Evolution of Counseling in Jamaica: Past,Present, and Future Trends

Counseling maintains a small yet growing presence in Jamaica as a profession. Practitioners are confronted with several societal problems. The authors provide a historical overview of Jamaica and a synopsis of the development of counseling. The emergence of counseling services through the limitations of psychiatry and psychology sets the stage for current practices and notable involvement of guidance counselors. It is concluded that the continued growth and effectiveness of counseling is dependent on overcoming negative attitudes and economic barriers.     

‘This chimp will kick your ass at memory games – but how the hell does he do it?’

Extraordinary evidence generates extraordinary claims. I discuss the remarkable memory skills of chimpanzees tested in the Kyoto Primate Laboratory, and suggest a novel – but deflationary – hypothesis to explain them. Could the chimpanzees, who have been highly trained to learn the sequence of Arabic numerals, have developed number–colour synaesthesia?     

Emotional response to musical repetition

Two experiments examined the effects of repetition on listeners' emotional response to music. Listeners heard recordings of orchestral music that contained a large section repeated twice. The music had a symmetric phrase structure (same-length phrases) in Experiment 1 and an asymmetric phrase structure (different-length phrases) in Experiment 2, hypothesized to alter the predictability of sensitivity to musical repetition. Continuous measures of arousal and valence were compared across music that contained identical repetition, variation (related), or contrasting (unrelated) structure. Listeners' emotional arousal ratings differed most for contrasting music, moderately for variations, and least for repeating musical segments. A computational model for the detection of repeated musical segments was applied to the listeners' emotional responses. The model detected the locations of phrase boundaries from the emotional responses better than from performed tempo or physical intensity in both experiments. These findings indicate the importance of repetition in listeners' emotional response to music and in the perceptual segmentation of musical structure.     

Some Implications of a Behavioral Analysis of Verbal Behavior for Logic and Mathematics

The evident power and utility of the formal models of logic and mathematics pose a puzzle: Although such models are instances of verbal behavior, they are also essentialistic. But behavioral terms, and indeed all products of selection contingencies, are intrinsically variable and in this respect appear to be incommensurate with essentialism. A distinctive feature of verbal contingencies resolves this puzzle: The control of behavior by the nonverbal environment is often mediated by the verbal behavior of others, and behavior under control of verbal stimuli is blind to the intrinsic variability of the stimulating environment. Thus, words and sentences serve as filters of variability and thereby facilitate essentialistic model building and the formal structures of logic, mathematics, and science. Autoclitic frames, verbal chains interrupted by interchangeable variable terms, are ubiquitous in verbal behavior. Variable terms can be substituted in such frames almost without limit, a feature fundamental to formal models. Consequently, our fluency with autoclitic frames fosters generalization to formal models, which in turn permit deduction and other kinds of logical and mathematical inference.     

Working memory: A developmental study of phonological recoding

A cross-sectional study using children aged 3 to 7 years and a cross-sequential study using children aged between 5 and 8 years showed that the development of phonological recoding in working memory was more complex than the simple dichotomous picture portrayed in the current literature. It appears that initially children use no strategy in recall, which is proposed to represent the level of automatic activation of representations in long-term memory and the storage capacity of the central executive. This is followed by a period in which a visual strategy prevails, followed by a period of dual visual-verbal coding before the adult-like strategy of verbal coding finally emerges. The results are discussed in terms of three working memory models (Baddeley, 1990; Engle, 1996; Logie, 1996) where strategy use is seen as the development of attentional processes and phonological recoding as the development of inhibitory mechanisms in the central executive to suppress the habitual response set of visual coding.     

Hierarchical elaboration in the conceptual structures of vietnam combat veterans

Abstract

Sixty male Vietnam combat veterans, 30 hospitalized for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 30 with no PTSD or other psychiatric disorder, sorted and labeled their life events into numeric matrices (repertory grids). Through hierarchical-classes analysis of a subject's matrix, we could compare the hierarchical level (elaboration) of the subject's constructs of a negative combat event with the hierarchical levels of other subjects' constructs of negative combat events and with the subject's precombat life event construction. As predicted, the level of construct elaboration was virtually identical for the two groups for precombat non-trauma-related events but was reduced in the PTSD group for the negative combat event. In addition, the Pythagorean distance scores of the PTSD group indicated less conceptual distance between the negative combat event and negative life events after Vietnam compared with the non-PTSD group's scores. Patients with PTSD rated negative life events more extremely (fewer “shades of gray” ratings) than did the non-PTSD group, especially life events that occurred after Vietnam.     

