College Students' Perceptions of the Relationship Between Fee and Counseling

Fee as a variable that could have an impact on college students' perceptions of counseling was explored because of the authentic concerns about college counseling centers needing to charge direct fees for their services. Participants (N = 350) represented a cross-section of potential consumers of psychological services, not just individuals currently receiving services. On an overt level, fees seemed to be less influential in counseling considerations, but were taken into account on a more covert level. This study supports the psychological literature, which suggests that fee is not the most important factor in clients' decisions to seek counseling. Implications for counselors, administrators, researchers, and program planners are discussed.     

DSM-IV: WhatY's New

The significant differences between the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R; American Psychiatric Association, 1987) and the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) are described, focusing on the types of mental disorders counselors frequently diagnose and treat. These include several disorders included in the children's section as well as Adjustment Disorders, Substance-Related Disorders, Mood Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, and Personality Disorders.     

Structure and development of behavior systems

Behavior systems are particular organizations of cognitive structures that are called behavior mechanisms: perceptual, central, and motor. Thus, behavior systems are defined here in structural terms and not in terms of their functional characteristics. In young animals, behavior mechanisms often develop independently of functional experience, though specific types of experience are usually necessary for integrated systems to develop. These concepts are illustrated here by the dust-bathing, feeding, aggressive, and sexual systems of the fowl, which are considered to be typical of behavior systems in other species. Aspects of neural development are examined and found to facilitate our understanding of a wide range of developmental phenomena, such as critical periods and irreversibility. Finally, various examples of classical conditioning and instrumental learning are analyzed in terms of the type of structures involved, and they are related to general developmental processes.     

Robust conditioned flavor preferences with a sensory preconditioning procedure

During sensory preconditioning, rats were given two distinct flavors (saccharin and coffee) in sequence with 0, 9, or 27 sec between the two flavors. A control group received the flavors unpaired. In subsequent training, the second flavor preceded sucrose by 5 min. Later, the subjects that had had 0- or 9-sec delays between the two flavors showed a significant preference for the flavor not directly reinforced, whereas those that had had a 27-sec delay showed only a marginally significant preference. Although taste aversions have been produced using these methods, this is the first demonstration of conditioned preferences for flavors not directly associated with the reinforcers. These results offer an alternative way to study flavor-flavor learning.     

The other side of the coin: Cognitive properties of nonreward

In this comment, I examine Amsel’s theory in the light of rats’ reaction not to frustrative non-reward per se, but to the more complicated case in which frustrative nonreward is part of a rule-based sequence of reward quantities. The discussion goes beyond Amsel’s emphasis on dispositional memory to consider cognitive and representational memory—the signaling properties of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. The strengths and weaknesses of Amsel’s theory are discussed with the fresh perspective that this viewpoint provides, and some issues emerge that may be fruitful for further study.