Hand Test characteristics of severely behavior handicapped children

The Hand Test was administered to 98 severely behavior handicapped (SBH) children and a matched control group of public school children. The withdrawal score and associated variables, indicative of severe psychopathology, differentiated the two groups. In addition, a qualitative analysis of the SBH protocols tentatively suggested a preponderance of four behavioral types that could be described as the underproductive, perseverative, psychotic and impulsive child. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Contingent reinforcement effects on movement responses of prison inmates to the Holtzman Inkblot Technique

Prison inmates were administered the Holtzman Inkblot Technique (HIT) under conditions of either verbal or nonverbal reinforcement of movement responses. Overall, there were no differences among the verbal, nonverbal, and control groups. Inmates charged with violent crimes were found to give the fewest movement responses. With crime category controlled, more movement responses were given under nonverbal conditions. There were no sex differences for movement responses but testing time increased significantly when administered by the female examiner.     

Content analysis: a comparison of manual and computerized systems

Computerized content analysis is a technique for classifying texts. In personality research it has been used to make inferences about psychological states and traits of the speaker or writer. Whereas computerized techniques have been increasing in both sophistication and ease of use, questions remain regarding their validity compared to hand-scored scales. In this study, we compare a relatively simple computerized technique; a more sophisticated, context-sensitive computerized approach; and a context-sensitive, human-scored system. Seventy-one subjects, representing four diagnostic groups, provided free-speech samples which were scored according to all three methods. Data from each method were then submitted to discriminant and classification analyses. In comparing the classification performance of the three methods, we found that both computerized methods were more accurate than the human-scored method. The time and cost benefits of computerized systems are discussed.     

Item factor structure of the Personality Adjective Check List

This study reports on a principal-components analysis of the Personality Adjective Check List (PACL) at the item level. Data came from a national sample of normal adults and included the responses of 1,058 men and 1,194 women (N = 2,252). Analyses were conducted separately for men and women, and for the sexes combined. The scree test was applied to decide on the number of factors to extract. Retained factors were rotated by varimax and direct oblimin procedures. Results were very similar for each analysis, with coefficients of congruence for the five orthogonal factors obtained from men and women separately being .95, .92, .94, .94, and .92. The five unipolar personality dimensions isolated were interpreted as Aggressive/Dominant, Neurotic, Conscientious, Detached/Introverted, and Surgent/Extraverted. These were compared to item factors of the Million Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI-I), MCMI-II, Adjective Check List (ACL), and to Norman's Big Five dimensions.     

Learned resourcefulness, drinking, and smoking in young adults

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between learned resourcefulness and two common addictive behaviors, namely, drinking and smoking. Male and female college students (N = 175) completed the Self-Control Schedule (SCS), the Quantity-Frequency-Variability questionnaire, and a smoking history form. Learned resourcefulness was related to self-reported patterns of alcohol consumption; specifically, heavy drinking subjects were lower in learned resourcefulness than were light and moderate drinkers who, in turn, were lower in learned resourcefulness than were infrequent drinkers and abstainers. Learned resourcefulness was only modestly related to smoking, with students who had never smoked evidencing somewhat higher learned resourcefulness than ex-smokers and current smokers. Overall, these data provide correlational support for the notion that learned resourcefulness may protect young adults against substance abuse.     

Religious self and secular self: Clinical transitions

Clerical people, returning to secular life, may undergo shifts in self-experience, including alterations in internal object relations. Self-psychology, positing the importance to health of cohesion of all aspects of self, provides a theoretical model for exploring such shifts and their facilitation through psychoanalytic psychotherapy. A case of a released Roman Catholic priest is discussed to illustrate dynamic processes. Emphasis is on a clinical approach that does not require conversion of religious and spiritual self-experience into drive derivative formulations     

Assertiveness and social anxiety in Chinese-American women

The notion that Chinese Americans, compared to Caucasian Americans, are passive and nonassertive was examined with self-report and behavioral measures. Chinese-Americans (n = 36) and Caucasian (n = 19) female college students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: role-playing a series of 13 situations requiring assertion with an Asian experimenter or role-playing the same situations with a Caucasian experimenter. The Chinese-American students were as assertive as the Caucasian subjects on all behavioral measures. Only one self-report measure, the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (Watson & Friend, 1968), revealed a significant difference between the two groups; Chinese-American students were more apprehensive about social situations than Caucasian students.     

Negative priming in same-different matching: further evidence for a central locus of inhibition

Responses to recently ignored information may be slower or less accurate than responses to information not recently encountered. Such negative priming effects imply that the mechanism of selective attention operates on unattended, as well as attended, information. In the present experiment, subjects judged the second and fourth letters of five-letter strings (e.g., BABAB) as "same" or "different." Responses were slower when a target letter was identical to the distractors presented in the immediately preceding trial. This effect did not depend on which response was required on the current or preceding trial. The results suggest that ignored information is functionally disconnected from the response system as a whole, rather than from a specific response.