrants are identified and discussed: Immigrants (subtypes Reluctants and Optimists), Immigrant-Americans, and Americans. Therapists' issues which can negatively affect therapy with such adolescents and families are also discussed. Effective therapy with immigrant families requires that family therapists become more culturally sensitive, therapeutically flexible, and accepting of family values to which they may be diametrically opposed. Recommendations for therapy are offered.Dr. Baptiste is himself an immigrant. The experiences and observations discussed here are culled from his work with immigrant families and children over the past 19 years in the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Indiana, and New Mexico.Portions of this article will appear in a chapter Psychotherapy with adolescent immigrants and their families in cultural transition in B. Settles and D. Hanks (Eds.),Families on the move: Emigration, immigration, migration and mobility. Sage Publications, 1990, and are used here with permission.     

Oral production of linguistically complex sentences with meaning relationships of time

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the abilities of children to use the adjoining mechanism in combining two constituent sentences with the temporal adjoiners: after, before, until, when, and while. To elicit responses, a sentence repetition task was devised that included these five temporal adjoiners in four different syntactic environments: transitive sentences with the adjoiner and the subordinate clause following the main clause, transitive sentences with the adjoiner and the subordinate clause preceding the main clause, intransitive sentences with the adjoiner and the subordinate clause following the main clause, and intransitive sentences with the adjoiner and the subordinate clause preceding the main clause. The 30 were between the ages of 4O and 66 years. They were average children who were free from any known emotional disturbance, who were acquiring Standard American English as a native language, who had normal speech and hearing, and whose parents had neither very high nor very low socioeconomic status. To the extent that the children in this study were representative of normal-speaking children of their ages, certain general conclusions were drawn. Children begin to use the temporal adjoining mechanism early, but they do not master it by the age of 66 years. The ability to use the adjoiners, nor is it equal for different syntactic structures nor for all degrees of semantic complexity. After, before, and when appear earlier than while and until. A rapid period of growth in learning to use the temporal adjoining mechanism occurs between the ages of 4 and 5 years. However, a plateau of learning appears to be reached between the ages of 5 and 6 years. In general, children first learn to use the temporal adjoining mechanism in intransitive sentences with the adjoining link in the middle or at the beginning of the utterance. Next, they learn to use it in transitive sentences with the adjoining link at the beginning of the utterance. Finally, they learn to use it in transitive sentences with the adjoining link in the middle of the utterance. In transitive sentences, children appear to learn the rule for placing the subordinate clause at the beginning of the utterance when temporally adjoining two constituent sentences before they learn the base structure rule. In intransitive sentences, they appear to learn the rule for placing the subordinate clause at the beginning of the utterance when temporally adjoining two constituent sentences at the same time that they learn the base structure rule. The underlying semantic relationships that are expressed by specific temporal adjoiners are important determinants of children's abilities to use these adjoiners. In linguistic evaluations, one should consider the syntactic environment in which the temporal adjoiner occurs and assume that after, before, and when are developmentally earlier than while and until.     

Context and strategy in acquiring temporal connectives

There has been considerable debate over the role of comprehension strategies in the acquisition of temporal connectives. This study examined the role of caluse logic and interpretational strategies in the acquisition of temporal words; age-related changes were also considered. Thirty-two children between 3 and 5 years of age served as subjects. Sentences with a variety of temporal words were used to tap children's comprehension of before, after, when, while, just before that, and and after that. Clause logic was found to significantly improve the understanding of these sentences. However, the order of mention and main clause first strategies were used infrequently. Apparently, when children respond to sentences that describe information in a way that is consistent with that they normally hear, these strategies are seldom applied.I wish to express my thanks to Janice Bogen, who assisted in data collection, and to Erika Hoff-Ginsberg, who assisted in some of the data analysis.     

Variations in use of the term “or”

Two studies showed that adults' responses to questions involving the term or varied markedly depending upon the type of question presented. When presented with various objects (A's and B's) and asked to circle all things which are A or B subjects tended to circle A's as well as B's, whereas when asked to circle all the A's or B's subjects showed a relatively stronger tendency to circle one or the other. Moreover the nature of the sets of objects (As and Bs) influenced behavior as well. There was also evidence that the effects due to question wording or set type transferred.     

Reflection-impulsivity and information seeking in emotionally disturbed children

Forty-four emotionally disturbed children were administered the Matching Familiar Figures Test by one examiner after which the 13 most impulsive and 13 most reflective were chosen. A second examiner administered the Fixed Alternatives Question-Asking Game in whichSs sought information by asking questions that could be answered either yes or no. These questions were classified on a developmental basis; reflective children were found to employ more mature questions than did impulsive ones. Indirect comparisons between the present results and those obtained with normalSs were made.     

Electrophysiological correlates of semantic features

Analyses of averaged auditory evoked responses to a list of 10 positive and 10 negative words led to the identification of a restricted region in the brain response which reliably discriminated between words differing in the semantic features positive and negative. These data support the view that word meanings are composed of more basic components or features and are not stored simply as dictionary items in the brain.     

