The efficacy of rational-emotive group therapy in psychiatric inpatients

The impact of rational-emotive theory and therapy upon the practice of clinical psychology has been profound, and many purportedly objective experimental tests of its efficacy as a mode of treatment have been reported. Yet the great majority of these reports have failed to utilize actual clinical populations. This study evaluated rational-emotive group therapy with psychiatric inpatients. Results supported the claim that irrational beliefs are related to emotional disturbance. It was also shown that patients undergoing rational-emotive group therapy changed their self-reported irrational beliefs more than did a control group. Finally, there was a trend for the experimental subjects to be more likely to have been discharged from the hospital during the 90-day follow-up period than were control subjects. However, this study failed to demonstrate that change in irrational beliefs was related to improvement in psychiatric symptoms or rates of discharge from the hospital. Some of the difficulties in conducting treatment evaluation research in a psychiatric hospital setting are discussed with respect to these results.     

Accurate display timing using an enhanced BASIC for the Tandy Color Computer

The general suitability of the Tandy Color Computer as an inexpensive laboratory microcomputer is discussed. A program is described that adds several useful timing-related functions to the native BASIC in the Tandy Color Computer, thus allowing BASIC to be used for programming experiments involving tachistoscopic displays and reaction times.     

On The Trail of Little Albert

The Psychological Record - In 1920, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner published a study of the emotional conditioning of an 11-month old infant, “Albert B,” which was to become a textbook...     

Very long term memory for tacit knowledge

Very long term memory for abstract materials was examined by recalling subjects who had served in a synthetic grammar learning experiment two years earlier. In that study (Reber & Allen, 1978) we differentiated among several cognitive modes of acquisition, their resultant memorial representations, and their associated decision processes. Two years later and without any opportunity for rehearsal or relearning, subjects still retain knowledge of these grammars to a remarkable degree. Although some differences have become blurred with the passage of time, the form and structure of that knowledge and the manner in which it is put to use remain strikingly similar to the original. That is, differences traceable to acquisition mode and conditions of initial training can still be observed. As in the original study, these results are discussed within the general context of a functionalist approach to complex cognitive processes.     

Recognition memory and the recall of spatial location

It is argued that memory for events should depend on the ability to recall their attributes. Two experiments suggest that this is so for the attribute of spatial location. When words presented in spatial arrays were later re-presented in a joint test of recognition memory and location recall, it was found that the surer one’s recognition, the greater the accuracy of location recall. Instructions to attend to a word’s location resulted in poorer recognition memory and marginally poorer location recall than were obtained when location was “incidentally” learned. Finally, when words were presented in color as well as in space, recognition memory was best when both attributes were recalled, was better when only location, was recalled than when only color was recalled, and was poorest when neither attribute was recalled.     

FOCAL,FORTRAN, and BASIC programs for reformatting and analyzing data collected by the SKED program

Several programs have been written in the FOCAL, FORTRAN, and BASIC languages for reformatting and analyzing SKED data. These programs include selection and explicit labeling of sets of recording counters representing distributions and/or total counts of events, several general manipulations of distributional data, and standard statistical treatment of distributions.     

Econometrics and psychometrics: A survey of communalities

Several themes which are common to both econometrics and psychometrics are surveyed. The themes are illustrated by reference to permanent income hypotheses, simultaneous equation models, adaptive expectations and partial adjustment schemes, and by reference to test score theory, factor analysis, and time-series models.     

The Relationship of Sex to Occupational Prestige

This study asked the question, Does the prestige of an occupation vary with the sex of the worker? For example, do male and female vocational counselors have the same occupational prestige? An equisection scaling procedure was used to develop an instrument to measure occupational prestige. When this instrument was administered to a sample of graduate students in guidance, some significant results were found but none of them held up on cross-validation. Neither was the differential allocation of prestige a function of the sex of the judge nor the form of the instrument     

Humphreys's attenuated test of Spearman's hypothesis

Humphreys's test of Spearman's hypothesis (viz., that the size of the standardized black-white differences on various psychometric tests is positively related to the tests' loadings on g, the general intelligence factor) is methodologically weak. It is based on comparison of a fairly representative sample of the black population of U.S. school children with a highly selected sample of the white school population, representing the lowest 15 to 20% of whites in socio-economic status (SES). A fair test of the hypothesis requires that the black and white samples should not be selected on any g-correlated variable, such as SES. Selection attenuates and distorts the relationship between tests' g loadings and the magnitude of the standardized mean black-white differences on the tests. Other unorthodox conditions in Humphreys's study, such as performing factor analysis on the test-score means of various arbitrary demographic groups instead of on individual test scores inflates tests' g loadings and biases the test of Spearman's hypothesis by restriction of reliable variance in g loadings. Humphreys's study cannot be considered a proper replication of Jensen's examination of Spearman's hypothesis in 11 different studies comprising 74 different tests, which consistently bears out Spearman's hypothesis.