EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK AND SELF-MONITORING ON HEAD TRAUMA YOUTHS' CONVERSATION SKILLS

The effects of feedback and self-recording on the small group conversational behaviors of two head trauma youths were evaluated. Feedback involved providing clients a light signal corresponding to positive or negative social interactions. The self-monitoring procedure required that the clients flip a switch corresponding with their positive or negative interactions. An A₁-B₁-C₁-A₂-C₂-B₂ design in which the feedback phase (B) and self-monitoring phase (C) were alternated to control for order effects demonstrated the efficacy of both interventions. Performance gains were also shown to generalize to less structured situations, bringing the clients' level of positive responses into a range established with a social comparison group.     

LEISURE-DANCE INSTRUCTION FOR SEVERELY AND PROFOUNDLY RETARDED PERSONS: TEACHING AN INTERMEDIATE COMMUNITY-LIVING SKILL

We evaluated an approach for teaching an intermediate community living skill via a leisure-dance activity to institutionalized severely and profoundly retarded persons. The targeted skill was considered as intermediate in contrast to a community living skill per se because it was based on successful performances of higher functioning, noninstitutionalized retarded persons as opposed to nonhandicapped individuals. Definitions for appropriate dancing were established and then validated through observations of the performance of retarded persons living in the local community. The dance skills were then taught to four participants through serial training in leg movements, arm movements, and coordinated leg and arm movements, plus follow-up trainer supervision. Generalization was also programmed by way of multiple trainers and training settings. Results during structured assessments showed that all four residents acquired the dance skills and that both serial training and follow-up supervision were necessary for skill acquisition. Generalized increases in appropriate dancing at dances attended by the participants and retarded persons from the community were also demonstrated. However, in most cases some active supervision by caregivers was needed to enhance the generalized improvements. Results are discussed in terms of the applicability of this approach for validating goals when training other community-related skills to low-functioning populations.     

Extraversion and sleep: A psychophysiological study of the arousal hypothesis

In order to examine Eysenck's (1967) hypothesis concerning the relationship between extraversion and arousal, autonomic measures were taken from introverts and extraverts immediately before sleep and during 6 hr of sleep. Introverts and extraverts did not differ in heart rate (HR) or skin-potential response rate (SPR) during the pre-sleep period. A variety of sleep-related measures of arousal provided no strong support for the hypothesis that introverts are more aroused than extraverts. The only consistent autonomic difference between introverts and extraverts during sleep was a tendency for introverts to have higher SPRs in the second 3 hr of the night. The results are discussed in terms of the level of environmental stimulation present in the experimental conditions, and suggestions are made for future sleep studies of the relationship between extraversion and arousal.     

An external millisecond timer for the Apple Macintosh with applications to cross-modal lexical priming

The circuit and program described in this report allow researchers to use Macintosh personal computers to conduct research that requires timing with millisecond accuracy. This is accomplished with external response keys and an external clock that sends characters through the Macintosh’s serial port. For researchers interested in cross-modal lexical priming tasks, a tachistoscopic slide shutter is incorporated to allow for accurately timed presentation of visual stimuli. Because the visual display and response keys are external to the computer, display and reaction times are not subject to the timing constraints inherent to the keyboard or the Macintosh Event Manager. All circuit diagrams and code are in the public domain.     

The impact of household economy on stress reactions among professional women

The impact on felt stress and and stress-related behaviors of household composition and proportion of pay utilized to sustain the household economy was evaluated using a homogenous group of female professionals. After controlling for individual-difference and work-load influences, the impact of household variables was found to be weak and inconsistent. While living alone with a child and having a larger proportion of one's salary allocated to sustaining the household economy was associated with psychosomatic distress, household factors did not predict sickdays, medication usage and alcohol consumption. The reasons for these weak and inconsistent findings were explored.     

Personal Intervention Preferences for Alleviating Mild Depression

The findings of a study to identify personal preferences for alleviating mild depression are presented. Preferences were classified into four treatment modalities: affective, behavioral, cognitive, and eclectic. The affective category received significantly more preferences than did the other three. Preferences were found to be related to sex and occupational level, but not to age.     

PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT: CONTINUOUS AND CONTINGENT APPLICATION IN THE TREATMENT OF SELF-INJURIOUS BEHAVIOR

This study evaluated the use of protective equipment in treating self-injurious behavior (SIB) exhibited by three retarded persons. In Experiment 1, the equipment was first applied continuously during 20-min sessions in individual multiple baseline designs across settings. Results showed substantial reductions in head hitting, eye gouging, and hand biting. Brief periods of time-out with the protective equipment were later made contingent on SIB and combined with a differential reinforcement procedure. Reduced levels of SIB was maintained with all subjects. Additionally, the amount of time during which the equipment was applied decreased as the SIB diminished. Experiment 2 evaluated the use of contingent protective equipment (the final condition in Experiment 1) when applied directly in the subjects' living uints during the day. During Experiment 2, SIB remained at or below the levels found at the termination of Experiment 1. Finally, in an effort to assess the long-term effectiveness of the procedure, responsibility for implementation was given to the staff who were typically assigned to provide therapy to the subjects. Follow-up probe observations conducted up to 104 days after termination of the final experimental condition showed continued low levels of both SIB and equipment usage. Results of these experiments suggest that contingent protective equipment and differential reinforcement may be effective in reducing chronic self-injury.     

Constrained canonical correlation

This paper explores some of the problems associated with traditional canonical correlation. A response surface methodology is developed to examine the stability of the derived linear functions, where one wishes to investigate how much the coefficients can change and still be in an -neighborhood of the globally optimum canonical correlation value. In addition, a discrete (or constrained) canonical correlation method is formulated where the derived coefficients of these linear functions are constrained to be in some small set, e.g., {1, 0, –1}, to aid in the interpretation of the results. An example concerning the psychographic responses of Wharton MBA students of the University of Pennsylvania regarding driving preferences and life-style considerations is provided.Wayne S. DeSarbo, Robert Jausman, Shen Lin, and Wesley Thompson are all Members of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories. We wish to express our gratitude to the editor and reviewers of this paper for their insightful remarks.     

Differences in mental representations spontaneously adopted for reasoning

Retrospective reporting was used to show that people spontaneously adopt different mental representations for reasoning. In two experiments, subjects solved a large number of threeterm series reasoning problems and then gave retrospective reports (verbal protocols, drawings, and forced-choice strategy selections) about their solutions. A majority of subjects’ reports could be classified reliably into two groups. One group (abstract directional thinkers) claimed to construct a mental ordering of the three geometric figures used as the terms in the problems. A second group (concrete properties thinkers) claimed to attribute physical properties to mental geometric objects. In both experiments, abstract directional thinkers made few errors and were sensitive to the number of pivot-first premises in a problem. Concrete properties thinkers made more errors and were sensitive to the use of inverse relations and the number of alternations between a relation and its inverse as a problem was read. Quantitative models of the two kinds of reasoning are presented. Implications are discussed concerning theories of reasoning, tests of reasoning, and the usefulness of retrospective reporting as a general method.     

Zipf's Law in transcribed speech

Summary Based on large samples of written text. Zipf:s Law holds that the logarithms of frequencies of words, and the number of different words at those frequencies, have an inverse linear relationship. This study tested this law on an oral sample by analysis of a transcribed interview which had been conducted for an unrelated study. A second purpose was to test whether the law holds differently for open- vs closed-class words. The words in the interview were tabulated by frequencies and numbers of words at each frequency, and separated by syntactic class. As Zipf found for written samples, the law provides a reasonable summary of the data for the less frequently used words but predicts fewer different words among the most frequently used words than were actually found. Linear regressions performed for each syntactic class revealed that the regression equation for open-class words provided the best fit to Zipf's law. The sample of closed-class words, containing a much smaller proportion of low frequency words, revealed a poor fit to Zipf's law.The author wishes to thank Diane Beyerchen, Wendy Calla, Edward Kulick, and Clinton B' Walker for their cooperation and suggestions.