School psychologists' services in special education programs

Reviews school psychologists' services in special education programs. Fifty-eight credentialed school psychologists in 10 school districts were interviewed individually about background and training, professional duties, favored clinical techniques, and opinions and recommendations for improved services. According to self-reports, the bulk of time was devoted to activities directly related to assessment of pupils with little involvement in research, in-service training, or other clinical activities. Professional association memberships were primarily local. Assessment techniques tended to be limited to a few standardized tests. Overall findings support sample psychologists' expressed concerns as to need for changes in preservice and in-service training.     

Attraction and altruism: With a little help from my friends

The present experiment was designed to determine whether the reinforcement value of an altruistic response is a function of attraction toward the victim and/or the affective state of the subject. Subjects (N = 95) received positive or negative evaluations from a victim or from a bystander and subsequently performed an altruistic response which terminated shock delivery to a victim on a series of 14 trials. Analyses of variance indicated that the acquisition of an altruistic response was greatest when attraction toward the victim was most positive (p < .0001) and nonexistent when attraction toward the victim was least positive. The results were consistent with the proposition that attraction rather than affect mediates altruistic reinforcement. Those subjects receiving negative evaluations from the victim failed to acquire the altruistic response, suggesting that failure to help may function as a form of passive aggression.     

Difficulties in assessing depressive-like reactions to chronic severe external stress as exemplified by spouse caregivers of Alzheimer patients

Problems in making differential diagnoses and severity ratings of depressive-like reactions in chronically, heavily stressed persons are described. These assessment concerns are especially pertinent to older persons. The assessment concern discussed relates to difficulties in determining the extent to which stress reactions are inevitable consequences of stressor demands versus excessive pathological reactions versus natural manifestations of aging. The newly revised criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition (DSM-III-R) and its associated structured interviews do not lessen the difficulties described. However, they reflect progress in specifying the amount of cross-sectional and longitudinal consistency required before maladaptive behaviours meet diagnostic and/or severity criteria as pathological indicators. Stressor level is important among the criteria for the less severe DSM-III-R depression-related disorders, but the specific response demands of the stressors are ignored. By contrast, biomedical factors are consistently given significant weight. To clarify these matters, the five DSM-III-R diagnostic axes, depressive diagnostic criteria, and associated structured interviews for eliciting relevant data are reviewed.     

Psychosocial Predictors of Change in Cigarette Smoking

Over a period of 6 months, factors related to change in cigarette smoking were investigated in a group of 250 adult outpatients, all of whom smoked at the time of enrollment in the study. Among the variables tested were demographic, social, and situational factors, beliefs about the health effects of smoking and difficulty of quitting, and intentions regarding future smoking. Information was gathered at baseline and the first and sixth months by means of telephone interviews. Relative to smoking at 6 months, intention, education, and professional advice made independent contributions to cessation. The processes of quitting were examined in more detail. Attempting to quit was related to intention, professional advice, level of smoking, and social cues to smoke. Among those who tried to stop, difficulty with urges to smoke, and education affected success versus failure. Earlier success related to less anxiety and tension, and to less difficulty in not smoking when in negative situations. The findings suggest that a complex set of social and cognitive factors affect change in smoking behavior, and that somewhat different factors are operative at different stages.     

Semantic context effects in visual word recognition: An analysis of semantic strategies

Using a procedure that isolates the facilitatory and interfering effects of a semantic context, the present study examines two distinct patterns of context effects. One pattern shows a dominance of facilitation for target words in a related context, and the other pattern shows a dominance of interference for target words in an unrelated context. The controlling factor seems to be the overall characteristics of the stimulus list. For materials that include semantic relationships that are consistent in the strength of the relationships, facilitation dominance obtains. For materials that include a wide range of semantic relationship strengths, interference dominance results. These two patterns of facilitation and interference are attributed to two semantic strategies available to subjects for using context information. The explication of the strategies includes a theoretical treatment of the present data.