Holland's theory and non-college-degreed working black and white women

The main concern of this study was to investigate differences between black and white American women employed in traditional female occupations who took the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) and the Self-Directed Search (SDS). The VPI and the SDS were administered to 110 black and white non-college-degreed workers in three occupations (laboratory technicians, sales clerks, and clerk-typists) corresponding to three of Holland's environmental categories (Investigative, Enterprising, and Conventional). In general, the findings for the three VPI and SDS scales and for these six occupational groups are mixed. On the SDS scales, findings indicate that black and white women in the same occupation seem to be far more similar than different. On the scales of the VPI, however, white and black women in the same occupation seem to be more different than similar.     

Memory storage and retrieval within and across modalities in children

Twenty-four kindergarten and fourth grade children were asked to locate a display card which had been visually or verbally presented. A probe, which identified the card to be located, was presented verbally and visually equally often. The children's ability to recall the location of an item did not differ as a function of the modality to which the material was presented. Nor was recall significantly affected when the presentation modality differed from the probe modality, suggesting that children as young as 5 can cross these sensory modalities to retrieve material with no loss in accuracy. Serial position curves suggest that the verbal and visual material is not stored in a common intersensory store. The primacy effect is found to be stronger with visually presented material and the recency effect strongest with auditorily presented material. Probe modality did not influence the serial position curves.     

COUNSELING THE EMOTIONALLY TROUBLED CLIENT FOR PSYCHIATRIC REFERRAL

From time to time the employment counselor encounters applicants who need referral for psychiatric assistance in order to increase their employability and potential work adjustment. In many instances the client may feel that he has neither an emotional problem nor a need for psychiatric evaluation. The counselor can help the applicant to recognize his problem and to accept a psychiatric referral by using communication alternatives such as reflection of feeling, reflection of experience, sharing of the process experience, interpretation, and confrontation with maintenance of tension. The client can be assisted in evaluating community mental health resources and in arranging for the initial psychiatric evaluation appointment.     

Parallel processing in visual same-different decisions

Two to 13 geometrical shapes were exposed simultaneously to S who decided whether all shapes were the same or whether one was different from the rest. Correct different decisions were usually faster than correct same decisions, but latency was independent of the number of shapes presented. We conclude that input from all the shapes was simultaneously processed into either one or two shape categories, and that a decision-theory choice was made between “same” (one shape category) and “different” (two shape categories) independent of the total number of shapes. This parallel processing is thought to be a characteristic of codable stimuli. Some observed same-different latency reversals were probably caused by a shift in the same-different criterion on the continuum for one- vs two-category decisions.     

Subjective estimates of shock probability following classical aversive conditioning with visual and gustatory conditioned stimuli

In two recent studies (Evans and Busch, 1974; Busch and Evans, in press) designed to explore the relevance of “cue appropriateness” concepts to aversion therapy, it was found that taste was a less effective CS than color. The major limitations of these studies were that conditioning was inferred from subjective ratings (although cross-validated by an unobtrusive but equally inferential performance measure), and the taste stimuli were rated more negatively in the pre-test than the color stimuli, thus creating possible ceiling effects.Quite apart from limitations in these particular studies, almost all cue appropriateness research contains methodological flaws; obvious ones are the failure to equate stimuli in different sense modalities for subjective intensity, or salience, and the failure to equate the ISIs when visual and gustatory elements of ingestible substances are the cues of interest. One of our studies (Busch and Evans, in press) partially resolved the timing problem, but in studies of visually-oriented college students the salience problem remains acute. It therefore seemed worthwhile to investigate whether, in the paradigm used in our laboratory, subjects simply attend less to taste cues than to color cues.In order to determine cue salience, a measure other than the development of CRs must be used. If an organism comes to give a CR to a certain stimulus, that is prima facie evidence of attention to, or if one prefers it, reception of, that stimulus, although generalization studies show the elements of the stimulus actually controlling the CR may not necessarily be the ones expected by the experimenter. Animal conditioning studies have shown, however, that the failure of CRs to emerge does not inevitably mean that the stimulus was ignored and an appropriate CR may appear if performance-related variables are manipulated. Similarly, humans may or may not show a CR and yet be able to verbalize correctly the contingency experienced during the conditioning. Thus for human Ss a cognitive expectancy measure should be able to reveal cue salience independent of the actual elaboration of a CR. We therefore repeated the Evans and Busch (1974) procedure and measured, instead of attitudinal changes to the CS, the Ss' perception of the contingency they had experienced.     

Bargaining Strategies with Asymmetric Initiation and Termination

Two experimental studies of bilateral bargaining were conducted, and this paper reports findings related to differences in the conditions under which bargaining began and ended. Asymmetric initiation affected the way the subjects bargained, but not, on the average, the deals they struck. Asymmetric termination affected both bargaining behavior and deals. One surprising conclusion was that following a relatively simple configuration of bargaining strategies increased both one's probability of making a deal and one's benefits from the deal itself.     

Spatial Memory and Response Strategies in Rats: Age, Sex and Rearing Differences in Performance

Rats reared in social isolation made more errors on a spatial memory task and made errors earlier in each trial than socially reared rats. The difference in performance only occurred when rats were isolated prior to 50 days of age, and it survived IOO days of subsequent social housing. IOO days of isolation after 50 days of age did not influence performance on the spatial memory task. Subsequent experiments suggest that spatial abilities may not differ between groups but that isolates are slower to learn to make a particular response and to locate a particular arm when spatial and response cues are irrelevant. In contrast to previous experiments, clear response strategies were seen in the present experiments. These were prevalent in the young (54-days-old) rats, were less common at 90 days and had completely disappeared by 180 days. Response strategies were more common in male rats and in socially reared rats.     

Clustering by aphasics in free recall

Aphasic performance was compared to normal and left hemiplegic controls in the use of clustering to aid recall of a list of words in a multitrial free recall experiment. Use of clustering correlated with increased recall scores. Left hemiplegic performance was superior to aphasic and inferior to normal suggesting that the presence of brain damage decreased clustering but that this decrease was greater in the presence of aphasia. A second experiment examined the possibility of remediating aphasic clustering behavior by providing cues as a training device. Cues, which aided normals, did not benefit the majority of aphasics. Results are interpreted in terms of their relationship to cognitive functioning.     

Simplified formulas for item selection and construction

The formula for the Pearson correlation coefficient of a dichotomous variable with a multiple-categoried variable is simplified for computational purposes by effecting in the multiple-categoried variable two types of arbitrary distributions: (1) rectangular and (2) proportional to binomial expansion coefficients. The formulas which result are convenient for the selection of test items and are applicable to the objective estimation of the comparative merits of the alternatives in multiple-choice test items. It is shown that the authoritative answer should have a high positive criterion coefficient, while the omissions and several wrong-answer alternatives should each have low (algebraic) negative criterion coefficients.