Client Cognitive Responses as a Function of Quality of Counselor Verbal Responses

This study examined the relationship between high and low quality counselor responses in four response modes and client cognitions. Twenty-one university students participated in two sessions of brief counseling that included high and low quality counselor responses in paraphrasing, questioning, reflection of feeling, and self-disclosure. After each counseling session, participants used Kagan's (1975) interpersonal process recall method to report their cognitions in response to these counselor responses. Results indicated that the participants had more favorable cognitions toward the counselor associated with high quality counselor paraphrasing and reflection of feeling responses. Participants' cognitions directed toward themselves did not differ in response to any of the four high and low quality counselor responses. Implications of the results are discussed.     

Disputing clients' irrational beliefs

This paper describes and illustrates a conceptual framework developed to assist novice REBT therapists with enlarging their disputational repertoire. First, four disputational strategies are described and illustrated. Then four disputational styles of presenting the strategies to the client are also described and illustrated. Then the disputational strategies and the disputational styles are combined within a conceptual framework to assist the developing REBT therapist in generating a variety of disputes for a single IB. Finally, the conceptual framework is applied to the IB of the case of Karen from Dryden and Digiuseppe'sPrimer on Rational Emotive Therapy to yield thirty-two separate disputes (sixteen disputes for the premise of the IB, and sixteen disputes for the derivative) of the IB.     

Detection of Fs in a single statement: The role of phonetic recoding

Most college-student readers have difficulty in detecting the letter F in instances of the word OF embedded in a single statement. Throughout a series of five experiments designed to clarify the basis of these detection failures, their unique and robust nature was demonstrated. The detection failures persisted in spite of repeated attempts to detect the letters by subjects who, in separate conditions and experiments, first memorized or copied the statement, or who, for purposes of comparison, also detected the O in OF, the N in ON, or the F in IF, or who read the statement in a number of physical formats, which included lower and upper letter cases, scrambled syntax, unsegmented letter strings, and vertical (list) presentation. Although many of these manipulations significantly improved performance, none produced perfect performance or performance comparable to the detection of F in IF. Several hypotheses, including those of redundancy, unitization, and phonetic recoding, were tested as explanations of the detection failures: The hypothesis that received the strongest support was that of phonetic recoding. This hypothesis focuses upon the atypical pronunciation of F as/v/(as in the word OF), rather than as the more typical/f/. In short, this reading illusion was concluded to be, in large part, a result of the subjects’ scanning their acoustic rather than their visual images of the printed word.     

Derivatives of the Self-Directed Search: Potential clinical and evaluative uses

Four derivatives of the Self-Directed Search (SDS), accuracy in estimating one's profile, differentiation of one's six SDS personality types, consistency of the types within one's summary code, and congruence of the summary code with the preferred occupational area, were computed and correlated with other indices of career maturity for 138 community college students. Accuracy in estimating one's SDS profile correlated significantly with five other career maturity indices, but the other derivatives tended not to relate to the other career maturity criteria. The discussion examines the implications of using the Accuracy derivative to identify clients in need of assistance with career development and to unobtrusively evaluate career development interventions, and it suggests ways of increasing the reliability of the derivatives and promising directions for further research.     

Human Aggressive and Escape Responding: Effects of Provocation Frequency

The Psychological Record - The effect of point loss frequency on aggressive and escape responding was investigated in two experiments. Subjects could respond on levers marked “A,”...     

Random error in additive decompositions of multiattribute utility

Decomposition is a common strategy for dealing with the complexity of multiattribute decision problems. A cognitively demanding task is broken down into tasks requiring simpler, perhaps easier, judgments which can then be aggregated. But individual judgments can be inconsistent in systematic or random fashion and when aggregated there is the possibility of propagation of this inconsistency. In this paper inconsistency in the form of random error is investigated in the context of additive decomposition of multiattribute utility. The process of aggregation of random error is studied and a comparison made with random error in holistic estimates of multiattribute utility. Conditions under which decomposition improves the consistency of the multiattribute utility estimate are presented and discussed.     

Decisional forgiveness across spanish and american samples: Translation,validation, and measurement invariance of the decision to forgive scale

Current Psychology - More than twenty different models of how forgiveness occurs have been proposed within forgiveness literature. One idea highlighted in many of these models was that forgiveness...     

Age differences in coping resources and satisfaction with life among middle-aged,young-old,and oldest-old adults

The authors examined age differences in perceived coping resources and satisfaction with life across 3 older-adult age groups (45-64, 65-74, and 75 years and older). The 98 participants represented healthy, socially active, community-residing adults. Group comparisons were made on 12 individual coping scales, and an overall coping resource effectiveness score was computed. No significant differences were found for 11 of the coping resources or for overall coping resource effectiveness. Similar consistencies in life satisfaction were found across the 3 age groups. The findings indicate that (a) for healthy adults, the oldest old cope at least as effectively as their younger counterparts, despite their likelihood of encountering increased levels of stress; and (b) psychologically, old age may be viewed as a time of resilience and fortitude.     

Effects of divided attention and word concreteness on correct recall and false memory reports

Lists of thematically related words were presented to participants with or without a concurrent task. In Experiments 1 and 2, respectively, English or Spanish word lists were either low or high in concreteness (concrete vs abstract words) and were presented, respectively, auditorily or visually for study. The addition of a concurrent visual or auditory task, respectively, substantially reduced correct recall and doubled the frequency of false memory reports (nonstudied critical or theme words). Divided attention was interpreted as having reduced the opportunity for participants to monitor successfully their elicitations of critical associates. Comparisons of concrete and abstract lists revealed significantly more recalls of false memories for abstract than concrete word lists. Comparisons between two levels of attention, two levels of word concreteness, and two presentation modalities failed to support the "more is less" effect by which enhanced correct recall is accompanied by increased frequencies of false memories.