Educational needs relative to human sexuality and AIDS among secondary school students and teachers in Lima

Between November 1989 and January 1990, a pilot study was conducted among state secondary school students and teachers in Lima Peru by questionnaires with the objective of determining their knowledge about human sexuality, sexual behavior, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), AIDS, drug abuse, and sexual activity. 110 students (64 boys and 46 women) aged 13-18 of low and medium-low socioeconomic background from metropolitan Lima participated. 40 teachers (70% females) aged 40.1 + or - 9.3 years also took part. THe adolescent focus groups were anxious to talk openly about sexuality to dispel their doubts. The levels of knowledge reached 46% for human sexuality, 50% for physiology and pregnancy, 35% for STDs and preventive sexual behavior, 50-60% for AIDS (transmission and risk groups), and only 35% for prevention. 21 had heterosexual experiences: 19 males and 2 females. 6 youngsters had homosexual experiences: 4 males and 2 females, 3 of these also had heterosexual sex. 20 of students without sexual experience expressed on interest, in engaging in sexual behavior if they fell in love. 33 adolescents reported using alcohol, 1/4 of these had consumed more than 6 bottles the previous week. The report on drug use was low, because 32% failed to answer this question. 60-70% of the teachers knew about human sexuality, while 72% knew about AIDS. 76.5% of them considered sex education in schools inadequate. 88.2% thought that adolescents need an explicit preventive program which should start in primary school and continue through all grades. This would require additional school resources. The teachers deemed daily life more educational about sexuality than information from schools and universities. 52% said that AIDS education messages had to be clear about preventive sexual behavior. 32% believed that correct use of the condom had to be demonstrated in class. 78% identified the mass media for dissemination of AIDS information, and only 15% judged their knowledge about AIDS sufficient for imparting it to students.     

Family interaction and the course of adolescent psychopathology: An analysis of adolescent and parent effects

This study focused on evaluating the utility of three family measures for predicting outcome in a sample of disturbed but nonpsychotic adolescents: (a) the affective quality of the adolescents' voice tone when communicating with his/her parents; (b) the predominant affective quality of the parents' voice tones when communicating with the adolescent, and (c) the affective quality of the content of the parents' verbalizations to the adolescent. These measures were derived from 5-minute face to face discussions between parents and their disturbed adolescent. Results indicated that adolescents using positive or neutral voice tones during emotionally laden discussions with their parents tended to show relatively adequate levels of psychosocial adjustment as young adults, while adolescents using exclusively negative voice tones tended to show sufficient adjustment difficulties in early adulthood to warrant diagnoses within the extended schizophrenia spectrum. Although adolescent voice tone was associated with outcome, considering both adolescent and parent affective response led to improved prediction, with consideration of adolescent and parent variables leading to accurate prediction of outcome for 30 of the 33 sample cases.     

After the puzzle boxes: thorndike in the 20th century

From the beginning of this century, following the publication of his dissertation, Thorndike made many significant contributions to psychology, some related to animal and human learning and others to various areas of educational psychology. This paper concentrates on the former and mentions some of the latter, in the context of personal and professional aspects of his life.     

Inhibitory control and errorless discrimination learning

Pigeons learned to discriminate between a positive stimulus (white key) and a negative stimulus (red or green key, depending on the subject) via Terrace's fading procedure. Generalization tests, conducted with intermittent reinforcement for key pecking at various wavelengths, yielded minima at the value of the negative stimulus in most “errorless” birds. Terrace's contrary finding of flat gradients in errorless subjects probably resulted from a floor-effect (i.e., virtually zero responding) produced by his extinction-test procedure. The present and other findings do not support Terrace's conclusions that the negative stimulus of an errorless discrimination is behaviorally neutral; inhibition apparently develops to the nonreinforced stimulus even during errorless discrimination learning. A negative correlation between stimulus and reinforcer seems the crucial factor in producing an inhibitory stimulus.     

