Fu tao: guidance in Taiwan seeks a value orientation

The guidance movement in Taiwan, only 20 years old, has paralleled ours in developing from vocational-educational advisement toward personal counseling. There is a basic conflict between traditional Chinese culture grounded in Confucian ideals and rules of behavior, and the highly individualized value orientation on which the counseling movement is predicated. This conflict leads Chinese guidance workers to search their tradition for a more appropriate balance between individual freedom and social responsibility. This article is a cross-cultural comparison exploring some critical implications for the value orientation of our Western democratic society and the counseling movement.     

A model for counselor-student-teacher involvement

School counselors need to adopt some new supplementary roles in order to get more involved in the classroom learning situation. The Inquiry Role Approach (IRA) offers such a program for counselor involvement. The IRA establishes teams of students who work with the counselor and the teacher in the regular classroom. Individual referrals to the counselor are accepted as part of the classroom routine. Preliminary evaluation of the program suggests that certain attitudes and social skills are enhanced, and the counselors benefit by dealing directly with more students in a classroom situation.     

Counselor or change agent: support from the profession

This article supplements the ideas on counseling and the social revolution which appeared in the May 1971 P&G—especially regarding the common behavior models of the counselor and the change agent. Because adherence to a model often places a counselor in jeopardy, the authors call on the profession to offer support and leadership on a national level to those counselors who wish to act as change agents.     

Effects of agreement and disagreement in groups on recognition memory performance and confidence

Three dependent variables, derived from an extended Signal-Detection paradigma, were used in each of 3 experiments: memory performance, confidence-level, and response-bias. Each memory item was first judged by S and then fictitiously by 2 confederates providing different degrees of agreement and disagreement. As compared to agreement moderate disagreement yielded both better recognition performance and, if S's judgements were false, less confidence. Strong disagreement failed to repeat these findings. Balanced agreement/disagreement raised the level of both performance and confidence relative to a situation without information from the group. In all the experiments correct decisions yielded higher confidence than errors. Festinger's theory of social comparison processes accounts for all results in performance, but for explaining the confidence shifts assumptions on ‘internal cues’ should also be incorporated. The response-bias was not affected by social treatment differences, thus supporting the view of some Signal-Detection theorists. Proposals towards a general theory of stimulus processing in social context are outlined and some of its consequences are discussed by taking as examples some conformity experiments.     

Transpersonal approaches to counseling

The transpersonal movement is concerned with expanding the personal boundaries of individuals to facilitate mind and body self-control through various unusual modes, such as autogenic feedback, hypnosis, yoga, and meditation. This article discusses transpersonal approaches to counseling with emphasis on the possibilities of using suggestion, relaxation, hypnosis, imagery, and dreams. The author offers a concept of transpersonal counseling in which children would be trained to control their own mental, emotional, and physiological processes.     

Intervention packages: an approach to self-management

Intervention packages—planned units of instruction and practice designed to deal with specific student problems—offer a systematic, economical strategy for counseling. Not only do the packages allow the counselor more time for counseling individuals and small groups but they also give students a feeling of greater control over their behavior and environment. This article suggests guidelines for developing and administering intervention packages.     

Visual and tactual form discrimination: Psychophysical comparison within and between modalities

Intermodal perceptual equivaience was investigated, using visual and tactual oddity discrimination and cross-modal matching-to-sample tasks. Four groups of Ss were presented with 100 problems made up of randomly derived forms from five levels of sidedness. The same quadratic relationship was observed for all tasks as a function of complexity, with optimal performance at eight sides. Comman information utilization, as indicated by intercorrelations of performance variables and by correlational analyses with differences in form measures, was not as pronounced within side classes. Evidence concerning the nature of pattern-feature usage in discrimination was obtained from graphical analyses.     

Detection of extraneous signals during sentence recognition

In two separate experiments, 40 Ss were presented with recorded sentences during each of which a click occurred. Ss had to depress a key as soon as they heard the click. RTs were f aster when the click was located at the major syntactic break of the sentence compared with RTs to clicks not at a break. This confirmed the hypothesis that processing load is a function of the surface structure of sentences, although the role of minor breaks was not clear. A second finding was that RTs were slower when the click was in the first rather than in the second half of the sentence. This can also be explained in terms of differential processing loads.