Values and the moral context of pastoral counseling

This paper reviews the ways in which psychology has influenced the pastoral counseling movement, focuses, upon how the role and function of the pastoral counselor have lost their unique identity, and offers the construct of a moral context as a means for rediscovering, identifying, reviving, and strengthening the pastoral counselor's professional and spiritual selfimage.This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Montreal, Canada, 1980. The author acknowledges, with appreciation, the contribution of Ariel Sylverin in the development of this article.     

Social and clinical factors in the frequency of ambulatory patients visiting a therapeutic club of a psychiatric clinic

Extramural psychiatric facilities such as therapeutic clubs are of major importance for the continuous aftercare of patients with qualitative or quantitative communicative difficulties. This contribution reports on social and clinical factors affecting the frequency with which outpatients of a psychiatric clinic attend such a club. The main objective of the club was to secure most frequent attendance among patients living without partners and who are not or only partly able to practice a vocation (regardless of the nosological and syndromatological diagnosis). This target was achieved. Attendance was less satisfactory among patients who had suffered from serious psychic disorders entailing frequent hospitalization and patients who, during their last stay at hospital, had received only somatic but no sociotherapeutic and psychotherapeutic treatment.     

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN IN TRADITIONAL AND NON-TRADITIONAL MANAGERIAL ROLES

This study investigated characteristics which distinguish women who choose traditional as opposed to non-traditional careers and who function at differing occupational levels. 156 nurses represented the traditional sample, and 147 women in business and industrial positions in which 20% or fewer of the job incumbents were female comprised the non-traditional career group. The women were matched according to age and education across three occupational levels. It was determined that women as a group in non-traditional business roles as compared to the traditionals were more achieving, emphasized production more, saw themsleves as having characteristics more like managers and men, and saw no self-characteristics which conflicted with those ascribed to male managers. The business women considered the domestic role as less important, had fewer children, and fewer children living at home, than did the nurses. The two groups did not differ in their attitude toward the importance of their careers, their perceptions of their husband's attitudes, nor in the education level of their spouse and parents. These findings lead to the conclusion that leadership attributes and behavior of women do vary between organizational settings and across occupational levels in predictable ways.     

Context dependence in visual feature processing

Summary Dependence in visual feature processing was studied with two identification experiments using briefly exposed stimuli. The basic stimuli consisted of two orthogonal line segments which formed either one of the four angles of a square, and the subject had to identify the location of the horizontal and vertical line segment making up a stimulus. In the first experiment, the two orthogonal line segments were sometimes separated by a gap. In the second experiment, either a 45° diagonal or a 135° diagonal or both were added to the right angles. With the observed response frequencies two forms of independence in feature detection were tested. Feature detection is called state independent if the detection of a feature is independent of the detection of another feature. According to context independence the detection of a feature is independent of the orientation and location of other features in the stimulus. Feature detection was shown to be context dependent whereas the hypothesis of state independence was not rejected, and state independence was unrelated to the size of the gap between the two orthogonal line segments in the first experiment. It was argued that the context effects obtained (context dependence) had occurred early in processing during the automatic activation of representational units corresponding to features before controlled search, interpretation and decision processes became involved.     

The neural organization of language: evidence from sign language aphasia

To what extent is the neural organization of language dependent on factors specific to the modalities in which language is perceived and through which it is produced? That is, is the left-hemisphere dominance for language a function of a linguistic specialization or a function of some domain-general specialization(s), such as temporal processing or motor planning? Investigations of the neurobiology of signed language can help answer these questions. As with spoken languages, signed languages of the deaf display complex grammatical structure but are perceived and produced via radically different modalities. Thus, by mapping out the neurological similarities and differences between signed and spoken language, it is possible to identify modality-specific contributions to brain organization for language. Research to date has shown a significant degree of similarity in the neurobiology of signed and spoken languages, suggesting that the neural organization of language is largely modality-independent.     

Signs of change in the affective context of dreams and the psychoanalytic process]

The author inquires whether dreams related in psychoanalysis can be indicator of curative change, and if so what affective conditions go to making this possible. To answer this question convincingly, he puts forward a new model of dream generation. It proceeds from the relation between cognitive elements, regulatory affective processes and species of interaction represented in individual dream situations. Such a model requires a new theory of mental representation, affective processes and memory. For precise analysis of change processes, Moser has recourse to a coding system for dream content. Finally he compares change processes in dreams with those in the psychoanalytic situation and suggests hypotheses on the extent to which changes in dreams can be indicators of changes in the psychoanalytic process.