"You learn and learn and learn.... and then you are an adult": parental perceptions of adolescence in contemporary Swaziland

The developmental period of adolescence is explored in Swaziland from a multidisciplinary perspective. The study compares early anthropological research with contemporary interviews of Swazi parents. While the Swazi language, siSwati, does not have a term for "adolescent," there is evidence of a definite developmental period which could be defined as adolescence. Parents view this period as being qualitatively different from childhood and adulthood, but they also have gender-related interpretations of its nature and length. While biological maturation (especially menarche for females) is viewed as a vital step in becoming an adult, behaviors must be learned during this time (i.e., "adolescence") before one is completely of adult status.     

Evaluation of counselling in primary care: How can research be made more useful for practitioners?

The paper presents a literature review of research on counselling in general practice critiqued from the perspective of the Practice Counsellor. It is noted that existing studies all focus primarily on outcome of psychological interventions in comparison to routine GP care. The contributions and limitations of these studies are discussed, and the methodological difficulties of conducting controlled trials in this context are explored. It is proposed that future research on counselling in primary care needs to draw on the paradigm shift in psychotherapy and a range of alternative research methodologies which will be more likely to produce research of relevance to Practice Counsellors.     

Influences of schooling and urban-rural residence on gender differences in cognitive abilities and academic achievement

A total of 1151 children from indigenous Quechua-speaking families residing in squatter settlements of the city and in two remote rural environments in Peru was given a battery of 16 tests of academic achievement and cognitive abilities. The former tests assessed reading and mathematics achievement and the latter tapped a broad range of cognitive functions. Children were enrolled in first, second, or third grade or did not attend school. “Younger” children were from 6 to 8 years old, and “older” children were from 9 to 12 years old. Large differences in cognitive functioning were associated with attendance at school, grade in school, age, and urban-rural residence. Gender was found to account for less than 5% of the variance in children's performance on cognitive and academic tasks. Gender effects appeared to decline with increased amount of schooling. This was reflected in interactions involving gender and schooling and in a greater number of significant gender effects for children who did not attend school or were in first grade. The results present a complicated picture of various interactional effects of task, location, age, and schooling on the detected gender differences in cognitive abilities and academic achievement.     

Book reviews

GRAY, J. A. Elements of a Two-Process Theory of Learning. London: Academic Press. 1975. Pp. 423. £6.60.

STOCKBRIDGE, H. C. W. Behaviour and the Physical Environment :Case Studies in Psychology and Ergonomics. London: Batsford. 1975. Pp. 191. £7.50.

CRYSTAL, D. The English Tone of Voice-Essays in Intonation, Prosody and Paralanguage. London: Edward Arnold. 1975. Pp. 198. £3.75.

MCFARLAND, D. J. (Ed.). Motivational Control Systems Analysis. London and New York: Academic Press. 1974. Pp. xii + 523. £11.00.

IVERSEN, S. D. and IVERSEN, L. L. Behavioral Pharmacology. New York and London: Oxford University Press. 1975. Pp. xiv + 310. £2.75.

LEVITT, R. A. Psychopharmacology. A Biological Approach. New York: Wiley. 1975. Pp. x + 502. £9.45.

DOWNS, R. M. and STEA, D. (Eds). Image and Environment. Chicago: Aldine. 1973. (London: Arnold). Pp. xxii + 439. £6.75.

MACCOBY, E. E. and JACKLIN, C. N. The Psychology of Sex Differences. London: Oxford University Press. 1975. Pp. 634. £7.00.

MASSARO, D. W. (Ed.). Understanding Language. New York: Academic Press. 1975. PP. 438. £7.90.

HILGARD, E. R., ATKINSON, R. C., and ATKINSON, R. L. Introduction to Psychology. Sixth Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1975. Pp. 658. £8.10.     

Book reviews

SANDERS, A. F. (Ed.). Attention and Performance III. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. 1970. Pp. viii + 442. (Price not known.)

CORCORAN, D. W. J. Pattern Recognition. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. 1971. Pp. 223. £0.50.

SCHRIER, A. M. and STOLLNITZ, F. (Eds.) Behaviour of Nonhuman Primates Vol. III. New York: Academic Press Inc. 1971. £4.45.

KINTSCH, W. Learning, Memory, and Conceptual Processes. New York: Wiley and Sons. 1970. Pp. 498. £4.40.

MORTON, J. (Ed.) Biological and Social Factors in Psycholinguistics. London: Logos Press. 1971. Pp. 215. £3.50.

RITCHIE RUSSELL, W. The Traumatic Amnesius. London: Oxford University Press. Pp. 84. £2.00.

MILLER, N. E. Selected Papers. Chicago: Aldine Publishing. 1971. Pp. 874. £15.00.

SUTHERLAND, N. S. AND MACKINTOSH, N. J. Mechanisms of Animal Discrimination Learning. New York: Academic Press. 1971. Pp. 559. $18.50.

FURCHTGOTT, E. (Ed.). Pharmacological and Biophysical Agents and Behavior. New York: Academic Press. 1971. Pp. xii+402. $14.50.

EYSENCK, H. J., ARNOLD, W. AND MEILI,R. (Eds). Encyclopedia of Psychology. Volume I. London: Search Press. 1972. Pp. 396. £8.00.     

Investigating the relationship between working memory and emotion regulation in mothers

Recent work suggests that executive functions, specifically working memory, may facilitate emotion regulation (ER). Here we examined whether measures of visuospatial working memory and verbal working memory relate to ER in a group of recent mothers. We found that while visuospatial working memory was associated with, and predictive of, self-reported measures of ER and emotion dysregulation—verbal working memory was correlated to only one dimension of emotion dysregulation. These findings suggest that working memory may play a unique role in everyday regulatory functioning. We frame our results in terms of the broader implications they may have for the potential role of executive functioning in parenting.     

Asymmetries in cue competition in forward and backward blocking designs: Further evidence for causal model theory

A hallmark feature of elemental associative learning theories is that multiple cues compete for associative strength when presented with an outcome. Cue competition effects have been observed in humans, both in forward and in backward blocking procedures (e.g., Shanks, 1985) and are often interpreted as evidence for an associative account of human causal learning (e.g., Shanks & Dickinson, 1987). Waldmann and Holyoak (1992), however, demonstrated that cue competition only occurs in predictive, and not diagnostic, learning paradigms. While unexplainable from an associative perspective, this asymmetry readily follows from structural considerations of causal model theory. In this paper, we show that causal models determine the extent of cue competition not only in forward but also in backward blocking designs. Implications for associative and inferential accounts of causal learning are discussed.     

The origins and evolution of links between word learning and conceptual organization: new evidence from 11‐month‐olds

How do infants map words to their meaning? How do they discover that different types of words (e.g. noun, adjective) refer to different aspects of the same objects (e.g. category, property)? We have proposed that (1) infants begin with a broad expectation that novel open‐class words (both nouns and adjectives) highlight commonalities (both category‐ and property‐based) among objects, and that (2) this initial expectation is subsequently fine‐tuned through linguistic experience. We examine the first part of this proposal, asking whether 11‐month‐old infants can construe the very same set of objects (e.g. four purple animals) either as members of an object category (e.g. animals) or as embodying a salient object property (e.g. four purple things), and whether naming (with count nouns vs. adjectives) differentially influences their construals. Results support the proposal. Infants treated novel nouns and adjectives identically, mapping both types of words to both category‐ and property‐based commonalities among objects.