Acceptability of behavioral staff management techniques

This study describes an extension of Kazdin's work on acceptability of behavior therapy methods to the assessment of acceptability in the developing field of behavioral staff management. An instrument for assessing acceptability of behavioral staff management techniques was developed and then used to assess staff evaluations of four techniques that have been researched in the staff management literature (instruction, reinforcement, punishment, self-management). The effects on acceptability of problem difficulty and duration of supervisor-staff interaction were also investigated. Staff identified the techniques as having differing degrees of acceptability, with instruction rated most acceptable, followed in order by self-management, reinforcement, and punishment. Ancillary studies supported the reliability and validity of the scale. Results are placed within the context of a recent behavioral supervision model, and discussed in terms of social validity and consumer satisfaction issues. Implications for delivering behavioral staff management interventions are presented.     

A computer simulation of children’s arithmetic word-problem solving

ARITHPRO is a computer simulation of children’s arithmetic word-problem solving behavior. It is an instantiation of a recently proposed cognitive model of the knowledge and procedures required to solve such problems. The program solves word problems by (1) comprehending the story text in which the problem is embedded, (2) comprehending numerical information as sets of objects, (3) building superstructures from these sets, thereby specifying their logical relations, and (4) using a counting procedure to derive the answer to the problem. This report describes ARITHPRO and its architecture and knowledge base. A few comparisons of ARITHPRO’s performance with that of children are also provided.     

PROMOTING LOW-FAT ENTREE CHOICES IN A PUBLIC CAFETERIA

Reductions in dietary fat have been recommended in the prevention of coronary heart disease. Because entrees contribute substantially to total meal fat content, we evaluated a cafeteria-based intervention for increasing the purchase rate of low-fat entrees (M = 6.83 g) relative to nonlowfat entrees (M = 25.59 g). The intervention included a poster listing the benefits of a LF diet and the daily LF entrees (i.e., broiled or baked chicken and fish dishes). During 6 days per phase, food selections (N = 3,264) were monitored by trained observers. The intervention, which cost $80.00, produced significant increases (i.e., from 20% to 35%) in the purchase rate of LF entrees.     

BODY-VESSEL-MATRIX: CO-CREATIVE IMAGES OF SYNERGETIC UNIVERSE

Abstract: In his essay "Goddesses of the Twenty-first Century," R. Buckminster Fuller's use of woman and goddess as metaphor suggests a fruitful source of images illuminating synergetic principles. Using five images, clustered as odyvessel-matrix, the article suggests an epistemology and a heuristic for connecting the personal-physical and the universal-metaphysical. These images are (1) the Egyptian goddess Nut, (2) the Greek earth goddesses, (3) Neolithic Maltese goddess temples, (4) the double spiral, and (5) the Apollo Mission's Earth photographs. These images are intended as transformational synergetic/ecofeminist figures to replace images of deprivation, alienation, and destruction with images of abundance, intimacy, and co-creation.     

Theft reduction in a grocery store through product identification and graphing of losses for employees

Shoplifting and employee theft constitute a major problem for retailers. Previous research has described techniques for effectively reducing either type of theft but has not addressed the problem of thefts of unspecified origin. In a grocery store we evaluated the effect of identifying for employees frequently stolen products from three groups of items and graphing, twice weekly in the lunchroom, losses for the separate groups. After the products were identified and losses graphed, thefts from the three groups dropped from eight per day to two per day.     

The role of understanding in solving word problems

Word problems are notoriously difficult to solve. We suggest that much of the difficulty children experience with word problems can be attributed to difficulty in comprehending abstract or ambiguous language. We tested this hypothesis by (1) requiring children to recall problems either before or after solving them, (2) requiring them to generate final questions to incomplete word problems, and (3) modeling performance patterns using a computer simulation. Solution performance was found to be systematically related to recall and question generation performance. Correct solutions were associated with accurate recall of the problem structure and with appropriate question generation. Solution “errors” were found to be correct solutions to miscomprehended problems. Word problems that contained abstract or ambiguous language tended to be miscomprehended more often than those using simpler language, and there was a great deal of systematicity in the way these problems were miscomprehended. Solution error patterns were successfully simulated by manipulating a computer model's language comprehension strategies, as opposed to its knowledge of logical set relations.     

The effectiveness of different types of pragmatic implications found in commercials to mislead subjects

Statements concerning the truthfulness of claims made in 16 tape-recorded commercials about fictitious products were judged by 40 college students. In half of the commercials a claim was directly asserted while in the other half the claims were pragmatically implied. Pragmatic implications are statements that lead a person to believe something that is neither explicitly stated nor necessarily implied. As expected based upon previous research, subjects often responded to implied claims as if they had been directly asserted (particularly by subjects in the short delay group). In addition, differences were found in the effectiveness of four different types of pragmatic implications for misleading subjects.     

Psychosocial risk and resistance factors among children with chronic illness,healthy siblings,and healthy controls

Psychosocial risk and resistance factors within the domains of parental functioning, family Stressors, and family resources were examined as predictors of psychological adjustment and physical problems in juvenile rheumatic disease patients (N=93), their healthy siblings (N=72), and demographically matched healthy controls (N=93). Family socioeconomic status and background variables showed few consistent relationships with child functioning. However, a constellation of risk and resistance factors tended to show comparable associations with functioning for patients, siblings, and controls. Higher parental depression and medical symptoms and more family Stressors, sibling problems, and burden of illness on the family predicted more problems among the patients. These relationships held when disease duration and severity were controlled. For the siblings, increased parental and patient dysfunction, more family Stressors, and less family cohesion and expressiveness were associated with more problems. Although the associations were not as strong, mothers' depression and lack of family cohesion and expressiveness also were related to more adjustment problems among the control children. These findings imply that there may be a general association between certain risk and resistance factors and childhood adaptation.This research was supported in part by NIH Multipurpose Arthritis Center Grant AM20610, NIMH Grant MH16744, and Veterans Administration Medical and Health Services Research and Development Service Research funds. Jan Gottlieb provided valuable help in all phases of the research. We appreciate the help of the staff of the Pediatric Rheumatology Clinic at Children's Hospital at Stanford and the families who participated in this study.     

Different slopes for different folks: Process analysis of spatial aptitude

Adults differing in spatial ability were tested on problems involving the mental rotation of familiar alphanumeric stimuli and unfamiliar stimuli drawn from the Primary Mental Abilities Space Test. Individual differences in spatial ability were associated with speed rather than accuracy of mental rotation processes. Ability differences were correlated with the time to rotate familiar alphanumerics and the additional time to encode, compare, and rotate unfamiliar stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of differences in elementary information processes associated with the representation and transformation of visual information.