Joining with all members of a family system: The rhetoric of antilogic in family therapy dialogue

Family therapists face a significant rhetorical challenge in working with families that disagree about the problematic life-situation which brought them to therapy. Therapists must find a way to join with disagreeing family members and then find a way to engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with them. Thus, they must deal resourcefully with contradictions. This article explores the ways that the Sophistic rhetorical concept of antilogic may be employed in helping therapists join and then engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with families who hold contradictory views concerning the problem that brought them to therapy.The author wishes to thank Ronald Chenail, PhD, Douglas Flemons, PhD, and Shelly Green, PhD, for their assistance in the development of this project.     

Black-white personality differences: another look.

Investigated the meaning of Black-White differences typically discovered on personality instruments by administering a pool of items derived from both the MMPI and California Psychological Inventory, as well as a group form of the Embedded Figures Test, to a sample of 226 black and white junior college students. A cluster analysis of the unexpectedly large number of inventory items significantly differentiating the two races produced reliable and meaningful configurations. Interpretations of race differences on these clusters and the EFT provide a new perspective on the meaning of Black-White personality differences.     

Instructions and decision times of size-constancy responses

The current study investigated the effect of instructions and stimulus discriminability on size-constancy responses and decision times in a task allowing separate evaluation of the effects of instructions and of dimensional choices by the subjects in the size-constancy task. Objective, perspective, or distance matches were influenced both by the instructions given the subject and by the relative discriminability of the stimuli in each dimension, so that subjects did not always successfully follow their instructions. Decision times were found to be fastest with perspective rather than objective or apparent instructions, but times taken to produce objective and perspective matches did not differ. Apparently, both objective and perspective judgments are available to the perceiver before a response is made, but instructions affect postperceptual response times.     

Sequential precession and diminishing returns in the acquisition of a motor skill

As students progress to higher and higher levels in the acquisition of a skill their number gets smaller and smaller. This article concerns the average length of time it takes the members of these successively smaller groups to complete earlier stages of skill acquisition. In the data presented, which concern Red Cross swimming, the more advanced a group is the less time its members take on the average to complete a preceding stage (sequential precession). The discussion section brings out a second relation in the same data: Namely, the further the same students advance in skill acquisition the smaller the advantage they enjoy over other students at the same level (diminishing returns).     

Augmentation of in vivo exposure treatment for agoraphobia by the formation of neighbourhood self-help groups

The advantages of selecting agoraphobic patients for treatment by group exposure according to their residential geographic neighbourhood were evaluated in terms of facilitation of ‘homework’ practice and increased social contact. Both ‘zoned’ and ‘unzoned’ groups showed gains in ability to perform hierarchy items after 11 sessions of exposure, relative to a no-treatment control group. However only zoned subjects showed significant reductions in experienced anxiety when executing such items. Self-ratings of overall phobic severity also suggested a zoned group was superior to unzoned while assessors' ratings indicated both groups as equally improved. Only zoned subjects showed a significant increase in social range. Improvements were maintained at 3-months follow-up. No effect of treatment was found on either the Zung measure of anxious mood or on social integration.These results suggest that, where practical, zoning might offer the means for desirable continuation of intensive clinic-based group treatment as well as the benefit of extending treatment into the patients' environment as in home-based treatments. Crucial levels of group cohesion might also be increased although therapists should be prepared to negotiate resistance to a socially demanding programme from patients with significant additional social phobias.     

The air gap phenomenon in children's landscape drawings

The “air gap” phenomenon was found to be very common in the free landscape drawings of middle and later childhood. Three experiments are reported in which the contextual cues for such drawings were systematically manipulated. When subjects were supplied with drawing sheets constructed to imply the absence of the air gap, the phenomenon was eliminated in most of their drawings. When supplied with sheets constructed to imply its presence, most subjects produced air gap drawings using contextually provided reference lines. There were no consistent transfer effects across different cuing orders. The susceptibility of the air gap phenomenon to modification by task manipulation suggests that it results from problems of production rather than from defects in the child's internal representation of the world.     

Personality and the topography of the conditioned eyelid response

One-hundred and four women were tested on an eyelid conditioning paradigm in a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design where two levels of US intensity (1 vs 3 p.s.i.) were balanced against two rest pause interpolations (after 25 and after 50 trials), and the presence or absence of a warning stimulus prior to CS-US presentation. Subjects were later classified as high, low or intermediate extraverts on the basis of a personality questionnaire. A very detailed analysis of conditioned responses was carried out, using both simple and composite measures including work-ratio, utility-ratio, CR frequency, peak latency, peak amplitude, response area and effective response area, degree of avoidance amplitude and latency, etc. Major findings related to similar effects of high intensity US vs low intensity US, and introversion vs extraversion; introverts react as if they were responding to more intense stimuli than extraverts. This finding cuts across other parameter variables, and supports Eysenck's formulation of personality-conditioning relationships in terms of higher cortical arousal in introverts as compared with extraverts.     

The importance of inhalation volume when measuring smoking behavior

Theoretical and technical considerations of measuring puff and inhalation volumes during cigarette smoking are reviewed. Measures of smoking behavior using a flowmeter and inductance plethysmography are described and demonstrated with seven subjects smoking over a 3-to 4-h period. Puff volume and duration, inhaled volume and duration, interpuff and intercigarette interval, and number of puffs varied for each individual over the session. The ratio of puff volume to inhaled volume changed with successive cigarettes. Smokers adjust the concentration of smoke by blending air with the smoke. Thus, to completely characterize smoking behavior, the volume of smoke and air inhaled into the lungs must be measured directly.