Avoidance responding as a function of stimulus duration and relation to free shock

Response-independent pairings of a tone and a brief shock were superimposed on uncued avoidance responding in four groups of rhesus monkeys. For one group, tone presentations were immediately followed by an unavoidable electric shock; for the remaining groups, gaps of 5, 20, and 80 sec intervened between tone termination and shock delivery. These temporal values subsume paradigms usually treated as discrete procedures; the conditioned emotional response procedure (0-sec gap between tone and shock), trace procedure (5-sec gap) and safety-signal training (80-sec gap). Within each group, tone durations of 10, 20, 40, and 80 sec were examined. A response pattern marked by maximum response rate in the initial 5 sec of the tone followed by deceleration before shock was observed when shock immediately followed the tone, but not when gaps were interposed between the tone and shock. Response rates in the first 5 sec of the tone were a function of both tone duration and duration of the gap. When the gap was 0 to 5 sec, initial response rates were highest in longer duration tones; this relationship between tone duration and initial tone response rate was not observed for longer gaps.     

Contrast and stimulus generalization following prolonged discrimination training

Different groups of pigeons received discrimination training in which the reinforcement-associated and extinction-associated stimuli were respectively either (a) a line tilt vs a blank key, (b) a blank key vs a line tilt, or (c) two different line tilts. The high response rates that developed to the positive stimulus in all groups during discrimination learning were maintained over 64 sessions of training. After these sessions, all subjects were tested for stimulus generalization along the line-tilt dimension. Gradients of relative (per cent) generalization around the stimulus associated with reinforcement (so-called excitatory gradients) and around the stimulus associated with extinction (so-called inhibitory gradients) were as steep as they typically are after much briefer training periods. These results do not support several of Terrace's predictions on the basis of the hypothesis that emotional responses develop to the stimulus associated with extinction during discrimination learning with errors, but eventually dissipate after extended training.     

Contribution of figural proportion, figural memory, figure-ground perception and severity of hearing loss to performance on spatial tests

348 adolescents, 176 male and 172 female, were administered six different spatial tests. Awareness of figural proportion, figural memory, and figure-ground perception contributed significantly to performance on spatial visualization tests but not to performance on spatial orientation tests. Similarly, severity of hearing loss was correlated with scores on visualization tests but not on spatial-orientation tests.     

Social class and help-seeking behavior

Using Bernstein's theory of childhood socialization and Kohn's research on adult occupational experiences as the theoretical base, research was undertaken to study the relationship between social class (as measured by occupation and education) and help-seeking behavior. Intensive interviews (n = 42) and surveys (n = 838) were used as data. No evidence of an age or race effect was found. A sex-by-class effect was found. It was found that the lower the social class, the more likely were high values of conformity and the use of didactic help-seeking behavior for both males and females. The higher the respondent's social class, the more likely he or she valued autonomy and had had experiences using a negotiating help-seeking style if the respondent was a female. Males overwhelmingly employed a didactic style regardless of class.This study was supported by grants from the Administration on Aging, #90-A-644, and from the National Institute on Aging, NIA 5-POI-AG 00123. An enormous debt is owed to Joyce Asser for her encouragement and feedback during the development of this paper.     

What causes residual dual-task interference after practice?

Practice can dramatically reduce dual-task interference, but typically does not eliminate interference entirely. Residual interference after practice is especially large with certain non-preferred modality pairings (e.g., auditory–manual and visual–vocal). Does this residual interference imply the existence of a persistent central-processing bottleneck? To address this question, we transferred participants with previous dual-task practice to a psychological refractory period design. Although we observed residual dual-task costs in all four experiments, there was no evidence for a bottleneck, even with non-preferred modality pairings. We conclude that practice can eliminate the bottleneck limitation, but performance is still subject to other sources of interference, such as competition between central codes of the two tasks.     

Who I am, who we are, and why: links between emotions and causal attributions for self- and group discrepancies

Discrepancies between people's ought selves and their actual selves and their ideal selves and actual selves predict the emotions that individuals experience. The authors predicted that internal versus external causal attributions for self-discrepancies should moderate the relationship between self-discrepancies and emotions, resulting in more refined predictions for both agitation- and dejection-related emotions and for two additional types of emotion, namely, anger-related and discontent-related emotions. Results of two studies generally supported the predictions that agitation-related emotions and dejection-related emotions were positively associated with actual-ought discrepancies and actual-ideal discrepancies, respectively, only when causal attributions for the discrepancies were internally based. Anger-related emotions and emotions of discontent were positively associated with actual-ought and actual-ideal discrepancies, respectively, primarily when causal attributions were externally based. Study 2, which addressed group discrepancies and group-based emotions, generally replicated the findings when group identification was high, yielding a more complex model of the link between discrepancies and emotions.