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.     

Further experiments on movement masking

Voluntary attention to one of two static objects in the peripheral field of one eye makes this object more liable to masking by a moving object in the corresponding area of the field of the other eye (Experiment 1).

Positive after images (and probably negative after images) are subject to (binocular) movement masking (Experiment 2).

Movement masking can occur in the field of either eye, but with the displays so far tried the inhibitory influence of a moving object is less in the field of the eye to which it is shown than in the field of the other eye (Experiment 3).     

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.