Managing Attitudes Toward High Achievers: The Influence 0f Group Discussion

For a variety of cultural, contextual, and interpersonal reasons, individual achievement often meets with potentially demotivating resistance from the group. In groups of between three and seven members, 397 psychology and social work students, in East and Northern Australian cities (Newcastle and Darwin), indicated their attitudes toward high achievers before, during, and after a group consensus task. In each location, and at both individual and group levels of analysis, initially slightly pro-achiever attitudes, following discussion of the issues, became polarized. Such changes, across diverse settings and groups, indicate that group discussion may be a robust tool, both for empowering teams and encouraging support for individual initiative.     

Boundaries in the practice of humanistic counselling

The multifaceted concept of boundary is used to describe the ground rules, quality and type of therapeutic relationship in a humanistic form of counselling that develops some of the principles of Carl Rogers and blends them with principles from psychodynamic practice. The concept of boundaries is first discussed in relation to its usages and practical consequences. An analysis of some core principles and assumptions about boundaries that guide the communicative psychotherapy approach of Robert Langs leads into a comparison with person-centred counselling. The aim is to develop a middle path for humanistic practice along more formal lines, involving a more fluid understanding of relationships and precise use of counselling principles. This also involves finding aspects of agreement between the psychodynamic and humanistic styles of working, by omitting some concepts and practices and identifying areas of common ground. Several comments on practice are made by comparing the two perspectives. The concept of boundary enables counsellors of all schools to think about points of similarity and difference. Finally, the notion of boundary itself is critiqued, and intersubjectivity is proposed as a potentially more meaningful term.     

T. V. Moore’s (1939)Cognitive Psychology

Thomas Verner Moore published a book calledCognitive Psychology in 1939, almost 30 years before Neisser’s (1967) more familiar and far more influential work. Although it covers most of the standard topics found in current cognitive psychology textbooks, and even anticipated several current trends, Moore’s text is not cited by any of the major histories of the “cognitive revolution” or any current cognitive textbook. We provide a brief sketch of Moore’s academic life and summarize several of his papers that are still cited. After describing the psychologies prevalent in 1939, we compare Moore’s text with two contemporary works, Woodworth (1938) and McGeoch (1942). We conclude by comparing the older text with Neisser’s and by offering several reasons why the book is virtually unknown.     

The Tower of Babel: Searching for core clinical,theoretical and ethical issues in psychotherapy

This paper is about how different groups of therapists view the others now that UKSPC has voted to initiate a register and 1992 is here. Therapy has a set of common aims and these link all therapies together. This paper tries to draw fundamental conclusions for practitioners and trainees. It is a first step in the author's investigations of the frame or field of psychotherapy, which holds both clients and psychotherapists. Mental health practitioners are joined together by a common bond of having the same type of vocation: to help those who are in emotional pain. It is posited that what happens in one part of the field of mental health care affects all other parts of the field.     

Book Reviews

Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Arabic Thought and Culture Series. DOMINIQUE URVOY, 1991. London, Routledge. 156 pp.

Logic and Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy Vol. VII. Islamic Philosophy and Theology Texts and Studies. DEBORAH L. BLACK, 1990. Leiden and New York, E. J. Brill. 290 pp.

Philosophy and Science in the Islamic World. C. A. QADIR, 1990. London, Routledge 1990. 218 pp.

Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots. ROBERT E. ALLINSON, 1989. Hong Kong and Oxford, Oxford University Press. 316 pp.

On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy. L. E. GOODMAN, 1991. New Haven, Yale University Press. 288 pp.     

Distinctiveness and serial position effects in recognition

Digitized photographs of snowflakes were presented for a recognition test after retention intervals of varying durations. While overall accuracy and discrimination remained constant, as the retention interval increased, primacy increased from chance to reliably better than chance while recency decreased to chance levels. A variation of Murdock’s (1960) distinctiveness model accounted for the changing primacy and recency effects observed in both between- and within-subjects designs. The generality of the model was examined in two different paradigms: lexical access during sentence processing, and free recall in the continual distractor paradigm. In both cases, the model made accurate qualitative predictions for both latency and accuracy measures.