Masked stimuli modulate endogenous shifts of spatial attention

Unconscious stimuli can influence participants’ motor behavior but also more complex mental processes. Recent research has gradually extended the limits of effects of unconscious stimuli. One field of research where such limits have been proposed is spatial cueing, where exogenous automatic shifts of attention have been distinguished from endogenous controlled processes which govern voluntary shifts of attention. Previous evidence suggests unconscious effects on mechanisms of exogenous shifts of attention. Here, we applied a cue-priming paradigm to a spatial cueing task with arbitrary cues by centrally presenting a masked symmetrical prime before every cue stimulus. We found priming effects on response times in target discrimination tasks with the typical dynamic of cue-priming effects (Experiments 1 and 2) indicating that central symmetrical stimuli which have been associated with endogenous orienting can modulate shifts of spatial attention even when they are masked. Prime–Cue Congruency effects of perceptual dissimilar prime and cue stimuli (Experiment 3) suggest that these effects cannot be entirely reduced to perceptual repetition priming of cue processing. In addition, priming effects did not differ between participants with good and poor prime recognition performance consistent with the view that unconscious stimulus features have access to processes of endogenous shifts of attention.     

Abstract: Genome-Wide Complex Trait Analysis of Shared Genetic Effects Between Brain Electrophysiology Measures and Alcohol Dependence

Multilevel analysis is an appropriate tool for the analysis of hierarchically structured data. There may, however, be reasons to ignore one of the levels of nesting in the data analysis. In this article a three level model with one predictor variable is used as a reference model and the top or intermediate level is ignored in the data analysis. Analytical results show that this has an effect on the estimated variance components and that standard errors of regression coefficients estimators may be overestimated, leading to a lower power of the test of the effect of the predictor variable. The magnitude of these results depends on the ignored level and the level at which the predictor variable varies, and on the values of the variance components and the sample sizes.     

Book Notes

Abstract

Identification of Book Reviewers for this Number. Samuel J. Brandenburg is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Economics in Clark University. James B. Hedges is Assistant Professor of American History in Clark University. George Humphrey is Professor of Philosophy in Queen's University, Ontario.

The Normal Mind: an Introduction to Mental Hygiene and the Hygiene of School Instruction. By William H. Burnham, Ph.D., New York, Appleton, 1924.

The Mentality of Apes. By Wolfgang Köhler. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc., 1925. pp. 342.

The Growth of the Mind. By Kurt Koffka. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, Inc., 1924. pp. 383.

The Mental Growth of the Pre-School Child. By Arnold Gesell. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1925. pp. 447.

Instinct, Intelligence and Character. By Godfrey H. Thomson. New York, Longmans, Green and Co., 1925. pp. 282.

Mental Growth of Children in Relation to the Rate of Growth in Bodily Development. By Buford Johnson. New York, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925. pp. 160.

Vocational Self-Guidance. By Douglas Fryer. Philadelphia, J. P. Lippincott Co, 1925. pp. 385.

The Story of Human Progress. By Leon C. Marshall. New York, Macmillan Company, 1925. pp. 548.

Educating for Freedom. By Edward O. Sisson. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1925. pp. x, 225.     

Associations between psychological characteristics and indicators of metabolic syndrome among Chinese adults

Current knowledge about the relationship between psychological characteristics and metabolic syndrome (MetS) components is limited in Asian populations. The purpose of this study is to investigate linkages between physiological markers of MetS and life satisfaction, hostility, and depression in Chinese adults. Secondary analyses were conducted using cross-sectional data from parents of randomly selected middle school students participating in a pilot study in Qingdao, China. Among 440 parents who consented to participate (237 women, 203 men), 368 provided valid responses in all three categories of psychological characteristics, and only those subjects were included in these analyses. General linear models and logistic regressions were run separately by gender, controlling for covariates. Among women, life satisfaction was inversely associated with triglyceride levels (p = .04), LDL-C (p < .01), risk of hypertriglyceridemia (OR[.53], p < .01), HDL-C (OR[.78], p = .03), and MetS (OR[.52], p = .03). No associations were found between life satisfaction and any psychological characteristics among men. Among women, hostility was positively associated with triglyceride level (p = .04) and risk of hypertriglyceridemia (OR[2.12], p < .05). Among men, hostility was positively associated with waist circumference (p = .04), waist-hip ratio (p < .05), and fasting plasma insulin (p < .01). Depression was not associated with any physiological measurement in either gender. These findings indicate that relationships exist between certain psychological characteristics and physiological indicators of MetS among Chinese adults, although there may be important differences between genders.