Distance and fusion in Robinson Jeffers' “the purse-seine” and other poems

Distance and fusion are fundamental ideas in Bowenian thinking, especially as expressed in the dynamic of distancing and pursuing. In this paper I have used these ideas as a means to briefly examine a short selection of Robinson Jeffers' poetry, which provides us with a literary example of these concepts in action.My thanks to M. K. Lane and the anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this article for their many suggestions, especially to the reviewer who helped me better distinguish between distance and fusion, and intimacy and autonomy.     

Computer content analysis of sex differences in the language of children

This study presents empirical procedures for the collection and content analysis of the oral language of kindergarten children. The analysis technique used material and machines available to most researchers. The results of the analysis of language samples of 144 randomly selected children from the entire kindergarten class of the Ithaca, New York, school system showed that boys produced significantly more language than did the girls as well as significantly more references to aggression, self, time, space, quantity, fears, good, act of oral communication, negation, and affirmation, and asked more questions of the examiner than did the girls. The girls made significantly more female references than did the boys. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Richard Zaner’s Phenomenology of the Clinical Encounter

The clinical ethics propounded by Richard Zaner is unique. Partly because of his phenomenological orientation and partly because of his own daily practice as a clinical ethicist in a large university hospital, Zaner focuses on the particular concrete situations in which patients and their families confront illness and injury and struggle toward workable ways for dealing with them. He locates ethical reality in the clinical encounter. This encounter encompasses not only patient and physician but also the patients family and friends and indeed the entire lifeworld in which the patient is still striving to live. In order to illuminate the central moral constituents of such human predicaments, Zaner discusses the often-overlooked features of disruption and crisis, the changed self, the patients dependence and the physicians power, the violation of personal boundaries and their necessary reconfiguring, and the art of listening.     

Covering Gender on Memory's Front Page: Men's Prominence and Women's Prospects

The gender composition of highly available, naturally acquired memories for famous people was investigated in four field studies and three experiments with predominantly Caucasian children and adults. When memory was probed with only a linguistically gender-neutral retrieval cue (famous people), both male and female participants recalled significantly more famous men than famous women. Adding a gender-inclusive retrieval cue (men or women) significantly attenuated this androcentric recall effect for men and completely eliminated it for women. Women also recalled famous women just as rapidly as they recalled famous men in an experiment that utilized gender-specific cues (famous men famous women). Regardless of how memory was probed, large gender of participant effects were consistently observed. Gendercentric processing of androcentric cultural data is proposed as an explanation for the pattern of results observed here, and limitations and implications of this research are noted.     

The influence of the form of the question on the eyewitness testimony of preschool children

Thirty-two preschool children were questioned after viewing four short films. The form of the question (affirmative-negative, definite-indefinite article, some-any quantifier) was systematically varied in a counterbalanced design. The form of the question did not significantly affect answers to questions about entities actually present in the films; however, it did have significant effects on answers concerning entities which were not in the film. Questions such as Did you see the..., Did you see any..., and Didn't you see some... were answered yes more frequently than other question types. Thus young children are aware of the expectation conveyed by certain linguistic forms, such asthe. The results are discussed in the light of current models of constructive memory as well as their implications for accurate questioning of children.An earlier version of this article was delivered to the Stanford Child Language Research Forum, Stanford University, April 1976.     

A study of “Belief” and “Non-belief” items from the jones irrational beliefs test with implications for the theory of RET

Evidence supporting the fundamental position of Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) that dysfunctional emotions and behaviors are heavily influenced by irrational beliefs has been questioned due to the fact that many measures of beliefs contain items that actually refer to emotions and behaviors. In this study individual items on the Jones Irrational Beliefs Test (IBT) (Jones, 1968/69) were rated by a panel of experts in RET as to whether they referred to beliefs, behaviors, emotions, or were ambiguous. Then Belief items and Non-belief items from the responses of 368 participants were extracted and scored separately. The Non-belief scores, based on items mostly referring to emotions and behaviors, were strongly related to measures of distress, as would be expected. But scores based on items unequivocally referring to beliefs were also significantly related to measures of emotional distress, psychosomatic symptoms, and suicidal contemplation. These findings are interpreted as clear support for RET's position on the relationship between irrational beliefs (B's) and dysfunctional emotions and behaviors (C's).Co-Editor of thisJournal, is a Fellow of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy in New York City, a Professor of Psychology at Hollins College, and a Licensed Psychologist in independent practice in Roanoke, Virginia.     

Children's understanding of some temporal terms denoting order,duration, and simultaneity

This study examined the comprehension by children of the concepts of order, duration, and simultaneity as reflected in certain linguistic structures. The children in the study were 3, 5, and 7 years old. Temporal order was examined through children's comprehension of two-clause sentences containing the conjunctions after, before, since, and until. Temporal duration was examined through children's understanding of one-clause sentences containing the progressive aspect and two-clause sentences containing the conjunctions since and until. These two conjunctions signal duration in the main clause when they conjoin two clauses. Simultaneity was studied through children's comprehension of two-clause sentences containing while. The results revealed that the order sentence structures (before and after) were generally comprehended by the children before the duration or simultaneous sentence structures, although at 7 years of age children were still not performing above chance on the order relation in since and until sentences. The duration sentence structures were comprehended by the children before the simultaneous sentence structures. The results support the literature in cognitive psychology and in philosophy which argues that order is simpler than duration is simpler than simultaneity.This report is based on a dissertation submitted to the University of Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the Ph.D.