Visual misalignment in arc and chevron figures

Five experiments investigated an apparent misalignment effect in 90 degrees arc figures. Preliminary observations showed that the effect occurs also in chevron figures, in an afterimage of the arc figure, and haptically in arc- and chevron-shaped objects. The experiments showed that the effect is greater with 3 radial lines than with 2, absent without them, and present in a figure consisting of only 3 radial lines. The effect with arc figures was consistently greater than that with chevron figures, a difference found not to be due to an apex marking the midpoint of the latter, and it was of intermediate size in figures with 1 arc boundary and 1 chevron boundary. The misalignment was also greater in narrow, elongated figures. The issues singled out for discussion are the effect of context on the misalignment effect with 3 radial lines, a possible explanation in terms of perceptual compromise, the difference in the effect between arcs and chevrons, and the relationship between this illusion and the Morinaga illusion.     

School Families: Implementation and Evaluation of a Middle School Prevention Program

The authors describe a school prevention program called School Families that emphasizes normal developmental needs of middle school students. In addition, the results of an in-depth qualitative evaluation of the program are presented. The School Families groups comprised middle school students, teachers, and adults from the university and community who meet weekly during the school day to process issues related to academic performance, decision making, self-esteem, and social skills. On the basis of written narratives, individual interviews, and focus-group discussions, the 35 participants (12 middle school students, 14 teachers, and 9 university students) reported that the School Families program largely had a beneficial influence on them.     

An evaluation of the long-term outcomes of small-group work for counsellor development

A questionnaire was designed which enquired into the long-term professional applications and outcomes of Rogerian small-group and Tavistock Group Dynamics training. The 92 respondents were graduates of either a Master's degree or a Diploma in Human Relations or Counselling Studies in a university course where a 'small-group' module was a compulsory element of the taught course. Respondents were drawn from graduates of these one-year full-time or two-year part-time courses over a 21-year period. All respondents were involved either directly in professional or voluntary counselling, in the application of counselling skills in their work, or in training in counselling and counselling skills at work. The respondents reported no loss of learning gains over time: ascribed the application of many specific counselling skills to the small-group training process; reported on the affective component of the learning process; and provided only minimal evidence of forms of psychological damage which could be directly ascribed to the experience. These outcomes have to be considered in the light of the relatively low response rate of 33% and the difficulties in monitoring the precise behaviour of the facilitators in the groups.     

The effect of response choice relatedness on pantomime and verbal recognition ability in aphasic patients

Twenty aphasic and twenty control subjects were examined on two versions of a pantomime recognition and a verbal recognition test; one version containing response choices conceptually/semantically related to target responses, the other containing unrelated response choices. The aphasic group was inferior to controls on the pantomime and verbal recognition tests, although the magnitude and consistency of the differences between aphasics and controls were greater for the pantomime test. The presence of conceptually/semantically related response choices on the pantomime recognition test significantly reduced test scores of aphasic patients, and this reduction was related to the magnitude of the effect of response choice relatedness on their verbal recognition test performance. The findings are consistent with an interpretation of aphasia as an impairment of a central symbolic ability which can affect processing for meaning in both verbal and nonverbal modes of communication.     

Abusive supervision and subordinates' organization deviance

The authors developed an integrated model of the relationships among abusive supervision, affective organizational commitment, norms toward organization deviance, and organization deviance and tested the framework in 2 studies: a 2-wave investigation of 243 supervised employees and a cross-sectional study of 247 employees organized into 68 work groups. Path analytic tests of mediated moderation provide support for the prediction that the mediated effect of abusive supervision on organization deviance (through affective commitment) is stronger when employees perceive that their coworkers are more approving of organization deviance (Study 1) and when coworkers perform more acts of organization deviance (Study 2).     

Measuring individual research productivity: A review and development of the integrated research productivity index

The purpose of the present study was to investigate methods of measuring individual research productivity for counseling psychologists. Using the 60 members of the Journal of Counseling Psychology editorial board, the authors computed a comparison of 6 popular indices of productivity, revealing considerable levels of positive skewness, kurtosis, and overlap with each other. Combining the strengths of the 6 indices, the authors developed a new productivity index entitled the Integrated Research Productivity Index (IRPI). The IRPI measures individual productivity by statistically combining an individual's author-weighted publications, average times cited by other publications, and years since first publication into a comprehensive score. Productivity values and IRPI scores for 3 groups of counseling psychologists (Tyler Award recipients, Kuder Award recipients, and Division 17 Presidents) were computed to provide evidence of discriminant validity among the indices. In contrast to the other measures examined, the IRPI accounts for productivity per year and years in the field and assesses mean citation count per article as opposed to total citation count, thus yielding similar scores for Tyler (lifetime) and Kuder (early career) research award recipients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).     

Developing symbolic capacity one step at a time

The present research examines the ability of children as young as 4 years to use models in tasks that require scaling of distance along a single dimension. In Experiment 1, we found that tasks involving models are similar in difficulty to those involving maps that we studied earlier (Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial scaling in young children. Psychological Science, 10, 393-398). In Experiment 2, we found that retrieval tasks, where children indicate the location of a hidden object in an actual space are substantially more difficult than placement tasks, where children put a visible object in a particular location in an actual space. We discuss possible implications of the differential difficulty of retrieval and placement tasks for the understanding of symbolic development.     

Response to Gordon Baker

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

Values in Qualitative and Quantitative Research

The authors identify the philosophical underpinnings and value‐ladenness of major research paradigms. They argue that useful and meaningful research findings for counseling can be generated from both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, provided that the researcher has an appreciation of the importance of philosophical coherence in working within a particular research tradition. Moreover, the authors recognize that the research world is one of methodological pluralism; they discuss particular critical values central to conducting research and evaluating research findings. Finally, the authors demonstrate that there is not a 1 ‐to‐1 correspondence between a research method and the research paradigm.