Family therapy with problem drinkers and drug takers: A pilot follow-up study

We report a retrospective outcome study of 36 problem drinkers and/or drug takers, treated with structural-strategic family therapy. The interval between treatment and follow-up varied from six months to two years. Follow-up data was available on 34 cases. Twenty had a pure alcohol problem and of these 18 had a good outcome at follow up. Five had a mixed drug/alcohol problem; of these all were free from problem drinking and four had become abstinent from drugs at follow-up. Of the nine patients with a pure drug problems, eight were abstinent from drugs at follow-up. Given the retrospective nature of this study and the lack of control data, these results must remain impressionistic but the implications of the findings are discussed.     

Men as success objects and women as sex objects: A study of personal advertisements

A study was made of 328 personal advertisements sampled from a major daily Canadian newspaper. It was found that gender differences for desired companion attributes were consistent with traditional sex role stereotypes. Relative to the opposite sex, women emphasized employment, financial, and intellectual status, as well as commitment, while men emphasized physical characteristics. Physical characteristics were the most desired, regardless of sex. Secondary findings were that, for this sample, considerably more men than women placed ads, and that the mean age for both sexes was relatively high. The main findings were similar to those from earlier studies.The author was formerly a psychiatric social worker employed by the Greater Vancouver Mental Health Service in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He is presently a doctoral candidate at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. The author would like to thank Dr. Ted Palys for his comments.     

Ratings of Emotional Response to Pictorial Stimuli: Positive and Negative Affect Dimensions

The purpose of this study was to investigate the structure of emotional responses to pictorial stimuli within the affective space defined by orthogonal dimensions of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). College student participants (N = 151) viewed 60 color photographic slides from the International Affective Picture System (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1995) and rated their emotional responses to each slide using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). Consistent with prediction, affective reactions to pleasant slides were characterized as high in PA, and low in NA. Unpleasant slides produced elevations on the NA scale, but contrary to expectation, also produced elevated ratings of PA, with the magnitude of PA scale scores increasing systematically with NA scale scores. The results suggest an interesting divergence between the structure of pictorially elicited affective reactions and that of ad hoc mood states. Directions for future research are discussed in relation to the unique properties of the slide viewing paradigm.     

Preference for familiar humans by rats

Many “higher” animals are commonly assumed to distinguish between individual humans. This belief is based largely on anecdotal reports; in reality, there is little empirical evidence to support human recognition in nonhuman species. We report that laboratory rats consistently chose a familiar human over an unfamiliar human following fourteen and five 10-min exposures and even following a single 10-min exposure. Furthermore, this preference was retained in the absence of additional contact for at least 5 months. These results confirm that laboratory rats can tell individual humans apart, a prerequisite for associating them with hedonic events. Such human-based conditioning, described by Pavlov and by Gantt, Newton, Royer, and Stephens (1966), may have important implications for animal research in a variety of settings.     

Opportunities For Learning: Course Sequences and Positional Advantages

Course sequences are strands of courses in particular content areas that span a student's educational career. Courses that are differentiated and sequentially organized, such as mathematics and science course sequences, create opportunities for positional advantages in a school's curricular structure. When students make a nonroutine change of schools – that is, transferring to a school outside of the regular attendance zone – they are at risk of changing their positional advantage. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988–94 (NELS:88–94), we examine the educational outcomes of sequences and explore curricular dislocations within the context of school choice. We find that the strongest predictors of 12th-grade mathematics and science course sequences are a student's course sequences at 10th grade. With regard to outcomes, students in higher mathematics and science sequences show greater achievement gains. Furthermore, students in higher mathematics sequences are less likely to have behavior problems and are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. Students who make a nonroutine change of schools are more likely to be in lower course sequences than students who do not transfer. Thus, course sequences in mathematics and science are tangible experiences with real consequences for students' lives during and beyond high school and are sensitive to transitions which disrupt the continuity of students' high school careers.     

Resource-Allocation Behavior in Complex but Commonplace Tasks

We all face resource-allocation tasks, yet little is known about how people make resource-allocation decisions. Three earlier papers (Langholtz, Gettys, & Foote, 1993, 1994, 1995) established that people can intuitively solve technical two-dimensional resource-allocation problems, where allocations are made on a continuous scale, reaching solutions that approach the optimum solution determined with Linear Programming (LP). In this research we expand our understanding of how people make resource-allocation decisions by examining how people perform complex but commonplace problems using a discrete scale where optimal solutions are determined with Integer Programming. We also contrast performance under conditions where progressively unequal scheduling is required to reach the optimum solution. The data show people can achieve solutions that provide most of the payoffs found with LP, even when they are faced with a complicated three-dimensional problem, but there is a tendency toward equal scheduling under all conditions.