ADULTS LISTEN SELECTIVELY; INFANTS DO NOT

Abstract— Infants' auditory detection thresholds are higher than adult thresh olds. Since adults listen selectively for an expected test tone frequency, and selective listening improves their detection performance, one hypothesis about why infant thresholds are high is that infants do not listen selectively. This hypothesis was tested by obtaining listening bands from adults and from 7- to 9-month-old infants. The results replicate earlier findings that adults listen selectively but indicate that infants do not. Lack of selective listening likely contributes to infants' high thresholds. Further, the finding that infants and adults have different listening strategies has implications for infants' auditory perception in general.     

The temporal selectivity of additive factor effects on the reaction process revealed in ERP component latencies

An experiment was conducted to relate individual components of the event-related brain potential to specific stages of information processing in a two-choice reaction time (RT) task in a group of undergraduate students. Specifically, the latency of the P300 component and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) were studied as a function of variations in stimulus degradation and response complexity. It was hypothesized that degrading the stimulus would delay the P300 and LRP to the same extent as RT, and that increasing response complexity would affect RT but not P300 latency. The extant literature did not permit any hypothesis regarding the effect of response complexity on LRP latency. The two task variables were found to have additive effects on RT. As predicted, variations in stimulus degradation influenced the latencies of both components, whereas alterations in response complexity had no effect on P300 latency. A significant new finding was that the onset latency of the LRP remained unchanged across levels of response complexity. The overall pattern of results supports the notion of temporal selectivity of stage manipulations that is derived from discrete stage models of human information processing. Furthermore, these results refine the functional interpretation of the LRP by indicating that within the conceptual framework of a stage model the processes this component indexes succeed the start of response choice but precede the start of motor programming.     

Cholinergic rebound after chlorpromazine exacerbates lithium muscarinic-induced limbic seizures in rats: implications for psychiatric treatment.

When lithium serum levels were within the (human) therapeutic range, young and old adult male and female rats (housed singly or in groups) all displayed faster limbic seizure onset times in response to a muscarinic cholinergic agonist (pilocarpine 20 mg/kg) if a single systemic dosage of chlorpromazine was injected 24 hours previously. The effect was comparable to injecting an additional 10 mg/kg of pilocarpine. These results strongly suggest that cholinergic rebound from chlorpromazine administrations during lithium treatment could facilitate subclinical electrical lability and very localized neuronal necrosis within the limbic system of clinical patients, resulting in normalization of psychiatric symptoms.     

Victim-Blaming and Society-Blaming Scales for Social Problems

Until now, no general scales have been available for measuring victim or society blaming. This constraint has been an impediment to policymaking with regard to those who are affected by social problems. Four scales were constructed: stable victim-blaming scale, unstable victim-blaming scale, stable society-blaming scale, and unstable society-blaming scale. Based on the results of the preliminary exploratory factor analysis and the reliability coefficients, the unstable society-blaming scale was deleted from further analysis. Then, a confirmatory factor analysis using the LISREL 7 program was conducted to evaluate the parameter estimates of the scale items and examine the construct validity of the 3 scales. The scales were judged to have construct validity with satisfactory reliability.     

The Career Satisfaction of the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision Members

Members of the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision completed a questionnaire on career satisfaction. A majority reported being quite satisfied with their careers. Most experienced only occasional burnout, and over half perceived their career stress as no greater than moderate.     

BODY IMAGE AND SOCIOCULTURAL NORMS

Internalization of sociocultural norms about the body has been theorized to be an important factor in fostering body dissatisfaction in women. Some theorists have suggested that a lesbian identity may buffer or immunize lesbians from the damaging effects of society's pressure to be thin by reducing this internalization. This study was designed to test this claim empirically. Questionnaires were completed by 108 lesbians and 115 heterosexual women recruited through snowball sampling. Lesbians felt more fit, reported less negative attitudes toward their lower bodies, and internalized sociocultural norms less than heterosexual women. For all women, internalization of sociocultural norms significantly predicted body attitudes. Lesbians and heterosexual women appear to be similarly exposed to and aware of society's messages, and as such their body attitudes substantially overlap. However, lesbians are buffered from these views in some specific areas. These differences appear to be primarily the result of differential internalization of sociocultural norms.     

Teacher stress and guidance work in Hong Kong secondary school teachers

Major sources of stress in Hong Kong teachers were investigated, with specific reference to guidance work as a potential source of stress. A survey of 415 secondary school teachers revealed that guidance-related aspects of work constituted a major dimension of stress, with guidance teachers, female teachers, younger teachers and junior teachers perceiving more stress than their counterparts in this dimension. Workload and time pressure were perceived as the most stressful aspects of work for all teachers. Results also showed an association between stress and job satisfaction, and biographical variables. Implications of the findings for teachers doing guidance work in Hong Kong and internationally are discussed.     

Further tests of a meta-model of youthful marijuana use

This paper tests a meta-model of youthful marijuana use on students in Grades 11, 12 and 13. Although the specific models for each grade varied in detail, all followed a meta-model making the following assumptions: (1) that use or nonuse of marijuana depends primarily on attitude towards use; (2) that attitude largely reflects the perceived functional and dysfunctional consequences of use; and (3) that what people perceive as functional or dysfunctional depends on relevant personality characteristics. All three models showed satisfactory goodness-of-fit in terms of nonsignificant overidentification tests (minimum P > 0.25) and small discrepancies between observed correlations and the corresponding theoretically implied correlations. A notable feature of the Grade 13 data in contrast to those for Grade 12 and previously reported findings was the seeming unimportance of the perceived value of marijuana use for gaining acceptance from peers. It was suggested that this might reflect the selective survival into Grade 13 in the sampled community of more independently-oriented students.     

The retention of nouns,adjectives, and verbs of sentences

This research compared the retention of nouns, adjectives and verbs of sentences. A model of the structure underlying the retention of sentences and in which deep structure constituent propositions are hierarchically related, was used to make predictions concerning the retention of these word classes. The model was not supported by the data and it was determined that latencies to recognize the words of a previously presented sentence were the same for all classes of words. This result indicated that for recognition (but not necessarily for other memory tasks), each word of a sentence is seperately or equally accessible (as long as inter-word imagery is the same). However, a further experiment showed that, although word class is not a variable, the image-arousing capacity of a word is. Latencies and error rates were much lower for high-imagery words than for low-imagery ones. The findings on error rates in recognizing words were interesting and pointed to a different model where the meaning representations and syntatic functions of words have an active role in sentence retention.