Managing Attitudes Toward High Achievers: The Influence 0f Group Discussion

For a variety of cultural, contextual, and interpersonal reasons, individual achievement often meets with potentially demotivating resistance from the group. In groups of between three and seven members, 397 psychology and social work students, in East and Northern Australian cities (Newcastle and Darwin), indicated their attitudes toward high achievers before, during, and after a group consensus task. In each location, and at both individual and group levels of analysis, initially slightly pro-achiever attitudes, following discussion of the issues, became polarized. Such changes, across diverse settings and groups, indicate that group discussion may be a robust tool, both for empowering teams and encouraging support for individual initiative.     

Perceptual tuning and conscious attention: Systems of input regulation in visual information processing

Literature is reviewed in support of very early perceptual input regulation which can be based on higher-order conceptual or structural stimulus properties. This learning-dependent perceptual tuning takes two forms: preconscious orientation, which operates automatically in the processing of most visual information and can be observed as a strong tendency to parse scenic information in terms of conceptually meaningful distinctions, and temporary tuning, in which perceptual biases are modified on a task-specific basis with respect to either scenic information or stimuli whose conceptual properties are arbitrary or conventional such as words as opposed to nonsensical letter strings. Perceptual tuning is contrasted with conscious attention, which is primarily a task selector rather than an input selector.     

Stimulus control of self-destructive behavior in a psychotic child

This study attempted to isolate some of the stimulus variables that controlled the self-destructive behavior of a psychotic child. In Experiment 1, the child was exposed to several demand and nondemand situations. In Experiment 2, the situation containing demands was modified so that demands now occurred in the context of a positive, ongoing interaction between the child and the adult therapist. The rates of self-destructive behavior underwent several orderly changes: (1) Rates were high in demand situations and low in nondemand and modified-demand situations; (2) rates decreased sharply when a stimulus correlated with the termination of demands was introduced; and (3) rates of self-destruction typically showed gradual increases within each of those sessions which contained only demands. These results were interpreted as suggesting that (1) self-destruction, under certain circumstances, may be conceptualized as an escape response which is negatively reinforced by the termination of a demand situation and (2) certain modifications of the social environment may provide discriminative stimuli for behaviors other than self-destruction, thereby decreasing this behavior.This investigation was supported in part by USPHS Research Grant 11440 from the National Institute of Mental Health. The research was conducted while the first author held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Medical Research Council of Canada. The authors thank Jon and Lynn Killion and Dennis Russo for their help in data collection and Ivar Lovaas, Laura Schreibman, and Robert Koegel for their many helpful criticisms. The encouragement and support of Tim's parents during the course of this study are sincerely appreciated.     

Effects of information load, sensory modality, and age on paced inspection performance

The effects on paced inspection performance of amount of stimulus information, presentation of information visually, as opposed to visually and auditorily, and age were investigated. In comparison to performance with one sequence of visual information, correct identifications of signals declined and false alarms increased when two sequences of visual information were monitored. Increasing the number of classes of signals in the two sequences did not significantly affect performance. However, when one of the two sequences was presented visually and the other auditorily, performance improved. There was a tendency for performance to be lower among older subjects in most experimental conditions.     

The concept of formal justice

Conclusion In Greek mythology, Themis, the goddess of justice, is blindfolded so that she may not see those who stand before her, and consequently, so that she can administer justice consistently and impartially. The imagery provides an apt illustration of the formal dimension of justice. Yet it serves only to blind us to the actual workings and character of the practice of doing justice. I have argued here that we must take seriously the full implications of material principles of jusitce. And when we do, there is no longer any conceptual space left in our reflections on justice for the virtue of formal justice. Of course, the just treatment of relevantly similar subjects does result in the equal treatment of these subjects; this, after all, is a logical consequence of acting upon a material principle of justice in similar cases. But this, let me emphasize, is only a consequence of doing justice and as such it reveals only a contingent feature of doing justice. The proponents of the formal dimension of justice have, so to speak, failed to see the trees through the forest. Impressed by the consequence of equality of treatment between cases, they have generalized their observations into specific claims about what it means to do justice to certain subjects. These generalizations, in turn, have led to the unfortunate and misleading reification of the concept of formal justice.Moreover, by exposing the myth of formal justice, the image of justice as an austere, rationalistic, and abstract virtue is also called into question. Justice is not blind to particular subjects. Quite the contrary, it looks to those who stand before her and demands from us the response which is appropriate for them. The practice of doing justice, this is to say, signals the need to respect the rights and deserts of particular subjects. Or rather, we comprehend and express this need by means of the practice of doing justice.     

Differentiation Matching Versus Level of Differentiation in Students' Judgments of Teacher Effectiveness

The present study examined the role of differentiation matching and level of differentiation in student-teacher relationships. Subjects were residents, mental health specialists, and medical students enrolled in psychiatry courses and in five core curriculum courses, and the respective faculty professors. All subjects completed measures of differentiation at the beginning of the course and students rated the teaching effectiveness of the faculty at the end. Judged teaching "effectiveness" was associated with a high level of interpersonal differentiation on the part of the teacher. Differentiation matching of teachers and student was related to high effectiveness ratings when the student was more differentiated than the teacher under conditions of frequent teacher exposure and familiarity.     

Lexical access and the brain: anatomical constraints on cognitive models of word recognition.

Recent studies in the cognitive psychology of reading and many other skilled performances have been dominated by models inspired by neural connectivity (e.g., McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986). Such models have not yet begun to consider the accumulating evidence of considerable anatomical localization of component cognitive operations in the human brain (e.g., Posner, Petersen, Fox, & Raichle, 1988). In this article we apply anatomical findings to the job of building computational models of visual word recognition. Brain imaging studies already provide important constraints on how lexical access should be defined in terms of isolable encoding operations that compute the visual form, phonology, and semantics of words. Brain imaging studies also speak to issues of modularity versus interaction between these encoding operations, distribution versus localization of processing within the operations, and orchestration of operations to accomplish different word processing tasks. We conclude that a combined cognitive and anatomical analysis may be of considerable benefit in developing more adequate models of human information processing.