Career Development of Black South African Adolescents: A Developmental-Contextual Perspective

South Africa is undergoing rapid change in a post-apartheid era. This article uses the developmental-contextual perspective to examine the extent to which contextual and individual factors dynamically interact in the career development of Black South African adolescents. Furthermore, interventions that may assist in the career development of Black adolescents, as well as the implications of this research for counselors, are provided.     

Illusions of familiarity caused by cohort activation

Subjects took part in an auditory lexical decision task followed by an auditory test of recognition memory for words presented in this task. Subjects categorized their recognition judgments as based on either recollection (“remember” responses) or familiarity (“know” responses). Distractor items in the recognition test included the base words from which the nonwords used in the lexical decision task were derived. Consistent with the findings of Wallace, Stewart, Sherman, and Mellor (1995), more false alarms were made to “late” base words (where the corresponding nonwords were created by changing a phoneme near the end of the word) than to “early” base words (corresponding nonwords were created by changing a phoneme at the beginning of the word). However, this effect was found in “know” responses but not in “remember” responses. The findings are attributed to enhanced fluency with which the base words are processed following their implicit activation at encoding.     

An International Comparison of Personality Differences between Hospitality and Other Service Sector Managers

This paper seeks to examine the hypothesis that reliable and valid personality instruments could have international applicability. Utilising data from 327 practising managers drawn from service industries in the United Kingdom, Hungary and the Czech Republic, the research offers a basis for discriminating between the profiles of hospitality and other service sector managers employing stepwise discriminant function analysis, F-tests and classification ratios. The findings, based on a subsequent ANOVA, suggest that these personality profiles extend across the three countries under study. Also, the research provides a methodological approach for consideration in future meta-analytical studies of the processes of management development.     

Future Research Directions in Laterality

This paper considers the current conceptual state of research into neuropsychological laterality and considers some issues which might appropriately be considered for the forward development of the field. It considers the biological context which has been adopted for these studies and the psychological significance of performance asymmetries. A principal emphasis of the paper is the degree to which inferences, rather than direct methodological deductions, can be drawn from the research undertaken. The status of the dichotomies which have been proposed, the role of interhemispheric transfer, and stages of processing models are considered. The degree to which cerebral asymmetries may be inferred to reflect normal processes of the brain is questioned, and some prospects of the future discussed.     

Melancholic epistemology

Too little attention has been paid by philosophers to the cognitive and epistemic dimensions of emotional disturbances such as depression, grief, and anxiety and to the possibility of justification or warrant for such conditions. The chief aim of the present paper is to help to remedy that deficiency with respect to depression. Taxonomy of depression reveals two distinct forms: depression (1) with intentionality and (2) without intentionality. Depression with intentionality can be justified or unjustified, warranted or unwarranted. I argue that the effort of Aaron Beck to show that depressive reasoning is necessarily illogical and distorted is flawed. I identify an essential characteristic of that depression which is a mental illness. Finally, I describe the potential of depression to provide credal contact with important truths.Many persons helped in writing this paper. Special thanks are owed to my wife, Patricia Sedgeman Graham, as well as to Richard Garrett and Hugh LaFollette.     

The unimportance of explicit spatial information in serial recall of visually presented lists

The superiority of auditory over visual presentation in short-term serial recall may be due to the fact that typically only temporal cues to order have been provided in the two modalities. Auditory information is usually ordered along a temporal continuum, whereas visual information is ordered spatially, as well. It is therefore possible that recall following visual presentation may benefit from spatial cues to order. Subjects were tested for serial recall of letter-sequences presented visually either with or without explicit spatial cues to order. No effect of any kind was found, a result which suggests (a) that spatial information is not utilized when it is redundant with temporal information and (b) that the auditory-visual difference would not be modified by the presence of explicit spatial cues to order.     

Teaching directional skills to preschool and kindergarten children

Studied a new device and training procedure for teaching the directional orientation and sentence tracking skills used in reading and writing western languages. Twelve preschool and 14 kindergarten children were randomly assigned to E and C groups. Between pre- and posttests, Es practiced for a total of 20 min. over a two-week period with an electronic device which flashed a correct signal only when S scribed left-to-right through successive sentences from top to bottom of the display. Any error in sequence extinguished the signal. Cs received only pre- and posttests. On test sentences prior to practice neither Es nor Cs were able to show where the sentences began or how they went from beginning to end. After using the device, Es tripled their orientation and tracking scores, while Cs not given access to the device did not improve (p < .002). Left-right and up-down directional confusion, often the subject of many hours of remedial training, were shown to be rapidly corrected in normal children by the use of a simple electronic device providing clear feedback distinguishing correct from incorrect responses. Implications for prereading instruction are discussed.     

Quantitative and qualitative aspects of memory for picture stimuli

Children aged approximately 8.5–9.5 years were shown either names (NP), or pictures (PP), of objects, for each of which they located the corresponding likenesses among an array of alternatives. Written recall and identification accuracy were assessed at 5 hr and 3 days after presentation. As predicted, NP produced significantly superior recall to PP. The rate of identification for recalled items among Ss in PP was significantly higher than that for NP. This result was interpreted as supporting the view that the superiority of NP in recall derives from the fact that Ss may rely upon retrieval from either name or image of each item whereas those in PP must depend upon image alone. This interpretation was extended to take two unexpected findings into account: (i) the superior overall identification accuracy engendered by PP, particularly at the longer time interval; (ii) the relatively weak relationship between identification accuracy and recall scores among matching Ss.     

Visual interaction in a group of introverts and extraverts

Ten introverts and 10 extraverts were selected from a student population on the bask of their responses to the E.P.I. The groups contained 5 men and 5 women and were matched for Neuroticism. Each subject took part in two 4-minute conversations, one with a male confederate, one with a female confederate. The same two confederates were used throughout the experiment, and no attempt was made to programme any aspect of their behaviour. Two trained observers, who sat behind a one way screen situated close to the speakers, recorded the visual and speech behaviour of both subject and confederate by means of a four-channel event-recorder. The recordings were made for the last 3 minutes of each interaction. Extraverts Looked more frequently than introverts, but there were no differences between the two groups in the proportions of time spent in Looking and eye-contact, or in the mean length of Looks. Extraverts also spoke more frequently than introverts, a finding which may complement that for the number of Looks. The findings could not be explained by the behaviour of the confederates, since they behaved consistently across the two groups of subjects. The experiment is discussed with particular reference to Mobbs (1968) and Kendon and Cook (1969). Comparisons of methodology are made.