The Wakonse Conference on College Teaching

A Wakonse Conference on College Teaching is a week-long retreat that provides renewal and support for college teaching. Offered in a secluded environment away from campus, it engages faculty from various colleges in demonstration and discussion of what makes teaching effective and rewarding. Wakonse is a grassroots movement within the academy to bring teaching to the forefront and make it central to the mission of higher education. Support for what makes Wakonse effective can be found in much of the student development literature.     

Gender Role of Male Therapists in Both Professional and Personal Life

This study's purpose was to extend the distantresearch on gender roles. The specific objective was tobetter understand the gender role of male psychologists.It was hypothesized that male psychologists would exhibit an androgynous gender role.Gender role styles in professional work and in thepersonal realm were assessed. Questionnaire packets weremailed to 300 male clinical psychologists affiliated with the American Psychological Associationacross six regions within the United States. Sixty ofthe 61 participants reported being Caucasian and 1reported being Native American. Being that the sample was that of practicing psychologists, all withdoctorate degrees, the social class is presumed to be atleast upper middle class. The packets contained ademographics questionnaire and two Personal Attributes Questionnaires. Results suggest that malepsychologists do exhibit an androgynous gender role inboth professional and personal realms. A great deal ofthe prior literature indicates that androgynoustherapists have more adaptive communication skills and arebetter at assessing and treating their clients. Thisresult is therefore advantageous to therapeuticoutcomes.     

Development of an on-line management information system for community mental health centers

An on-line computerized management information system has been developed at the Salt Lake City VA Hospital and is currently being implemented at Salt Lake Community Mental Health Center. An introduction to this system, including systems design and procedures for development, are presented. The advantages of on-line technology as compared to batch processing technology are also discussed.     

Repression of emotionally tagged memories: the architecture of less complex emotions

We asked subjects to recall memories of events that evoked feelings of anger, sadness, fear, and embarrassment. These memories evoked patterns of dominant and nondominant emotions. The dominant emotions evoked by the recalled events were no less intense for repressors than nonrepressors, but repressors' patterns of nondominant emotions were less intense than those of nonrepressors. The data suggested that for repressors the associative network of negative emotional memories may be more discrete and less complex than that for nonrepressors. This finding was consistent with recent research indicating that negative emotional memories are less accessible for repressors than for nonrepressors. The pattern of multivariate effects suggests that this repressive memorial architecture may serve the motive of isolating fear-associated memories.     

Sensory control of maternal aggression in Rattus norvegicus

Female rats become aggressive toward adult conspecifics during lactation. This change in social affect is dependent on the presence of the offspring, because maternal aggression disappears when the pups are removed. It was found that a similar decline occurs when the litter is placed in a glass flask while remaining in the home cage. In contrast, maternal aggression persists following placement of the pups in a nylon mesh bag. The pups did not vocalize while being in the mesh bags, so it appears that olfactory cues from the offspring constitute a critical element in the maintenance of maternal aggression in the rat. It has been suggested that the odor not only of the pups but also of the intruder may contribute to eliciting aggressive behavior in lactating rodents. In line with this proposal, it was found that mother rats spend about one third of the time preceding the first attack sniffing the body of the intruder. In contrast to findings in mice, housing of the prospective intruder behind a double wire mesh partition in the lactating female's home cage failed to reduce her aggressiveness toward him. Rats, then, may require more intimate contact with an individual than do mice for the aggression-reducing effect of familiarization to be observed.     

The role of sensorimotor impairments in dyslexia: a multiple case study of dyslexic children

This study attempts to investigate the role of sensorimotor impairments in the reading disability that characterizes dyslexia. Twenty-three children with dyslexia were compared to 22 control children, matched for age and non-verbal intelligence, on tasks assessing literacy as well as phonological, visual, auditory and motor abilities. The dyslexic group as a whole were significantly impaired on phonological, but not sensorimotor, tasks. Analysis of individual data suggests that the most common impairments were on phonological and visual stress tasks and the vast majority of dyslexics had one of these two impairments. Furthermore, phonological skill was able to account for variation in literacy skill, to the exclusion of all sensorimotor factors, while neither auditory nor motor skill predicted any variance in phonological skill. Visual stress seems to account for a small proportion of dyslexics, independently of the commonly reported phonological deficit. However, there is little evidence for a causal role of auditory, motor or other visual impairments.     

Psychometric properties of the Trauma Stages of Recovery

Of the trauma theories available, Herman's has captured the essential features common to most traumatic etiologies. Continued development of this theory has included dimensions within stages of recovery. The Trauma States of Recovery is presented here as a way of assessing stages of recovery and inherent components. Three samples of about 500 college students each and a clinical sample (n=34) were recruited. Independent principal components analyses, employing a scree plot, gave a five-component solution accounting for 40.2% of the total variance. The component solution employed Promax rotation for the correlated components. The five components were named Emotional Awareness and Control, Symptom Mastery, Coping, Memory, and Relationships. Internal consistencies, test-retest reliability, and split-half reliability were acceptable. Response bias was low. Convergent validity (with various subscales from the Beck Depression Inventory, the Self-esteem Scale, the Spielberger Anger-Expression Scale, and the Dissociative Experiences Scale) and discriminant validity (with various subscales of the AIDS Knowledge and Attitudes Survey and Jackson's Personality Research Form Dominance Scale) were promising. The Trauma Stages of Recovery also significantly discriminated between clinical and nonclinical samples on three of the five components, Symptom Mastery, Coping, and Memory.