Nursing: Significance for spiritual care

Nurses can be seen to contribute significantly to the spiritual objectives and programs in hospitals and other health agencies under religious auspices. One impressive example is nursing involvement with and cooperation in the pastoral care program at North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem. At this hospital the nurse is both an assistant to and a coworker with the chaplain and functions in many ways as facilitator and supporter in his spiritual mission.     

Asymmetries in the perceptual span for Israeli readers

Native Israeli readers read Hebrew and English text as their eye movements were monitored. A window of text moved in synchrony with their eye movements and the window was either symmetrical about the fixation point or offset to the left or right. When subjects were reading Hebrew, the perceptual span was asymmetric to the left and when they were reading English it was asymmetric to the right. The results point out the importance of attentional factors in reading.     

The effect of phonemic processing on the retention of graphemic representations for words and nonwords

The three experiments reported in this study were each conducted in two phases. The first phase of Experiment 1 involved a same-different comparison task requiring “same” responses for both mixed-case (e.g., MAIN main) and pure-case (e.g., near near) pairs. This was followed by Phase 2, a surprise recognition test in which a graphemic effect on word retention was indicated by the superior recognition accuracy obtained for pure-case compared with mixed-case pairs. The first phases of Experiments 2 and 3 involved pronounceability and imageability judgment tasks, respectively. Graphemic retention was assessed by contrasting recognition accuracy for letter strings presented, during Phase 2, in their original Phase 1 case, with letter strings presented, during Phase 2, in. a graphemically dissimilar new case. The experiments provided evidence that there was minimal retention of the graphemic representations from which the phonemic representations of words are generated and, further, that the locus of this effect is probably postlexical. Nonwords were recognized more accurately than words in all three experiments. The latter result was attributed to differences between nonwords and words in both graphemic retention and semantic distinctiveness.     

The EPPI family therapy outcome study

Information was evaluated from 1014 families seen in an eight-year period by therapists connected with the Department of Family Psychiatry at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute in Philadelphia. Statistical analysis revealed several factors that had some predictive value in relation to outcome of therapy; these were race, past psychiatric hospitalization, type of presenting family problem, and number of sessions held. There was a rather good chance of improvement being noted by the therapist if the family stayed in treatment for eight or more sessions. About 90% of the cases were seen for less than 20 interviews. Only about 3% were seen for longer than 35 interviews. The vast majority of EPPI cases were short-term. Black families tended to present different problems from white, and therapy was terminated with blacks sooner than for whites. About 35% of families terminated after one to two interviews, and another 30% after three to seven sessions. Since families tended to benefit most after eight or more sessions, the need for better methods or techniques to engage families is highlighted.The research was supported in part by a Career Development Award from the University of California, San Francisco, to the first author.     

Is visual information integrated across saccades?

After subjects established fixation on a target cross, 12 dots were presented parafoveally. When the dots were presented, the subjects made an eye movement to the location of the dots, and during the saccade the 12 initially presented dots were replaced by 12 other dots. The 24 dots were part of a 5 × 5 matrix, and the task of the subject was to report which dot was missing. The data were consistent with other recent studies: subjects could successfully report the location of the missing dot far above chance (54%), whereas performance in a control condition (in which the two sets of dots were presented to different spatial and retinal locations) was almost at chance level (10%). However, a number of control conditions demonstrated that the effect was due primarily to persistence from the phosphor of the cathode ray tube used for stimulus presentation and that little of the visual information integrated was across two fixations. Implications of the results for a theory of integration across saccades are discussed.     

Alcoholics in inpatient,short-term interactional group psychotherapy: an outcome study

The differential outcome of 100 psychiatric inpatients distinguished by the presence/absence of secondary alcoholism was examined in shortterm closed group psychotherapy. Alcoholics did not differ from the general sample in outcome, but displayed distinct active/aggressive personality features. Group outcome was not affected by the presence/absence of alcoholic members.     

Adolescent Smoking Behavior and the Recognition of Cigarette Advertisements1

In a study designed to assess the relationship between smoking status and correct identification of cigarette brands, junior high school students from two schools viewed cigarette and automobile advertisements with brand and model identification deleted. Results showed that adolescents with higher ad recognition scores were more likely to smoke cigarettes. In addition, a relationship was found between age and correct identification of cigarette advertisements, with older students identifying more ads correctly than younger students. No significant effects emerged for identification of automobile advertisements except for sex, with boys identifying more advertisements than girls. Additional findings indicated that even “experimental” smokers, who smoked as little as once per year, recognized significantly more cigarette advertisements than nonsmokers. These and other results are discussed in terms of their implications for prevention and policy issues. It is argued that society's allowance of printed cigarette advertising overlooks adolescents' heightened vulnerability to the kinds of appeals used in cigarette advertisements. Present policy also overlooks adolescents' relative unresponsiveness to the health risk information required in cigarette advertisements.