Book Reviews

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man, by Jack Drescher, The Analytic Press, 1998, 373 ps. Lazarus, What's Next? A Memoir, by Renate Horney, self...     

Children's use of multiple-counting skills: adaptation to task factors

The purpose of the study was to determine conditions under which young children enumerate by counting in multiples. Thirty-eight kindergartners and first-graders enumerated dot displays and gave verbal reports of their strategies; additionally, they were given an independent assessment of multiple-counting skill. Dot displays varied according to overall numerosity, perceptual arrangement (random, clustered, rectangular), and numerosity of subgroupings. Children were relatively accurate at enumerating small-numerosity and nonrandom displays. They were relatively likely to report counting by multiples, rather than by ones, on small-numerosity and clustered displays. Contingent upon their skill level, children counted by multiple units (twos, threes, and fours) that corresponded to the numerosity of subgroupings (2, 3, and 4). Contrasting effects of different numerosities and perceptual arrangements are discussed in terms of contextual support for the use, and development, of numerical skills among young children.     

Foreseeability and self-interest as moral judgment factors with normal and acting-out adolescent boys

Thirty-two male adolescents participated in a study of moral judgment and its relationship to social functioning. Half of the subjects were selected for frequent acting-out, aggressive behavior, and half were selected from regular eighth-grade classes and matched for intelligence. The moral stories featured good intentions with bad outcomes and varied as to whether or not the outcome was foreseeable and in the actor's self-interest. Subjects judged the actor, attributed judgments to adults, and casually explained the outcome. The difference in judgments between foreseeable and nonforeseeable actions was greater for “normal” subjects. Furthermore, although normal subjects judged foreseeable actions more harshly than acting-out subjects, the reverse was true for nonforeseeable actions. Judgments attributed to adults were harsher than subjects' own judgments, and this difference was greater for acting-out subjects. Causal attributions (personal vs. situational) and other reasoning related strongly to the foreseeability and self-interest factors but not to subject group.     

Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words

We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representations of information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential, like the propositions in a text. Diagrammatic representations are indexed by location in a plane. Diagrammatic representations also typically display information that is only implicit in sentential representations and that therefore has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make it explicit for use. We then contrast the computational efficiency of these representations for solving several illustrative problems in mathematics and physics. When two representations are informationally equivalent, their computational efficiency depends on the information-processing operators that act on them. Two sets of operators may differ in their capabilities for recognizing patterns, in the inferences they can carry out directly, and in their control strategies (in particular, the control of search). Diagrammatic and sentential representations support operators that differ in all of these respects. Operators working on one representation may recognize features readily or make inferences directly that are difficult to realize in the other representation. Most important, however, are differences in the efficiency of search for information and in the explicitness of information. In the representations we call diagrammatic, information is organized by location, and often much of the information needed to make an inference is present and explicit at a single location. In addition, cues to the next logical step in the problem may be present at an adjacent location. Therefore problem solving can proceed through a smooth traversal of the diagram, and may require very little search or computation of elements that had been implicit.     

Experimentelle Untersuchungen über die Erfassung des handschriftlichen Ausdrucks durch Laien

Ohne ZusammenfassungHerrn Prof. Dr. Blumenfeld und Herrn Prof. Dr. Peters danke ich für Beratung und Förderung meiner Arbeit.     

TheL-method

It is shown that theL-method is basic to test-building and to all combining of scores where the several sub-parts of a composite are weighted according to their respective standard deviations, i.e., with equal gross score weights or by adding the several sub-scores. With chiefly a listing adding machine, a few celluloid strips, and a master matrix table ofL's, one may, in a fraction of the time and with equally good or even better practical results, easily duplicate, with test-building material most of the feats obtainable by multiple regression equations.