Reviews of current books

Pastoral Psychology -     

Children's understanding of the self-presentational strategies of ingratiation and self-promotion

Eight- and eleven-year-olds' explanations for the self-presentational behaviour of story characters provided clear support for a predicted shift between these ages from understanding in terms of psychological to understanding in terms of interpersonal processes. However, a prediction that the strategy of self-promotion would be better understood than that of ingratiation was not supported.     

Central integration effects with stabilized afterimages

Prolonged patterned afterimages were used to study integration effects in stabilized images. Seven Ss were presented with various configurations of a pattern through a prism stereoscope, both monocularly and binocularly. Some of the fragmentations and regenerations reported in the binocular condition could only have resulted as a function of organization of the inputs to the two eyes, suggesting that postretinal processes are operative in stabilized image phenomena.     

CORRECTION DES VERBALISATIONS IRRATIONNELLES CHEZ DES JOUEURS DE POKER-VIDEO*

Earlier studies have shown that irrational thinking dominates rational thinking during gambling. The present study evaluated the effects of cognitive restructuring on gambling behaviors among video poker players. Within a single case experimental design across subjects, the results showed that irrational verbalizations decreased during treatment while rational verbalizations increased. Three out of four players reduced their frequency of gambling following treatment. The theoretical and clinical implications of these results are discussed.     

Syntactic complexity does not necessarily make sentences harder to understand

Researchers studying language comprehension have assumed that, all else being equal, more complex sentence constructions will take longer to process. However, results from experiments, such as the one presented in this paper, which use reading rates as the dependent measure suggest that it is the interaction of specific types of deep structure representations with their surface structure forms that accounts for fluctuations in readers' on-line processing of various sentence types. In particular, those sentences in which the deep structure direct object immediately precedes the verb in the surface structure sequence are easier for comprehenders to process. These data support a dual, parallel processing model of sentence comprehension in which lexical and morphological/relational information are processed independently.Johns Hopkins University.     

What is diagnosis? Some critical reflections

It is argued that the common definition of diagnosis as ‘the determination of the nature of a disease’ is misleading. Many diagnoses are not the names of disease entities. This finding reflects the integral relation of the diagnostic task to the rest of clinical reasoning. Diagnosis has no separate goal of its own, in particular it does not have the goal of determining the nature of a disease. Instead, diagnosis contributes to the general goals of clinical medicine. Any attempt to model diagnostic reasoning abstracted from the rest of clinical reasoning will yield an inadequate representation of diagnosis. Such a distortion of medical reasoning will blind us to whatever implications an adequate epistemology of medicine may have for an understanding of the relation between theoretical and practical knowledge in other contexts.     

Learned helplessness versus reactance: The effects of sex-role stereotypy

Both learned helplessness and reactance theories hypothesize that the effects of noncontingent reinforcement on later performance are related to the amount of experience with noncontingent reinforcement and to the subjects' expectations of control. In addition, learned helplessness theorists have suggested that performance may depend upon the causes to which subjects ascribe failure. The present study investigated these hypotheses by defining expectation of control as the degree of sex-role stereotypy and by assessing causal attributions. Forty men and 40 women were given either zero, three, four, five, or six discrimination problems for which they received noncontingent reinforcement; they were subsequently tested on anagrams and math problems. Causal attributions were rated after each set of tasks. The data suggested the following. (1) In general, under conditions of noncontingency, high masculinity subjects performed better on anagrams and low masculinity subjects performed worse on anagrams than subjects in the control conditions; stereotypic femininity was not related to performance. (2) Ratings of attributions for failing the discrimination problems were generally unrelated to performance, although there was weak support for the facilitating effects of effort attributions. (3) Subsequent to anagram and math performance, women rated external attributions higher following success and internal attributions higher following failure than did men. The implications for learned helplessness and reactance theories are discussed.The authors would like to thank Stephen Haynes and Jack McKillip for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.