Reviews of current books

Pastoral Psychology -     

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.     

Relations between source amnesia and frontal lobe functioning in older adults

A study is reported in which the relations among normal aging, source amnesia, and frontal lobe functioning were explored. Twenty-four older adults (aged 60-84 years) were tested on their ability to remember where they had acquired new factual information; they were also given the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), a test of verbal fluency, and other psychometric tests. The degree of source amnesia in this normal sample correlated with age, verbal fluency, and some measures from the WCST. Source amnesia was not related to Performance IQ, however, or to a measure of fact recall. The implications for the relations among aging, memory, and frontal lobe functions are discussed.