Elementary school principals assess services of school psychologists nationwide

A one-page questionnaire was sent to 400 elementary school principals nationwide to assess their opinions regarding services of the school psychologist. These elementary school principals indicated that the school psychologist was found to be most helpful when providing the traditional services of psychological testing, personality and emotional assessment, consultation, and screening. Changes in school psychological services desired by the elementary school principals were more time from the school psychologist and an increase in individual and group counseling, preventive mental health, and inservice training. If elementary principal opinion is to be regarded, gross alterations to existing services of the school psychologist are not indicated by the results of this study.     

Donation, surrogacy and adoption

ABSTRACT The Warnock Report fails to reveal an important underlying principle concerning the donation and transference of gametes and embryos. This principle contrasts sharply with the principle that children are non-transferable. Consideration of where to place the line between transferable embryos and non-transferable fetuses, or children, yields a conception of surrogacy that would set it apart from adoption. The paper argues for a coherent system of surrogacy supported by regulative institutions in which surrogacy is seen to facilitate an acceptable form of parenthood.     

The effects of feedback with chronically institutionalized mental patients

The ability of two female and one male chronically institutionalized adult mental patients to comprehend and retain feedback on individualized problem behaviors and the effect of that feedback on changes in the occurrences of those behaviors were examined. Feedback on five problem behaviors was provided to each subject within a small therapy group setting employing a multiple baseline across subjects experimental design. Comprehension and retention tests occurred two, five, and seven days following the feedback in the small groups, while the rates of the occurrences of the problem behaviors were time-sampled throughout the subjects' waking day via use of the Time-Sample Behavioral Checklist (Paul, 1987). Results indicated that, although there were no changes in the rates of occurrence, these subjects were able to retain and understand the feedback on their problem behaviors. Implications for further investigations and for the utility of feedback with chronically institutionalized adults are discussed.     

Orientational anisotropy in the human visual system

When a target stimulus in a predesignated location is identified by a keypress response, responses are slightly faster if noise stimuli in adjacent locations are identical to the target than if they are a different stimulus assigned to the same response (a repeated-stimulus superiority effect). An exception to this result has been found in experiments that used randomly intermixed letter and digit stimuli. These experiments showed slower responding for identical noise than for nonidentical, response-compatible noise (a repeated-stimulus inferiority effect). The present study investigated these phenomena in three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 established that both the superiority and inferiority effects can be obtained in the same experiment. They also provided evidence that the repeated-stimulus inferiority effect is a function of the intermixing of letters and digits and not of the larger target-set size that has been used for mixed lists. Experiment 3 demonstrated that, with unmixed presentation, the repeated-stimulus superiority effect is enhanced by an increase in the number of stimuli assigned to each response. The experiments are consistent with accounts that attribute the repeated-stimulus superiority effect to competition that occurs when different internal recognition responses are activated. Moreover, the experiments suggest that the repeated-stimulus inferiority effect has its basis in processes that occur subsequent to feature extraction.     

Dis-positioning Euthyphro

The Euthyphro objection is often perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the king objection to theistic meta-ethics. This paper proposes a response that hasn’t been much explored within the contemporary literature, based on the metaphysics of dispositions and natural law theory. The paper will first contend that there is a parallel between ways theists conceptualise God’s role in creating laws of nature and the ways God creates goods. Drawing upon these parallels I propose a possible response to the dilemma, where this response parallels the dispositionalist response as to how God creates laws of nature. I do this by first explicating a natural law theory of goodness, then suggesting how the ontology of dispositions can be used in a novel way to account for goods, and finally by explaining how all this relates to the dilemma. I conclude the paper by posing some objections to myself and providing some replies.     

Rationalism,irrationalism and taylorism

From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness, by Bernard Doray, London: Free Association Books, 1988, 229 pages, hb £27.50, pb £11.95.