Situation-Behavior Profiles as a Locus of Consistency in Personality

Traditional approaches have long considered situations as "noise" or "error" that obscures the consistency of personality and its invariance. Therefore, it has been customary to average the individual's behavior on any given dimension (e.g., conscientiousness) across different situations. Contradicting this assumption and practice, recent studies have demonstrated that by incorporating the situation into the search for consistency, a new locus of stability is found. Namely, people are characterized not only by stable individual differences in their overall levels of behavior, but also by distinctive and stable patterns of situation-behavior relations (e.g., she does X when A but Y when B ). These if . . . then . . . profiles constitute behavioral "signatures" that provide potential windows into the individual's underlying dynamics. Processing models that can account for such signatures provide a new route for studying personality types in terms of their shared dynamics and characteristic defining profiles.     

A Brief History of Jungian Splits in the United Kingdom

The institutionalizing of analytical psychology in the United Kingdom has its origins in the Analytical Psychology Club founded on 15 September 1922. It became increasingly apparent that professionalization of the Jungian movement was essential and this led to the formation of the Society of Analytical Psychology in 1946. This was followed in 1951 by the founding of the British Association of Psychotherapists. The Association of Jungian Analysts split off from the Society of Analytical Psychology in 1975–6, and this was followed in 1982 by the split between the Association of Jungian Analysts and the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists. The Berlin Congress of 1986 saw the beginnings of a liaison body for the four London societies, which came to be called the Umbrella Group. This has organized joint conferences and workshops, but the split in 1992 between the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy and the British Confederation of Psychotherapists has posed a new threat to the growing harmony between the London societies. In the face of this threat, the Umbrella Group has not been able to articulate a common policy and strategy about the Jungian presence in the United Kingdom.     

The use of expectancy theory in the explanation of turnover in ROTC

A questionnaire was administered to 142 mate students who were enrolled in ROTC and 18 male students who had dropped out of ROTC. Several months later seven of the above 142 subjects dropped out of ROTC. A ratio expectancy theory model was developed from the questionnaire as an operational definition of motivation to remain in ROTC. The results indicated that the 25 dropouts had a significantly lower (p < .001) score on this motivational measure than the 135 subjects who were still enrolled in ROTC, and also that these latter subjects were as strongly attracted to a civilian job as they were to an Army job. The implications of these findings relative to the ability of the Army to attract career officers were discussed.     

Motor perseverative behavior in adult stutterers and nonstutterers

The performances of 22 adult stutterers and 22 adult nonstutterers on motor tasks requiring the graphic reproduction of a sequence of alternating figures following the production of a series of nonalternating figures were studied. The finding that there were no differences in the performance of the two groups on the alternating motor tasks was interpreted as challenging the validity of previous observations that motor perseverative behavior exists in stutterers and is indicative of a central neurological deficit in that population.     

The interaction of memories in the rat: Effects on short-term retention performance

In four experiments, rats were tested for short-term retention of a target spatial location either with or without prior exposures to alternate spatial locations in a T-maze. In all cases, exposure to alternate locations prior to exposure to the target location impaired retention of the target. This impairment increased as the number of exposures to the alternate location was increased, and the impairment decreased as the interval between alternate and target exposures was increased. In no case was the magnitude of the impairment found to increase as the retention interval was lengthened.     

Vocational maturity in adulthood: Toward turning a model into a measure

It is postulated that adult vocational maturity needs to be assessed because of the changing developmental tasks encountered during the course of a career. Vocational maturity having been found to be multidimensional, existing undimensional inventories of adult vocational maturity are considered of limited although demonstrated validity. Relevant theories of adult vocational development and adjustment are reviewed. Super's proposed adult vocational maturity model is examined for the promise that it offers and for the problems that arise in developing a multidimensional measure of vocational maturity. A way of surmounting these problems is proposed as a basis for work now being undertaken.     

Language and speech recovery in a case of viral encephalitis

The speech and language recovery course of a 47-year-old man with viral encephalitis is described. Over a 3-month period, the patient was evaluated six times using the same selected battery of tests. Results show that viral encephalitis can deleteriously affect communicative performance and that improvement in medical status is accompanied by rapid and dramatic gains on most standard speech and language measures. For this case changes appeared related to improved auditory attention and retention, increased efficiency in word retrieval, and improved mental status.     

