Information Seekers in the Aftermath of Technological Disaster at Three Mile Island1

Information seekers attending the TMI Public Health and Environmental Information Series six years after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident were found to be more educated, less worried, more cynical of experts, more likely to report disturbances in concentration, and more likely to be male than a normative sample of area residents. Course participants are described as seeking cognitive solutions and as having an underlying agenda of restoring lost faith in experts. Those who had evacuated at the time of the accident manifested the most psychological symptoms among course participants.     

On the irreducibility of the will

This paper criticizes the thesis that intending to do something is reducible to some combination of beliefs and desires. Against Audi's recent formulation of such a view I offer as counterexample a case wherein an agent who wants and expects to V has not yet decided whether to V and hence does not yet intend to. I try to show that whereas belief that one will V is not necessary for intending to V, as illustrated in cases of desperate attempts to V, one cannot intend to V without preferring to V (rather than not V) and thus one cannot intend to V without, in some sense, wanting to V (at least wanting it in preference to not V-ing). The connection of one's intentions with one's objectives, attempts, plans, and hopes is briefly treated, and some influential work by Davidson is criticized.     

Gender differences in health-related quality of life

In 1986 the life expectancy at birth was 71.3 years for males and 78.3 years for females--providing a 7-year advantage for women. Although women live longer, it has been reported that they paradoxically experience more physical and psychological illnesses. In this article, we estimate the expected well-years or quality-adjusted life years for men and women in the general population. The data were obtained in a random sample of 1,034 residents of San Diego. The well-life expectancy uses standard life expectancies with adjustments for quality of life. The well-life expectancy for men was 59.8 years; for women, it was 62.7 years. Thus, the quality adjustment had significantly more impact on women (15.6 years) than on men (11.5 years). Age-specific estimates of health-related quality of life suggested a male advantage before age 45 and a female advantage after age 45. The benefits of well-years of life as a public health statistic are discussed.     

Gender and values: What is the impact on decision making?

In this study we investigated C. Gilligan's [(1982), In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press] suggestion that women and men, due to socialization, develop differently in terms of moral development [L. Kohlberg (1969), “Stage and Consequence: The Cognitive Development Approach to Socialization,” In D. G. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization: Theory and research, Chicago: Rand McNally]. We also considered whether men and women differ in terms of a related construct, values of equity and equality [K. A. Rasinski (1987), “What's Fair Is Fair or Is It? Value Differences Underlying Public Views About Social Justice,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 53, pp. 201–211]. It is our expectation that gender influences overall orientation in terms of the two sets of values, and that differences in values lead decision makers to weigh decision issues and to make final decisions differently. Results suggest that there are some gender-related differences in value systems, weights of decision issues, and final decisions.     

Training in child and adolescent group therapy: Two surveys and a model

Although group therapy is widely used in the treatment of children and adolescents, there has been little attention paid to establishing training standards and developing comprehensive programs for training psychiatry fellows in child and adolescent group psychotherapy. The authors conducted two surveys of child and adolescent training programs. After reviewing the literature, they present the data from their surveys, compare similarities and differences, and discuss trends. Finally, they propose a model for training in child and adolescent group therapy.     

Analogical transfer and expertise in legal reasoning

Analogical transfer and its relation to expertise is examined in a legal context. Three experiments were conducted comparing the performance of novices (introductory tax students) and of experts (experienced tax practitioners from multinational public accounting firms) on tasks involving the application of tax laws. In Experiment 1 subjects completed a target problem after reading a decided case that was either analogous or not analogous to a target problem. A limited amount of transfer was observed, with no differential rate of transfer across experience levels. In Experiments 2 and 3 attempts were made to facilitate transfer of knowledge by inducing transfer-appropriate processing of the source analog and by providing multiple source analogs. The results of both experiments indicate an interaction between treatment and expertise. Unexpectedly, the facilitating treatments reduced the transfer of knowledge for experts while increasing the transfer for novices. Subsequent analysis of the responses of the expert subjects indicates that for the more experienced expert subjects a highly proceduralized rule interfered with the knowledge transfer when that rule was made salient by the facilitating treatments. The less experienced expert subjects behaved in a manner consistent with the hypotheses. This poor performance of the more experienced experts results from the inflexibility in expert problem solving due to the proceduralization of information processing. Frensch and Sternberg (1989) demonstrate that this type of inflexibility is one of the costs of expertise and results from the development of a large and highly complex knowledge base containing numerous well developed strategies.     

Speech imagery is not always faster than visual imagery

One approach to the study of mental imagery is to examine the performance characteristics of different forms of mental imagery when used in various tasks. To demonstrate the utility of this functional approach, the use of speech and visual imagery processes in the serial mental rehearsal of common verbal sequences le.g., letters of the alphabet and familiar object arrays (objects found in familiar rooms) was examined in the present experiments. Rehearsal rates and self-reporte were consistent with the hypothesis that mental rehearsal efficiency is a function of the compatibility of characteristics of the rehearsal materials and rehearsal mode. While verbal sequences were rehearsed faster under speech than under visual imagery conditions, object arrays were rehearsed as fast under visual as under speech imagery conditions. In addition, evidence was found that covert verbal rehearsal is faster than overt verbal rehearsal under some circumstances.     

The generality of overselectivity in developmentally disabled children

A growing body of research suggests that low Mental Age (MA) autistic and retarded children show a unique stimulus control deficit, one that may cause many or most of their behavioral deficiencies. This problem, stimulus overselectivity, is evidenced when a child responds only to a restricted portion of the stimulus environment when compared with normal children. The purpose of this study was to assess whether this overselectivity is general across situations or whether it is restricted to certain stimulus/task conditions. Eight autistic children, who evidenced overselectivity on a preassessment task, and 8 normal children with similar MA levels participated. All children were trained on 3 tasks to determine if overselectivity varied as a function of different stimulus conditions. Each of the 3 tasks involved training a child to respond to (i.e., touch) a card containing a circle (S +) and to avoid a blank (S ?) card. In each case, the circle comprised a series of dots. The difference between the 3 circles (tasks) was the distance between the successive dots making up each circle. Also, in the minimal separation condition the dots were smaller in size and greater in number than in the larger separation conditions. Of concern was whether autistic children learned about the gestalt (i.e., the circle), which required attention to multiple cues, or whether children would overselect and respond to the dots. The results showed that (1) stimulus overselectivity was found not to be a generalized deficit in autistic subjects; instead, it varied as a function of the stimulus variables; and (2) the stimulus variables manipulated in this study similarly influenced the responding of both normal and autistic children. The implications of these data for a theory of overselectivity are discussed.