Personality Projection on Culturally Structured Symbols

To investigate whether the characteristics of the recently developed Stanford Preschool Internal-External Scale (SPIES; Mischel, Zeiss, &; Zeiss, 1974) would remain stable for older children of apparently different socioeconomic status than the normative sample, the SPIES was administered to 104 kindergarteners of essentially middle class background in an ordinary elementary school. The findings indicate that the SPIES may be useful in research on perceived locus of control in kindergarteners as well as preschool children.     

Psychiatric Diagnosis as a Function of Assessor Profession and Sex

Diagnostic impressions formed by 26 clinicians after intake interviews with 200 randomly assigned outpatients at a community mental health center were analyzed by assessor discipline and sex and by patient sex and age level. Professional status was positively related to diagnostic severity among male assessors—nurses, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists made increasingly higher proportions of psychotic diagnoses. Female therapists were less likely than their male counterparts to render psychotic diagnoses. This finding was most robust for doctoral interviewers, especially psychologists, and for patients who were female or under 30. Results are discussed in relation to the need for a model of the diagnostic process that allows for the role of practitioner attributes. Previous largely negative findings may have had their source in the failure of contrived analogue procedures to evoke emotions in the rater comparable in intensity to those aroused in the real-life encounter.