Assessing the acceptability of staff management procedures to direct care and supervisory staff

Direct care and supervisory staff in five residential training programs for persons with mental retardation in North Dakota rated the acceptability of six staff management procedures. Overall, staff rated “Instructions”, “Instructions and Modeling”, “Feedback and Praise”, and “Instructions, Feedback, and Praise”, as significantly more acceptable than “Self-Management” and “Self-Management, Feedback and Praise”. There was a significant group by treatment interaction in which supervisors and direct care staff had significantly different acceptability rating for four of the six procedures. The results were further analyzed by group and implications and future research are discuessed.     

Multilevel models in developmental psychological research: Rationales and applications

The armoury of statistical techniques has recently been enhanced with the multilevel model for longitudinal data. The present article explains the multilevel model for longitudinal data to the statistically non-sophisticated reader. It shows how the model relates to the five rationales of longitudinal research, as they were put forward by Baltes and Nesselroade (1979). In addition, it shows how the model matches Wohlwill's methodology of developmental functions. To elucidate the model further, three applications are given. The applications pertain to the development of children's sleeping duration during the first 18 months of life, the effects of early hospitalization on the daily frequency of crying, and the developmental relationship between social and solitary play.     

Three-space inference from two-space stimulation

Oblique contours sloping at 30° with respect to the horizontal were presented alone, in combination to form chevrons, or with a vertical line to form arrowhead or Y patterns; they were projected onto a screen in the frontal parallel plane and viewed from positions that gave viewing angles of 90° (normal to the screen’s surface), 53°, or 34°. The perceived orientation of the contours, as assessed by a movable arm that the subjects set to be parallel to the obliques, changed monotonically as a function of viewing angle. The change was as great for single obliques as for combinations of obliques within the chevron, arrowhead, and Y patterns. The results of Experiment 1 were extended in Experiment 2, in which obliques at 30° and 50° with respect to the horizontal were presented singly or in combination as chevron patterns. It is argued that the results of both experiments indicate that single two-space oblique lines are immediately interpreted as lying in three-space and that the changes in perceived orientation are a consequence of this perceptual inference.     

Perceptual selectivity for color and form

Three visual-search experiments tested whether the preattentive parallel stage can-selectively guide the attentive stage to a particular known-to-be-relevant target feature. Subjects searched multielement displays for a salient green circle that had a unique form when surrounded by green nontarget squares or had a unique color when surrounded by red nontarget circles. In the distractor conditions, a salient item in the other dimension was present as well. As an extension of earlier findings (Theeuwes, 1991), the results showed that complete top-down selectivity toward a particular feature was not possible, not even after extended and consistent practice. The results reveal that selectivity depends on the relative discriminability of the stimulus dimensions: the presence of an irrelevant item with a unique color interferes with parallel search for a unique form, and vice versa.     

The Bellak and Associates Ego Function Rating in general practice of psychiatric expert assessment

The paper considers more than 70 ego function rating examinations in their relation to expert apprinsement. In general, appraisement was confirmed by the further progress of the cases. The gravity of the mental disorder can be set in perspective by the appraisement of co-affecting factors. A cutoff level of about 4 as the mean of 12 ego functions can be taken to be reliable, the working capacity being frequently impaired below 4.     

TREATING WOMEN AS SEX-OBJECTS

In this paper we have two related aims. First, we aim to present an account of what it is to treat women as sex-objects.¹ Like other philosophical writers in the field, we hold that the central idea in an account of such treatment is the failure to treat women with proper respect in sexual behavior. This idea has been cashed out in terms of using,² and in terms of dehumanization or failure to accord equal rights to freedom and welfare.³ However, we believe that there is a central deficiency in most such philosophical accounts of treating women as sex-objects, namely, a failure to outline in any detail a theory of interpersonal norms so that one can grasp in more concrete terms what it is to avoid treating a woman as a sex-object. We aim to rectify this deficiency by presenting a model of interpersonal norms based on the work of the social psychologist Chris Argyris.⁴     

The negative generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon

In four experiments employing between-list designs, generation was found to have negative effects on free recall of word pairs and on cued recall of the second word. In addition, generation had negative effects on measures of word-pair integration and on clustering in recall. In contrast, positive effects of generation were found on free recall of second words alone, and on a recognition test for memory of the second word. It was concluded that in between-list designs, generation led to greater individual-item processing of the generated term than reading, but this processing occurred at the expense of processing the relation between the words in a pair and processing the relations between different pairs in a list.     

Hefting for a maximum distance throw: a smart perceptual mechanism

Objects for throwing to a maximum distance were selected by hefting objects varying in size and weight. Preferred weights increased with size reproducing size-weight illusion scaling between weight and volume. In maximum distance throws, preferred objects were thrown the farthest. Throwing was related to hefting as a smart perceptual mechanism. Two strategies for conveying high kinetic energy to projectiles were investigated by studying the kinematics of hefting light, preferred, and heavy objects. Changes in tendon lengths occurring when objects of varying size were grasped corresponded to changes in stiffness at the wrist. Hefting with preferred objects produced an invariant phase between the wrist and elbow. This result corresponded to an optimal relation at peak kinetic energy for the hefting. A paradigm for the study of perceptual properties was compared to size-weight illusion methodology.     

Zeno's paradoxes and the cosmological argument

I want to thank Professor José Benardete, Professor Panayot Butchvarov, and Professor David E. Johnson for their very kindly viewing earlier versions of this paper.