Reviews of current books

Pastoral Psychology -     

Fixed ratio and extinction performance of infants in the second year of life

Five 14(1/2)- to 19(1/2)-month-old infants were trained to lever press for snacks on small fixed ratio schedules of reinforcement. Within four to nine sessions, responding under FR 10 was established for four subjects and FR 15 for the other. Each subject's last session revealed behavioral patterns similar to animal and human FR trained subjects-a high and constant ratio rate, mixed with a zero rate following reinforcements. Deviations were mostly in the form of prolonged and variable post-reinforcement pauses. These and other irregularities were probably due to the limited deprivation conditions and improper training procedures in which the ratio (for two subjects) was ascended too early and too quickly. Extinction was instituted during the last session. The degree to which extinction performance matched that of other organisms depended upon how stable and "ratio-like" performance was during conditioning.     

The Development and Evaluation of a Measure of Counselor Effectiveness

The purpose of this research was to construct and evaluate a measure for assessing counselor-trainee effectiveness. An eight-category rating instrument was constructed and two standardized interview situations emphasizing problems commonly encountered by secondary school counselors were developed. The standardized interview situations provided by the use of coached counselees permitted a panel of six trained judges to evaluate via closed-circuit television 30 counselor-trainees under conditions designed to insure comparability and, hence, fair appraisal. Using a definition of reliability as the degree of consistency between judges, the average correlation between ratings given by pairs of independent raters was .50. It was concluded that the rating instrument developed and the techniques employed for its use constituted a usable, realistic measure for assessing the counseling proficiency of counselor-trainees.     

Children's judgments of body size and distortion

Body size estimates of 69 children aged 5–13 years were obtained using a TV video methodology. Tasks included an adjustment procedure where children manipulated the width of their body image on a TV, and a discrete task, where they judged the accuracy of their TV image which was presented as either normal or distorted, that is, too wide or too thin. On the continuous task, judgments were more accurate on ascending trials where children had to increase the width of the image. On the discrete task, a signal detection analysis revealed older children were better in detecting size distortion in their images and that the differences were due to differences in the biological sensory system and not due to a bias to report that they were too fat or too thin. However, there were response bias differences between genders. Females were more likely to report size distortion with increasing age while males were less likely.