The relationship between personal authority in the family system and discovery of meaning in life

This study investigated the relationship between intergenerational family relationships and Frankl's concept of meaning in life. Intergenerational family relationships were measured by the Personal Authority in the Family System Questionnaire (PAFS-QE) by Bray, Williamson, and Malone. The meaning in life variables were measured by the Life Attitude Profile-Revised (LAP-R) by Reker. This quantitative study, using the BMDP Statistical Package (Dixon, 1990), correlated the scores on various subscales from both instruments, resulting in seven statistically significant relationships. The findings, although modest, suggest the existence of a relationship between these two theoretical areas.This article is based in part on the first author's doctoral dissertation at Texas Woman's University.A copy of the PAFS-Q may be obtained from: James H. Bray, PhD, 5510 Greenbriar, Houston, TX 77005. A copy of the LAP-R may be obtained from: Gary Reker, PhD, Trent University, Psychology Department, Peterborough, Ontario Canada K9J 7B8.     

Comparison of simultaneous prompting and constant time delay procedures in teaching sight words to elementary students with moderate mental retardation

Simultaneous prompting (a type of antecedent prompt and test procedure) and constant time delay were compared with four students with moderate mental retardation learning expressive sight words. A parallel treatments design across word sets and replicated across students was used. For acquisition, the simultaneous prompting procedures required fewer trials, sessions, and training time to criterion and resulted in fewer student errors during daily probe and training sessions. However, maintenance data indicated mixed results across the two procedures. Reliability data (both dependent and independent variables) revealed no differences between the two procedures in terms of the teacher's accuracy in recording student responses and implementing each procedure. Future research issues are discussed.     

Developmental psychology in the real world: A paradigm of parent education

Twenty years ago, William Kessen, Greta Fein and I developed and tested a model of parent education, a model which involved variation in curricular content, didactic approaches, and child outcomes–experimentally contrasted. Our experience yielded some valuable lessons about the extent to which researchers can influence parents' behaviour, and parents their children's development. In the present article I suggest that these lessons might be useful for researchers now as they were for us then. I present some observations about the research that developmental psychologists have done in the intervening two decades and suggest that we could learn much by using such a model of parent education to answer questions about the effets of parents' behaviour on children's development. Carefully done, parent education studies can yield valuable information about many of the questions raised in recent correlational research. Parent training research can suggest hypotheses that can be tested with data collected non-interventively and analysed in causal model analyses–and vice versa. What is more, because one reason for studying parent effects is so that we can offer guidance to parents about rearing their children, this design has a particular advantage; it is both the medium and the message.     

Marital satisfaction and family stress as predictors of classroom behaviors

The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between parents' perceptions of marital satisfaction and family stress and their third grade children's classroom behavior. Twenty-one married couples completed questionnaires during home visits. Behavior observations were made from videotapes of children recorded in their classroom during lunch and group academic periods on each of three days. Frequencies of peer interactions, solitary behaviors, and teacher interactions were coded. Regression analyses showed that mothers' level of marital satisfaction (but not fathers') predicted their children's frequency of peer interactions during lunch. Fathers' level of perceived family stress (but not mothers') predicted their children's frequency of peer interactions during lunch. Neither measure for either parent was related to the frequency of peer interactions, solitary behaviors, or teacher interactions observed during the academic sessions. These findings highlight the importance of assessing the potential differential relation of parent variables to children's trans-situational behaviors, and the examination of these variables in relation to different social-environmental contexts in which children participate outside the home.     

Effects of attentional focusing on pain perception

Two experiments were conducted to examine the hypothesized differential effectiveness of two attentional focusing strategies in pain perception. In the first experiment, subjects (72 male college students) rated their levels of pain after being exposed to either low- or high-intensity pressure stimulation for 75 s. Subjects were instructed to use either an external or internal focus of attention during the pain induction. Results revealed that external focusing was more effective for coping than internal focusing across both levels of stimulus intensity. The second experiment was a replication of the first, and featured bolstered internal focusing and stimulus intensity manipulations. Results showed that high-intensity stimulation produced higher pain ratings than did low-intensity stimulation for subjects in the internal focusing conditions, but not for those in the external focusing conditions. The findings support the power of distraction strategies for dealing with short-term pain with a rapid onset. Theoretical implications are discussed.The authors thank Darwyn E. Linder and Daniel M. Landers for their help in development of this research. The authors are also indebted to Sarah Colley, Jona Davis, Nanci Neuberger, and Rebecca Roberts for their assistance in data collection.     

Varieties of size-specific visual selection

Compared time to evaluate stimuli of varying sizes. When Ss expect an upcoming stimulus to be a certain size, response time increases with the disparity between expected and actual size. There are, however, 2 size adjustment processes, and they reflect 2 types of visual selection. In the first, a shape-specific image representation is used to separate a visual object from a superimposed distractor. These representations require the type of slow size scaling demonstrated in imagery experiments. The second size scaling process is faster and not shape-specific. At any given time the visual system is set to process information at a particular scale, and that scale can be adjusted to match an object's size. Because both selection mechanisms depend on size, they probably occur at a relatively low, spatially organized processing level. These findings lead to a new explanation for results that had been taken as evidence for attentional selection at the level of object representations.     

Alcoholism and morphologic findings of the nervous system in autopsy cases

154 autopsy cases of alcoholics (120 men and 34 women) were investigated from a neuropathological viewpoint. In only 19 cases could typical diseases of the nervous system caused by alcoholism be found (Wernicke's encephalopathy, central pontine myelinolysis, Marchiafava-Bignami's disease and disorders of the peripheral nerves and muscles). In comparison liver diseases occurred almost five times more frequently in our own material. Diseases caused by alcoholism of the nervous system, the question of brain shrinkage and its partial reversibility, the up to now not completely known effects on the neurophil and cortical cytoarchitectonic are discussed according to the literature.