The natural appearance of unnatural incline speed

In three experiments, college students provided judgments about a marble's speed along a nonlinear incline. Each experiment revealed widespread support for the slope-speed belief, a mistaken belief holding that an object's speed at any point depends on the slope at that point. In truth, an object's incline speed varies with its elevation. In Experiment 1, participants relied solely on a diagram. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants observed computer animations depicting the descent of a marble at speeds conforming to either the slope-speed belief or Newtonian theory, and they rated the slope-speed version as more "natural" than the correct version. The task in Experiment 1 gauged participants' consciously available knowledge, but the perceptual realism of the slope-speed animations suggests that the slope-speed belief is also held outside awareness. By contrast, virtually all previously identified false beliefs about motion appear unnatural once animated.     

Theoretical orientation and reported practice: A survey of eclecticism among counsellors in Britain

There is an increasing trend for counsellors to report that their practice is based on a combination of methods and approaches, rather than being grounded in a 'pure' model. However, there has been a lack of research on the proportion of counsellors in Britain who define themselves as eclectic or integrative in orientation. This study reports on a survey of eclecticism and integrationism in counsellors and other therapists in Britain. Results indicate that as many as 87% of counsellors can be regarded as taking a 'non-pure-form' approach of some kind. Issues in interpreting data on counsellors' self-reports of orientation are discussed, and implications for training and further research are outlined.     

Long-term positive and negative identity priming: Evidence for episodic retrieval

An episodic retrieval account of negative priming (Neill, 1997; Neill & Valdes, 1992) was evaluated in three experiments. Duringpractice, regular word pairs were presented to subjects differing numbers of times. The subjects named specific target words while they ignored specific distractor words. Following a 5-min retention interval, memory for practice was revealed:Test responses for target words exhibited positive priming that increased with increases in the number of times that the words had been attended. Test responses for distractor words exhibited either positive priming (Experiment 1) or negative priming (Experiments 2–3) that also increased with increases in the number of times that the words had been ignored. The type of priming that abstractors exhibited was determined by several contextual similarities between the practice environment, in which distractors were ignored initially, and the test environments, in which they were processed subsequently. Negative priming that spanned a 5-min interval, increased with increases in the number of times that a distractor was ignored, and was sensitive to contextual changes indicated that the direction of the effect was temporally backward because the test probe cued memory for earlier processing of the priming stimulus when the distractor had been ignored.     

When two memories can and cannot be retrieved concurrently

We examined whether two memories can be retrieved concurrently from long-term memory. In Experiment 1, the subjects recalled words, either from two categories—alternating between the two—or from just one category. In Experiment 2, the subjects recalled two words belonging to either the same category or different categories, and the category prompts for these two responses appeared either simultaneously or successively. The results of both studies are consistent with the view that two items from different categories must be retrieved serially, whereas two items from the same category can be retrieved in parallel.     

Concurrent task effects on memory retrieval

Previous studies combining continuous free recall with a concurrent task have generally shown that concurrent tasks impose fairly negligible effects on memory retrieval. By contrast, dual-task studies employing either cued recall or semantic retrieval reveal gross memory impairment and suggest that retrieval is delayed by the centrally demanding phase of the concurrent tasks (i.e., response selection). To explore this conflict, subjects performed continuous free recall while carrying out a serial-choice#x2014; response time (RT) task, as in the previous free recall studies. Unlike these previous studies, however, the choice#x2014;RT task utilized arbitrary stimulus#x2014;response mappings in order to increase the proportion of time devoted to the centrally demanding response selection phase. Recall total was reduced significantly, and recall latency was slowed substantially.     

The relationship between personal philosophy and effectiveness in counsellors

This study investigates the relationship between the effectiveness of counsellors and their personal philosophy, beliefs and attitudes. There is a review of the relevant literature concerning the qualities and attributes of effective counsellors, with a detailed examination of studies of counsellor philosophy. Two groups (n = 14 and n = 19) of counsellors on training courses were studied. Each participant wrote an account of a ‘Helping Relationship Incident’ which was rated on the 12 dimensions of counsellor ‘perceptual organization’ developed by Combs & Soper (1963). Course tutors gave ratings of the counselling effectiveness of their students. Rank order correlations between judgements of counsellor effectiveness and ratings of perceptual organization/philosophy were made. In both groups statistically significant results were found, adding weight to the hypothesis that a ‘person-centred’ perceptual organization or belief system is an important factor in counsellor effectiveness. The implications for counsellor selection and training are discussed, and suggestions are made for further research on this topic.     

Therapeutic Factors Experienced by Members of an Out-Patient Therapy Group for Older Women

The Yalom curative factors Q-sort was administered to eight members of an out-patient therapy group for older women (average age 55 years), who were also interviewed on the group experiences they had viewed as helpful. Results indicated that Existential Awareness was seen as the most important curative or therapeutic mechanism by members of this group. This finding stands in contrast to other studies of out-patient groups, in which interpersonal factors have been widely reported as most helpful. The reasons for this distinctive finding are examined. Results also exhibited striking individual differences between members of the group in terms of the group processes they each found most therapeutic. The significance of these findings is discussed, both in relation to working with older women, and also with respect to methodological issues concerned with the use of the Yalom Q-sort technique.     

Tracking Reading: Dual Task Costs of Oral Reading for Young Versus Older Adults

A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor oral reading costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were reading out short paragraphs. Multilevel modeling was used to determine how paragraph-level predictors of length, grammatical complexity, and readability and person-level predictors such as speaker age or working memory capacity predicted reading and tracking performance. In addition, sentence-by-sentence variation in tracking performance was examined during the production of individual sentences and during the pauses before upcoming sentences. The results suggest that dual tasking has a greater impact on older adults’ reading comprehension and tracking performance. At the level of individual sentences, young and older adults adopt different strategies to deal with grammatically complex and propositionally dense sentences.     

The effects of S-R uncertainty in the PRP paradigm: A reply to Kantowitz

Karlin and Kestenbaum (1968) reported a series of apparently complex interactions between S-R uncertainty and RT in an experiment using the psychological refractory period paradigm. McLeod (1977) showed that these effects could be predicted by a parallel processing limited capacity model. Kantowitz (1978) criticised that paper on the grounds that it paid insufficient attention to the predictions of response conflict theory and made no mention of errors.It will be shown (a) that response conflict theory, as described by Kantowitz, fails to predict the effects found by Karlin and Kestenbaum (b) that the comments about errors miss the point of McLeod (1977) (c) that in his final section Kantowitz falls into an old trap which awaits the unwary analyser of PRP data.