Internet and the support of psychology education

The Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) Centre for Psychology has been promoting the use of computers in psychology education for the last 5 years. The advent of the Internet and ubiquitous access to the World-Wide Web has the potential to revolutionize the way the teaching and learning of psychology can be supported. This paper describes how we are using the Web to support psychology education through information dissemination, through the provision of teaching resources, and through facilities for communication.     

Implicit learning shapes new conscious percepts and representations

We present here the lineaments of a new account of implicit learning, an account that does not rely on the notion of “implicit knowledge.” In this account, improved performance depends on the action of unconscious mechanisms that structure the phenomenal, conscious experience of the world. This integrative view makes groundless the search for dissociations between conscious and unconscious influences that has been at the core of the research on implicit learning and memory. We contrast this view, on the one hand, to Dienes and Berry’s (1997) proposal, which defines implicit learning by analogy with subliminal perception, and, on the other, to Neal and Hesketh’s (1997) episodic account, in which subjective experience is a starting point for inquiry, rather than the phenomenon requiring explanation.     

Values,Beliefs, and Proenvironmental Action: Attitude Formation Toward Emergent Attitude Objects1

Discoveries in environmental science become the raw material for constructing social attitude objects, individual attitudes, and broad public concerns. We explored a model in which individuals construct attitudes to new or emergent attitude objects by referencing personal values and beliefs about the consequences of the objects for their values. We found that a subset of the major clusters identified in value theory is associated with willingness to take proenvironmental action; that a biospheric value orientation cannot yet be discerned in a general population sample; that willingness to take proenvironmental action is a function of both values and beliefs, with values also predicting beliefs; and that gender differences can be attributed to both beliefs and values. Our model has promise for explicating the factors determining public concern with environmental conditions.     

Scientific Meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Person perception: Effects of sex,marital status,and sex-typed occupation

A sample of 208 male college students evaluated a briefly described stimulus person on 20 7-point bipolar scales which described personality traits and professional performance characteristics. Each subject rated one of 16 persons who were described as either female or male; never married, divorced, widowed, or unmarried; and employed in either a feminine or masculine sex-typed occupation. Female stimulus persons generally were rated more favorably than male stimulus persons. The personality traits of married persons of both sexes were evaluated more favorably than those of unmarried persons. Individuals in sex-typical and sex-atypical occupations received similar evaluations.Parts of this article were presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, August 1981.     

A comparative outcome study of behavioral social-skills training, interpersonal-problem-solving and non-directive control treatments with child psychiatric outpatients

The purpose of the present study was to compare the short- and long-term efficacy of behavioral social-skills training and interpersonal-problem-solving with a control condition (non-directive treatment) with a clinical population of 61 socially-maladjusted outpatient boys. Treatment consisted of 12 weekly 1-hr sessions, with follow-up conducted at 12 months. A comprehensive assessment strategy was employed which included direct behavioral observations, parent, teacher, peer, self-report and academic performance measures. The results of this social-skills comparative outcome study indicated that the behavioral and interpersonal treatments resulted in changes on parent, teacher, self-report and peer sociometric ratings at post-treatment. At the 1-yr follow-up, the behavioral treatment maintained it's gains and continued to show modest improvement. Conversely, the interpersonal treatment manifested significant declines, as did the control group. These findings and implications for future research are discussed.     

A COMPARISON OF TWO INTERVENTION ROLES: PEER MONITOR AND POINT EARNER

Two fifth-grade students' high levels of off-task and disruptive behavior decreased rapidly during an intervention in which they were appointed peer monitors or point earners. The children worked in dyads in which one child served as a peer monitor and the other child earned points from his or her monitor for good behavior. Points were accumulated as part of a group contingency. We introduced the two appointments in an independent math period and alternated the appointments across days. The peer monitor and point earner roles, when alternated on an every-other-day basis, were equally effective in reducing the students' inappropriate behavior. Furthermore, their behavior during intervention fell well within the range of inappropriate behavior levels exhibited by classmates. The speed with which both students completed their math problems increased during both appointments. The accuracy of their academic work, however, varied; one student improved slightly and the other student decreased slightly in accuracy.