Hierarchical coding in speech timing

The analysis of syllable and pause durations in speech production can provide information about the properties of a speaker's grammatical code. The present study was conducted to reveal aspects of this code by analyzing syllable and pause durations in structurally ambiguous sentences. In Experiments 1–6, acoustical measurements were made for a key syllabic segment and a following pause for 10 or more speakers. Each of six structural ambiguities, previously unrelated, involved a grammatical relation between the constituent following the pause and one of two possible constituents preceding the pause. The results showed lengthening of the syllabic segments and pauses for the reading in which the constituent following the pause was hierarchically dominated by the higher of the two possible preceding constituents in a syntactic representation. The effects were also observed, to a lesser extent, when the structurally ambiguous sentences were embedded in disambiguating paragraph contexts (Experiment 7). The results show that a single hierarchical principle can provide a unified account of speech timing effects for a number of otherwise unrelated ambiguities. This principle is superior to a linear alternative and provides specific inferences about hierarchical relations among syntactic constituents in speech coding.     

Adolescent Decisional Autonomy Regarding Participation in an Emergency Department Youth Violence Interview

Much attention has been given to determining whether an adolescent patient has the capacity to consent to research. This study explores the factors that influence adolescents' decisions to participate in a research study about youth violence and to determine positive or negative feelings elicited by being a research subject. The majority of subjects perceived their decision to participate to be free of coercion, and few felt badly about having participated. However, adolescents who were alone in the room during the assent process were more likely to report that they chose freely to be a research subject. This study may influence the ways physicians communicate with adolescent patients around research assent within a clinical care environment.     

Quantitative CT scan studies in aphasia. I. Infarct size and CT numbers

Infarct si?e (number of 1-mm² pixels in the lesion) on CT scans of 30 aphasia patients was obtained with a semiautomated computer program. The mean number of lesion pixels present per slice containing lesion was approximately 500 for mild aphasias (transcortical motor and conduction), 700 for Wernicke's, 1000 for Broca's, 1500 for mixed, and 2000 for globals. These differences were significant for $\text{11}\text{15}$ of the group pairwise comparisons. When lesion locus was controlled for in the anterior/posterior plane, 73–100% of the aphasia patients were correctly classified as to type of aphasia by a discriminant analysis utilizing only the number of lesion pixels present on two CT slices. Different slice combinations were used for different aphasia group comparisons. There was a significant correlation between severity of aphasia and lesion size. There was a significant correlation between lesion size and the CT numbers in the lesion. This type of analysis may be useful to predict the prognosis for recovery potential in aphasics who have CT scans performed at 2 months poststroke.     

Food-searching behavior of cats in a multiple-choice elimination problem

Twelve cats were individually exposed to a four-point elimination problem for 50 consecutive days. The problem for the animals consisted of choosing a series of different points where they found, and were allowed to eat, a piece of meat, without returning to any previously visited point. The order of elimination was not controlled in any way by the experimenter. Results indicated that cats were able to solve this problem. All subjects showed a strong tendency to make successive runs toward points situated as far apart as possible. Moreover, a relation was shown between performance and the tendency to follow this high divergence principle. This result is discussed in terms of subjects' ability to process information about the spatial characteristics of the experimental situation. This ability might in fact be related to the behavioral plasticity of animals in spatial problems according to the difficulty of the task.     

Pauses and syntax in American sign language

Research on spoken languages has shown that the durations of silent pauses in a sentence are strongly related to the syntactic structure of the sentence. A similar analysis of the pauses (holds) in a passage in American Sign Language reveals that sequences of signs are also interspersed with holds of different lengths: long holds appear to indicate the ends of sentences; shorter holds, the break between two conjoined sentences; and the shortest holds, breaks between internal constituents. Thus, pausal analysis is a guide to parsing sentences in ASL.     

High speed memory scanning in mental retardates: evidence for a central processing deficit

Third-grade, high-school, and adult normal subjects and two diagnostic categories of educable mental retardates (cultural familials and encephalopathies) were tested in a Sternberg-type “memory scanning” recognition task. All five groups showed the characteristic linear increase in correct reaction time as the number of items in the memorized set increased. The slopes of the linear functions, however, were steeper for the two retardate samples than for the normal samples, suggesting a central processing deficit which could not be attributed to a lag in development.