Public knowledge,attitudes, and beliefs about homeless people: Evidence for compassion fatigue?

Media reports suggest that the public is becoming impatient with the homeless—that so-called “compassion fatigue” has gripped the nation. This characterization of public sentiment could have important policy consequences—restrictive measures can be justified by growing public impatience, and progressive housing policies seem infeasible within a hostile climate of opinion. But evidence to support the compassion fatigue notion is anecdotal. We examine the issue by tracking the results of public opinion polls and by reporting detailed evidence from a nationwide random-digit dial telephone survey (N=1,507) concerning knowledge attitudes and beliefs about homeless people. To be sure, the public sees homelessness as an undesirable social problem and wants something done about it. However, although the homeless are clearly stigmatized, there is little evidence to suggest that the public has lost compassion and is unwilling to support policies to help homeless people.     

Parallel short forms of the family of origin scale: Evidence of their reliability and validity

Two parallel short forms of the Family of Origin Scale were developed from data provided by 69 women and 63 men who completed the full Family of Origin Scale along with a variety of measures of family-of-origin characteristics. Data on the reliability and validity of the short forms are provided and discussed. The results indicate that both short forms are strongly and significantly correlated with each other and with the full-scale version of the FOS and that they share its reliability and validity characteristics to a very high degree.     

A behavioral link between the oculomotor and cardiovascular systems

Although the eyes and the heart serve very different purposes, each receives autonomic innervation. Capitalizing on recent theoretical and technological innovations in the understanding and assessment of oculomotor and cardiovascular behavior, three experiments measured behavioral covariation between the oculomotor and cardiovascular systems. Measures of dark focus and dark vergence indexed oculomotor tone, and the spectral decomposition of variations in heart rate indexed cardiovascular control mechanisms. In Experiment 1, individual differences in cardiovascular parameters could predict individuals’ dark vergence (R²=.806) but not their dark focus (R²=.404). In Experiment 2, the same parameters were measured from subjects who experience either panic attacks (n=11) or blood phobia (n=9). Heart rate was positively correlated with dark vergence and the two subject groups were separable based on both oculomotor and cardiovascular variables. Using a within-subjects approach, Experiment 3 found that both dark vergence and dark focus tended to be nearer during sympathetic dominance of the heart than during parasympathetic dominance, within-subjects variations in cardiovascular parameters could predict dark focus, and between-subjects variations in interbeat intervals could predict dark vergence. Shared patterns of autonomic activation may be responsible for this eye-heart link.     

Exchange delays and impulsive choice in adult humans.

Choice responding by adult humans in a discrete-trial task was examined as a function of conditions that manipulated either the delay to point delivery or the delay between points and their exchange for money. In point-delay conditions, subjects chose between an "impulsive" alternative that provided a small amount of points immediately and a "self-control" alternative that provided a larger amount of points delayed by 15, 30, or 60 s. Points were exchanged for money immediately following the session. Subjects preferred the self-control alternative. In exchange-delay conditions, subjects chose between a small amount of points exchangeable for money immediately following the session and a larger amount of points exchangeable for money after 1 day, 3 weeks, or 6 weeks. A self-control preference observed for all subjects in the 1-day exchange-delay condition reversed to exclusive impulsive preference for 4 of the 6 subjects when choice conditions involved exchange delays of 3 or 6 weeks. These results show that human choice is sensitive to the manipulation of exchange delays and that impulsive preference can be obtained with exchange delays on the order of weeks.     

Functions of the environment in behavioral evolution

This paper explores some of the ways in which the environment functions with respect to behavior within an explanatory framework analogous to that of evolutionary biology. In both the behavioral and organic domains, the environment functions differently with respect to individual occurrences and evolutionary units. Within the behavioral domain, the problem of accounting for an occurrence of an operant instance differs from that of accounting for the existence of the operant unit of which the instance is a part. Maintaining these distinctions in levels of analysis within the behavioral domain, we focus first on operant units and operant instances as products of evolutionary processes occurring in the behavioral domain and second upon the causal role of the environment with respect to the existence of operant units and the occurrence of operant instances. The environment's function is selective with respect to origin, maintenance, suppression, and extinction of behavioral populations. At the level of operant instances, the environment has instantiating functions-evocative or alterative. Evocative functions are exemplified by discriminative relations, and alterative functions include both conditional and motivative relations. Implications are considered regarding extension of the analogy to more complex behavior-environment relations.     

The use of consultation in psychological practice: ethical, legal, and clinical considerations

The importance of consulting with other professionals to maintain acceptable standards of care is well documented in many health care professions. However, evidence indicates that many psychologists fail to utilize consultation when needed, and that consultation use varies along dimensions such as the education and training of the consultee, the type of setting, number of years in practice, and proximity to available consultants. In this article, we review the research on the use of consultation by psychologists as well as other health care professionals. We discuss the clinical, ethical, and legal implications of seeking consultation as a professional psychologist. Finally, a detailed and practical model for the regular use of consultation is given to improve the routine use of consultation in clinical practice.     

Racial Categorization and Stereotype-Based Judgments About Homeless People1

The present study uses a social-cognitive paradigm to examine the association between racial categorization and stereotype-based judgments about homeless people. The study uses data from a national White subsample (N= 1,221) surveyed about attitudes toward homeless/homeless mentally ill people. It was hypothesized that individual differences in perceptions of the representativeness of Blacks in the homeless population, as measured by subjective estimates of the percentage of Blacks, would be associated with the enhancement of racially relevant negative stereotypes about homeless people. A secondary hypothesis was that perceptions of the representativeness of Blacks would be more strongly associated with the stereotype of homeless people as dangerous than with the view of them as lazy. The results support these hypotheses.