Parts of activities: reply to Fellbaum and Miller (1990)

If people believe that one activity is a kind of another, they also tend to believe that the second activity is a part of the first. For example, they assert that deciding is a kind of thinking and that thinking is a part of deciding. Fellbaum and Miller's (1990) explanation for this phenomenon is based on the idea that people interpret part of in the domain of verbs as a type of logical entailment. Their explanation, however, suffers from at least 2 deficiencies. First, it fails to account for parallel effects with nouns (e.g., a contest is a kind of an activity, and an activity is a part of a contest). Second, it contains a flaw that incorrectly predicts many activities to be parts of each other (e.g., coming is part of going and going part of coming). However, a hypothesis Rips and Conrad (1989) originally proposed for the kind-part reciprocal effect avoids both of these difficulties.     

The Papago Psychology Service: A community mental health program on an American Indian reservation

A community psychology service run by the Papago Indian tribe and staffed largely by Papago Indians who have been trained as mental health workers is described. This service is unique among mental health services for Indians in that the tribe has complete control of the funds for the service and sets its own policies. It was developed for a rather traditional Indian group, and the culture, the traditions, and the wishes of the Papago community were respected. Consultation with medicine men was built into the program from the start, and adaptation of mental health techniques to fit the culture is stressed. Before this clinic was established, few mental health resources were directly available to the reservation. Similar to other Indian tribes, the Papagos are economically disadvantaged, with an unemployment rate of over 50%, low educational attainment, and very high rates of alcoholism, suicide, and vehicular accidents. The topics covered are the tribe's view of health programs for its people, the present Papago community and traditional means of treatment, traditional psychotherapy adapted to Papago culture, the indigenous Papago mental health worker, and the non-Indian professional consultant.     

Psycholinguistics and education: Directions and divergences

The development of reading, foreign language competence, rhetorical and communicative skills, and symbolic thought processes differs from pure psycholinguistic research as horticulture differs from botany. Correspondences between educational psycholinguistics and pure psycholinguistics lie in how each views the learner on a continuum that ranges from docile to autonomous. Language can be characterized as arbitrary or derived from possible universal symbolizing processes, and curriculum in general can be characterized on a continuum ranging from opaque to emergent. Language acquisition can be viewed as the product of intentional socialization or an outgrowth of natural processes, and educators may be said to range from instructive to eductive in their approach to methods. The divergences between education and psycholinguistics in respect to their philosophical analysis of their research strategies and their views about individual variation and central tendencies seem to presage mutually supportive research programs.     

Toward a Systematic Approach to the Study of Complex Human Functioning

The Psychological Record -     

Relationships between the Beck Depression Inventory and the Hamilton Psychiatric Rating Scale for Depression in depressed outpatients

The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Hamilton Psychiatric Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) were used with 300 outpatients diagnosed with DSM-III major depression disorders. A principal-components analysis was performed on the intercorrelations among the 21 BDI and 24 HRSD symptoms. Three orthogonal components were found and interpreted as reflecting differences in self-report and clinical rating methods for measuring the severity of depression. The importance of using both self-reports and clinical ratings for evaluating depression in psychiatric outpatients was discussed.     

Folk psychology of mental activities

A central aspect of people's beliefs about the mind is that mental activities--for example, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving-- are interrelated, with some activities being kinds or parts of others. In common-sense psychology, reasoning is a kind of thinking and reasoning is part of problem solving. People's conceptions of these mental kinds and parts can furnish clues to the ordinary meaning of these terms and to the differences between folk and scientific psychology. In this article, we use a new technique for deriving partial orders to analyze subjects' decisions about whether one mental activity is a kind or part of another. The resulting taxonomies and partonomies differ from those of common object categories in exhibiting a converse relation in this domain: One mental activity is a part of another if the second is a kind of the first. The derived taxonomies and partonomies also allow us to predict results from further experiments that examine subjects' memory for these activities, their ratings of the activities' importance, and their judgements about whether there could be "possible minds" that possess some of the activities but not others.     

The role of the interpolated task in short-term retention

It has been proposed that a single set of operations based on classical interference theory is adequate to describe the phenomena of both short- and long-term memory. An article by Keppel and Underwood (1962) argues that short-term forgetting is due to proactive interference and, by implication, not a result of trace decay. An experiment which varied retention interval and the nature of the interpolated task, gave results which indicate that when the amount forgotten and the nature of errors are considered, a decay model is supported, the proactive interference suggestion being untenable.