Student gender and the probability of referral for counselling in a college of further education

A small pilot study was carried out to investigate whether college tutors' perceptions of students' counselling needs were dependent on the gender of the student. Twenty-five tutors were asked to read six vignettes describing composite case-studies of students showing overt distress. The vignettes were constructed to represent two of each of three types of problem (anxiety, depression and aggression). One of each clinical type depicted a female student and the other a male. The tutors were asked to evaluate each of the six vignettes along a visual analogue scale, according to the perceived urgency of the problem and its long-term nature. The results were then analysed using two-factor within-subjects anovas and unplanned multiple pairwise comparisons to establish whether there existed any differences on these dimensions. Of the analyses computed, it was found that depressive vignettes were considered to be in more urgent need of referral than were anxious or aggressive vignettes; that males were generally considered to have a more urgent need for referral than were females; that anxiety was construed as a less enduring problem than was depression or aggression; and that male aggressive vignettes were considered to be a longer-term problem than were females, anxious or depressive clients. These results indicate that some sex-role stereotyping exists with respect to psychological problems. This is discussed in terms of equal opportunities and access to student support systems.     

The Effects of Censorship on Attitude Change: The Influence of Censor and Communication Characteristics1

The effects of censor characteristics and audiences' initial agreement with a censored communication on attitude change and desire to hear a communication were investigated. Subjects were informed that a communication taking a position with which they had originally agreed or disagreed had been censored. The censor was either an attractive or unattractive agent and his expertise on the topic of the speech was either high or low. The results indicated that in all cases except one, censorship led to an increased desire to hear the communication and attitude change toward the position of the communication. In the one exceptional case, when an attractive expert censor forbade a communication with which the audience disagreed, the subjects decreased their desire to hear the speech and did not change their attitudes on the topic of the communication. The results were interpreted as indicating that censorship arouses both reactance and balancing attempts but that balancing will be observed only in limited situations.     

Linguistic influences on visual memory

The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis has raised considerable controversy in the literatures of psychology and anthropology. Several misconceptions of the hypothesis are reviewed, and the hypothesis was experimentally supported in a visual reproduction paradigm. Subjects were first given label training for a set of figures, and were then asked to recall by drawing the shapes. Training with categorized labels resulted in a 25% improvement in recall when compared to a condition with nonword (paralog) labels. Even stronger evidence of linguistic influence on visual memory was obtained by examining the order of recall. The conceptual relationships among labels strongly influenced the sequence of reproductions.     

Reducing delusional speech in chronic, paranoid schizophrenics

Four schizophrenic patients with paranoid and grandiose delusions who had been hospitalized for an average of 17 yr were exposed to social reinforcement contingencies in a multiple baseline design. During the baseline period, each patient was interviewed for four 10-min sessions each day. The elapsed time from onset of conversation to onset of delusional talk was recorded. At the end of each day, the patients engaged in a 30-min informal chat with a nurse-therapist while relaxing with coffee, snacks, and cigarettes. The intervention introduced two contingencies: (1) The 10-min interviews were terminated as soon as the patient began talking delusionally; (2) The patients earned time for their evening chat by talking rationally during their daytime interviews. Increases of from 200 to 600% in the amount of rational talk exhibited during the interviews occurred as the contingencies were introduced for each patient sequentially over time. These increases were maintained in three patients when the amount of reinforcement was halved, but declined when the patients were confronted directly with their delusional ideas. A modest amount of generalization occurred from the day-time interviews to the evening chats but did not extend to the behavior of the patients on the ward.     

Reinforcement therapy in the classroom

Teachers were trained in the systematic use of attention and praise to reduce the disruptive classroom behavior of four first-grade children. Observation measures showed a significant improvement from baseline to treatment for these children and no significant changes for same-class controls. While the amount of teacher attention to target children remained the same from baseline to treatment, the proportion of attention to task-relevant behavior of these children increased. Psychological tests revealed no adverse changes after treatment.     

Body sway during long-term standing and as affected by pure tones

Sixty students, male and female, were used as Ss to test the effect of a 1, 000-Hz, 5-sec tone at 0, 70, and 90 dB, on standing sway. In general, antero-posterior sway was greater than lateral, and males swayed more than females in both directions. In addition, males increased their sway in time, whereas females did not. Only lateral sway in the 5-sec interval after the presentation of the tone increased, and only after 10, 15, and 20 min of standing, with a maximum at 15 min. Amplitude of lateral sway appeared independent of bodily characteristics, and is suggested as being more useful for comparing Ss than is antero-posterior sway.