JOB DEVELOPMENT FOR THE MENTALLY RESTORED PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT1

The experiences of the placement department of the Mental Health and Manpower Project have demonstrated that an effective team can be created to develop job opportunities for the mentally restored psychiatric patient. Composed of a vocational counselor and a placement counselor, the team is effective in securing meaningful employment and developing re-education programs in the community. While the vocational counselor provides the clinical information concerning the restored patient-client, the placement counselor serves as a more personnel oriented individual in finding the appropriate kind of employment position. The team points to the potential that the mental health center possesses in involving the general community in its programs.     

Book reviews

The Journal of Value Inquiry -     

Discrimination learning by macaca mulatta with option to switch between S+ and S−

Three rhesus monkeys were trained to press either of two response keys. A response on the reinforcement key during presentation of the reinforced stimulus produced a sucrose pellet followed by an intertrial interval, but during presentation of the unreinforced stimulus produced only the intertrial interval. A response on the switching key changed the discriminative stimulus from reinforced to unreinforced or from unreinforced to reinforced. The reinforced stimulus was presented automatically on half the trials, but could be produced only by a switching response on the other half. Switching tended to occur in three distinct stages during acquisition of discriminative behavior. The first stage was identified as "nondiscriminative switching"; the second as "nonswitching"; and the third as "discriminative switching".     

Adaptation and repulsion in the figural after-effect

An experiment is reported which shows the effect of inspection of a curved line on the apparent curvature of a curved test line for a range of curvatures of both I and T lines. A second experiment extends the range of I curvatures, using only one T line, a straight line. The experiments showed both adaptation and repulsion components in the FAE.

An experiment by Kohler and Wallach which could not be reconciled with these results was repeated in the relevant part; the results were in agreement with the first experiment here and did not agree with those obtained by Kohler and Wallach.

An argument is presented that both adaptation and repulsion effects could be produced by a cell adaptation mechanism.     

Lightness matching for different visual routes through a compound scene

Left and right halves of a visual display were covered with inducing fields (IFs) of different lightnesses. S’s monocular gaze moved over an irreversible route from a neutral Munsell target to a CO series through either the left- or right-side IFs. For the 16 Ss there were 8 different IFs, varying from light to dark. For each of three different gray targets Munsell CO choices varied directly with the lightness of the IFs through which the gaze was routed rather than with the lightness of the total presented display. A replication with modifications is also reported.     

The value of relative-time-spent ratings in task-oriented job analysis

Recent studies have called for the abandonment of the relative-time-spent scale in task inventories. This recommendation is based on findings that the job profile created with the scale data is highly correlated with the profile created from a much simpler “Do you perform this task?” checklist. We examined this issue using 3 inventories and 42 jobs (N=2252). Profile correlations were computed on only the tasks actually performed by incumbents to avoid possibly inflated rs due to including irrelevant tasks. The specificity of task inventory items was proposed as an explanation for the high correlation between the two job profiles. Specificity of items was examined by looking at both the type (job duties versus tasks) and the amount (number of items in job profile and average number of items relevant to each job) of items used in the inventory. Correlations between time spent and checklist profiles were in the .80's and .90's regardless of the number of irrelevant tasks or the specificity of tasks. We agree with previous military research and conclude that the relative-time-spent scale has limited incremental utility beyond a dichotomous checklist.