Characteristics of Clients Judged to Require Long-Term Counseling

This study examines one subgroup of clients seen at a university counseling center, namely, 72 clients who were expected by their counselor to remain in counseling for 10 or more interviews. Ratings were available on psychological characteristics for this sample and for the Counseling Center's total client population. In addition, the total university population could be compared with both of these groups on demographic characteristics. On the basis of pre- and post-counseling ratings of severity of problem, the sample being investigated was divided into Improved and Unimproved groups. Comparative data are examined with regard to class, college, sex, type of residence, type of problem, severity level at onset and termination, number of counseling interviews, motivation for counseling, defensiveness, and counselor's feelings toward client. Long-term counseling and improvement status are found to be a function of most of these variables.     

On the Nature of Public and Private Self-Consciousness

ABSTRACT Wicklund and Gollwitzer raise a number of questions concerning the explanatory value of self-consciousness as a trait and the validity of the distinction between public and private self-consciousness These questions are based on strawperson arguments, the issues they attack are largely of their own creation and bear little relation to the original authors' own positions My response attempts to point out their false assumptions concerning the nature of self-attentional traits, to examine some of the research, much of which they have ignored or misrepresented, which supports the public-private self-consciousness distinction, and to question Wicklund and Gollwitzer's tendency to regard their own theory as some sort of standard against which others must be judged, apparently unaware of the possibility that their own conceptions may be flawed     

The effect of a prior presentation on temporal judgments in a perceptual identification task

Subjects read aloud words presented once at the rate of one per second. A perceptual identification task, involving 30- or 50-msec presentations, followed. Some of the words presented for identification had been read previously; others were new. After each presentation, in addition to identifying the word, the subjects judged its duration. The data indicate that a single presentation of a word affects its later perception, as revealed by enhanced perceptual identification, longer duration judgments, and better temporal discrimination. A second experiment showed that a single presentation influenced duration judgments even when identification was not required. The final experiment addressed the issue of what is preserved in memory from a prior presentation. The results from the three experiments indicate that duration judgments provide a valuable dependent measure of memory in the perceptual identification task and support the misattribution hypothesis: A prior presentation enhances perceptual identification, and this increase in relative perceptual fluency is incorrectly attributed to a longer presentation duration.     

A mind to go out of: reflections on primary and secondary consciousness

Dreaming and waking are two brain-mind states, which are characterized by shared and differentiated properties at the levels of brain and consciousness. As part of our effort to capitalize on a comparison of these two states we have applied Edelman's distinction between primary and secondary consciousness, which we link to dreaming and waking respectively. In this paper we examine the implications of this contrastive analysis for theories of mental illness. We conclude that while dreaming is an almost perfect model of organic psychosis, it is less so for schizophrenia and major affective disorder where it must serve a primarily heuristic role helping us to model hallucinations and delusions but not the diseases themselves.     

Perceiving surfaces in depth beyond the fusion limit of their elements

An isolated dot appears double outside a small disparity range called Panum's fusional area. In random-dot stereograms (RDSs), however, this doubling, or diplopia of dot elements is not evident at any disparity. Nevertheless, depth is perceived up to disparities that greatly exceed Panum's fusional limit. Either one is unaware of dot diplopia at disparities exceeding Panum's fusional limit or the fusion limit is extended. To examine these possibilities, we developed a novel RDS in which dichoptically color-coded dots have a distinctive color when fused, and return to their intrinsic colors when diplopic. We measured the fusion limit of dots in this RDS, and compared it to the patent stereopsis limit of the perceived surface in similar RDSs. We found that the fusional area of dots in the RDS was comparable to Panum's fusional area. Furthermore, there was clear dissociation between the fusion limit and the patent stereopsis limit in the RDS. We conclude that the elements composing a surface are not necessarily fused when a large disparity surface is perceived in depth.     

Language and modeling word problems in mathematics among bilinguals

The study was conducted to determine whether the language of math word problems would affect how Filipino-English bilingual problem solvers would model the structure of these word problems. Modeling the problem structure was studied using the problem-completion paradigm, which involves presenting problems without the question. The paradigm assumes that problem solvers can infer the appropriate question of a word problem if they correctly grasp its problem structure. Arithmetic word problems in Filipino and English were given to bilingual students, some of whom had Filipino as a first language and others who had English as a first language. The problem-completion data and solution data showed similar results. The language of the problem had no effect on problem-structure modeling. The results were discussed in relation to a more circumscribed view about the role of language in word problem solving among bilinguals. In particular, the results of the present study showed that linguistic factors do not affect the more mathematically abstract components of word problem solving, although they may affect the other components such as those related to reading comprehension and understanding.