Twenty Counseling Maxims

Beginning counselors typically experience difficulty in transitioning from classroom-based counseling skills and theory training to their initial clinical experience. Current training models fail to provide a conceptual bridge of practical value to assist in this transition. Three organizing processes, illustrated through 20 counseling maxims, were developed for skills-trained novice counselors to provide a conceptual foundation for their clinical decision making.     

Goldman and the foundations of social epistemology

This essay argues that Alvin I. Goldman's truth-linked theory of group knowledge (veritism) omits individual components of social cognition, that all group based theories of knowledge lead to scepticism, and that if any sense is to be made of social knowledge, it must be done on individualist lines. I argue that Goldman's veritism can be reconstructed by adopting a reliabilist theory,social reliabilism. And I argue that Goldman's objections to a particular sort of consensualism are not telling. So there are now two plausible and competing theories of social knowledge-social reliabilism and consensualism.I am grateful to Keith Lehrer and Alvin Goldman for their criticisms of previous drafts of this paper.     

Effects of clausal structure on subject-verb agreement errors

This paper explores the effect of manipulating the internal structure of a complex subject on the incidence of subject-verb agreement errors. Using the sentence completion task (Bock & Miller, 1991), this study followed up on Vigliocco and Nicol's (1995) finding that the syntactic distance between a head noun and a number-mismatching noun contained within a modifier has an impact on error incidence: the greater the distance, the lower the error rate. The study presented in this paper investigated whether this distance effect is purely syntactic; if so, then it would be expected that there would be fewer errors followingThe owner of the house which charmed the realtor... than followingThe owner of the house who charmed the realtors..., since in the latter, the mismatch is syntactically nearer the head noun. Results show no hint of a difference between the two, suggesting that the distance effect is more likely due totemporal distance rather than syntactic distance per se.This research was supported by grant 5 P60 DC 01409-05, a Research and Training Grant funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders, National Institutes of Health, to the National Center for Neurogenic Communication Disorders, University of Arizona. I am grateful to Danielle Cvitanovic, Nicole Diamond and Brad Greenwell for their assistance in testing subjects and scoring responses. I wish to thank Merrill Garrett for reviewing an earlier draft of this paper.     

“Innocent Victims” of AIDS: Identifying the Subtext1

References to “innocent victims” of AIDS in the media and public discourse imply that other people with AIDS or HIV are blameworthy. In the present study, college undergraduates read two newspaper articles about an “innocent victim” of AIDS, and were required to report what they understood to be the “victim's” message. Very few participants reported the subtext without prompting. When asked directly, however, most respondents (88%) agreed that the “victim” was making an implicit statement about other people with AIDS, and 70% of this subgroup correctly identified the subtext. Compared to other respondents, those who identified the subtext had more positive attitudes toward homosexuals.     

TWO MEASURES OF PREFERENCE DURING FORCED-CHOICE ASSESSMENTS

A forced-choice preference assessment was conducted in which two dependent measures were used to select preferred stimuli: (a) approach responding and (b) latency to the first aberrant response. Stimuli identified as preferred based on both dependent measures were then evaluated during treatment. The results suggested that latency may be a useful measure in the selection of preferred stimuli during forced-choice assessments.     

Rational emotive behavior therapy women's groups: A twenty year retrospective

Editor's Note: Janet Wofe was invited to describe her significant contributions to the evolution of cognitive/behavioral/feminist women's groups, including the personal influences that led her to this particular career focus. In this retrospective, key elements in REBT women's groups are highlinghte and illustrated with a case example; and changes that have occurred in these groups over the past twenty years are described. A comparison is made with other popular types of women's groups and suggestions offered for the further development of gender-informed REBT.     

Visual pop-out in infants: Evidence for preattentive search in 3- and 4-month-olds

The present experiment tested for preattentive visual search in 3- and 4-month-old infants using stimulus features described by Treisman and Souther (1985) as producing visual “pop-out” effects in adults. Infants were presented with two visual arrays to the left and right of midline. One array comprised homogeneous elements, while the other had a discrepant element embedded in it. On the basis of previous research, we expected infants to fixate the array containing the embedded discrepant element. The pattern of fixation indicated detection of the embedded discrepant element for both age groups, but only with stimuli shown to elicit visual pop out in adults. This asymmetry in detection is consistent with the presence of preattentive visual search in infants as young as 3 months.     

Influence of Age,Gender, and Context on Attitudes Toward Sexist/Nonsexist Language: Is Sport a Special Case?

This study examined the influence of age andgender on attitudes toward sexist/nonsexist language insport and nonsport contexts. College students,university personnel, and business people (N = 292) took the Inventory of Attitudes towardSexist/Nonsexist Language. Seven percent wereAfrican-American, 2% Asian-American, 2%Hispanic-American, 1% Native American, 85%European-American, and 3% other. They averaged 3.34 on a 5-point scale,indicating ambivalence. Participants 23 years old andabove were more favorable toward nonsexist language thanwere younger participants (p < .01). Women were more supportive than men (p < .01). Age andgender explained 23% of the variance. The significantdifference between sport/nonsport contexts was notmeaningful, nor was a significant gender by contextinteraction. Sport was not a special case of resistance tononsexist language.     

Characteristics of Adult Caretakers of Children and Youth Served by an Urban Child Welfare Agency

The child welfare system of the early 1990s was marked by the proliferation of home-based services. Research on the effectiveness of various home-based interventions indicates results have been equivocal. The need to make explicit the specific characteristics of the adults and children targeted for home-based services, particularly families from diverse cultural backgrounds, has been identified as a critically needed contribution to the literature. In this study, the characteristics and service utilization experiences of adults and families served in an urban, home-based, child welfare program was examined. The results are discussed in relation to findings on the characteristics and experiences of adults and families served in other settings. Implications for future research and service delivery are discussed.