Discrimination of picture requests for missing items among young children with developmental disabilities

Two experiments were conducted to assess discrimination of picture requests for missing items among young children with developmental disabilities. In Experiment 1, three children were first taught to request one object when it was missing from a set of two related leisure items. In Experiment 2, two children were taught to request one object belonging to a set of three leisure items. In both studies the requesting response consisted of pointing to a photograph of the missing item. After acquisition of the initial request, discrimination of picture requests was assessed when the second item (Experiment 1) and second or third item (Experiment 2) was missing. Requests for the untrained items emerged in the presence of natural maintaining contingencies and in the absence of instructional prompts for all but the third child in Experiment 1. This child required continued intervention on the initial request. The results suggest that for some children a sequence of intervention and the programming of natural maintaining contingencies may prove effective in promoting the discrimination of picture requests for missing items among young children with developmental disabilities.     

Four Dimensions of Envy: Strategies for Managing Its Manifestations in Psychotherapy

Envy is not an amorphous feeling and can be seen as consisting of four distinct dimensions, labeled identification, confrontive, redirecting, and medea. Just as we have to be aware of the traditional stages of psychosexual and psychosocial stages of development, we need to be alert as to what dimension of envy the patient may be experiencing at any given moment in psychotherapy. When these dimensions manifest themselves in therapy we find that each of them requires a different strategy by the therapist. Each dimension has its unique features and what is successful at one stage of treatment may be disastrous at another. If the therapist does not intervene at the beginning stages to prevent envy from increasing in intensity, there is a danger that the patient can slide into a stage in which effective therapy may be doomed.     

RELATIVES AND RELATIVISM

Philosophical Studies -     

The Use of a Personal Trainer to Enhance Participation of Older Adults with Severe Disabilities in a Community Water Exercise Class

Inclusive instruction was provided for three older adults with profound mental retardation in a water exercise class at a local YMCA. The older adults were taught to exercise through the use of systematic prompting. A multiple baseline design across participants with an embedded reversal was used to evaluate the impact of a personal trainer. The three participants performed the exercise, but regressed without the assistance of the trainer, as demonstrated by the reversal. Data collected during peer prompting and maintenance conditions indicated that the participants continued to exercise at levels higher than baseline but lower than with a personal trainer.     

Religiosity and psychological distress among blacks

The influence of religion on mental well-being has been the subject of controversy for a long while. Yet little is known about this relationship among black Americans. Using a probability-based sample of 451 urban black Americans, this study examines gender differences in religiosity and explores the ramifications for mental health. Findings indicate that females are more religious than males as evidenced by their greater participation in organizational forms of religious practice such as meetings and other gatherings. However, for both males and females, religiosity varied significantly by age and by marital and parental status. On the other hand, there were no differences in religiosity according to levels of education, income, and employment status for either males or females. With regard to mental health, greater religiosity was associated with fewer depressive symptoms for both males and females. Further, in the event of stressful circumstances, the influence of religion on mental well-being for females was direct, while religious involvement appeared to have an indirect or stress- buffering effect for males.     

Blocking of the response-reinforcer association: Additional evidence

Response rates maintained by free-operant schedules are sometimes reduced when a brief signal is interposed between the response and reinforcer. Early interpretations of this rate reduction were in terms of associative competition between the response and signal, analogous to blocking and overshadowing effects obtained in Pavlovian conditioning. But subsequent evidence has disputed this interpretation by showing that the signal enhances response rate in several circumstances. The present study attempted to define the conditions determining the different effects by investigating the role of signal location in the delay-of-reinforcement interval. When it occurred immediately after a response, response rate was enhanced. When it occurred at the end of the delay interval, immediately preceding the reinforcer, the signal decreased response rate. A similar decremental effect occurred when the signal occurred in the middle of the delay interval, contiguous with neither the response nor the reinforcer. Similar blocking effects occurred with a response acquisition procedure. The results demonstrate that blocking effects do indeed occur in instrumental conditioning but that the usual procedure of using signals immediately contingent on responding confounds such blocking effects with the competing effects of conditioned reinforcement/marking.     

Countering perfectionism in research on clinical practice II: Retrospective analysis of treatment progress

A simple correlational study is described which has methodological advantages, when compared with an equivalent manipulative (i.e., quasiexperimental) research design, for examining exploratory questions about treatment outcome. These advantages stem from the fact that retrospective designs, when compared with prospective ones, are much less likely to involve ethical problems due to offering relatively ineffective or unnecessary treatment, and less likely to involve confounds from newly hypothesized differential expectations about treatment. Based on Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) scale scores, clients with high levels of histrionic or narcissistic (and possibly also those with antisocial, compulsive and paranoid) personality traits seemed to profit more from RET than those without such traits. Clients with high levels of schizoid, avoidant, and schizotypal traits (and probably also clients with strong passive-aggressive traits, and possibly also clients with strong dependent and borderline traits) seemed to profit less from RET than those without such marked traits. We have previously shown that the relatively healthy personality traits and disorders are associated with global self-upping and the relatively sick ones with global self-downing, as well as contrasting patterns of positive and negative reactions to stressful events. Our findings here support the concept that clients who consistently handle life situations well will tend to progress most rapidly in therapy, and those who generally handle life situations badly will tend to progress slowly. Personality traits may be especially significant markers for therapeutic attention to problems stemming from global self-rating. Expectations based on the severity of global self-upping and/or self-downing may be good predictors of therapeutic progress. In contrast, expectations about RET outcomes based on severity of distress or neediness will probably be less accurate.Dr. Russell C. Leaf is Associate Professor of Psychology at Rutgers. He also directs a research project at the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy, in collaboration with the four other authors of this article, on the relationships between intake personality and mental health. He is an Institute Fellow and Supervisor, and previously served as a staff therapist and as the Institute's Director of Clinical Evaluation.Albert Ellis is President of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy.Roslyn Mass is Professor at Middlesex County College. She is in charge of data processing and analysis for the collaborative research of this authorial team, and is a Fellow of and previously served as Administrative Director of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy.Raymond DiGiuseppe is Associate Professor of Psychology at St. Johns and Director of Research and Director of Training at the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy.Diane Alington is Assistant Director and a member of the core faculty of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers, where she conducts a research program on sex differences in adult development.     

Influence of hedonic tone on lexical decisions

A lexical decision task was used to investigate the effect of a word’s hedonic tone on decision time. Thirty words, varying in degrees of pleasantness, were randomly presented with 30 nonwords, half of which were pronounceable and half not. It was demonstrated that decision times for the pleasant words were significantly faster than for the unpleasant words. The two types of nonwords were also found to differ: Decision times for the pronounceable nonwords were significantly slower than for the nonpronounceables. Results are discussed in the light of previous work in both memory and perception. The utility of the lexical decision task for relevant future research is also considered. Part of the work reported in this paper was supported by North East London Polytechnic as partial fulfillment of the requirements for a higher degree (C.N.A.A.).     

Equal Opportunity Programs: A Case for Counseling

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, under Title VI, requires that institutions of higher education submit enrollment figures according to ethnic breakdown for federal monies to be allocated. Such requirements are indicative of efforts to diversify student populations. The Higher Education Act of 1965 also incorporates a number of related programs—Supplemental Opportunity Grants, College Work Study, Talent Search, Upward-Bound—which are designed to provide direct or indirect assistance to disadvantaged students. (Gordon, 1975)