A Longitudinal Study of Vocational Maturity and Ethnic Identity Development

This study examines longitudinally the development of vocational maturity and ethnic identity in a majority and a minority group of 641 students in the Province of Québec, Canada. Ethnic identity and four components of vocational maturity were assessed in four cohorts at three times of measurement. Results show clearly different developmental trends in both ethnic identity and in vocational maturity for majority and minority groups: The minority group showed a linear increase in ethnic identity over time, while the majority group showed a decrease starting with the second time of measurement; vocational maturity components showed a more complex pattern of changes but demonstrated that minority participants matured significantly earlier than those from the majority group. There was a positive relationship between ethnic identity and vocational maturity for both groups.     

Paragrammatic speech without a comprehension deficit? A case report

In this article we present a case report of a patient, who had a peculiar pattern of language use following a stroke. The two most prominent features were language switches during spontaneous speech in the first months postonset, when the patient mixed English, German, and French words and utterances into his mother tongue (Dutch); clearly disturbed speech output, showing signs of word-finding problems and paragrammatism but hardly any paraphasias, while at the same time no evidence of a language disturbance could be obtained with standard clinical aphasia tests.     

Brief Therapy: Two's Company

The triad is a key element in family therapy. It is clinically useful to conceptualize it as a unit with a structure of its own. This paper suggests that a typical triadic system consists of a pair of allies and an isolate, or "odd-man-out," all of whom are "stuck" in a rigid pattern that has become dysfunctional. The therapist can break the pattern by developing interventions specifically designed to create new alliances and thus broaden the family's behavioral repertoire.     

Verbal interference with perceptual classification: The effect of semantic structure

In a task of the same form as the standard Stroop test, the relevant attribute was ellipse size and the required responses were the numbers 1 through 6 assigned to each of the ellipses in order of increasing size. The irrelevant attribute consisted of either alphabet letters or the numerical symbols 1 through 6 displayed in the center of each ellipse. The numerals produced more interference with the classification of the relevant attribute than the alphabet letters, supporting Klein’s (1964) results. In addition, the interference due to the irrelevant numerical symbols increased as the distance between the values of the relevant and irrelevant attributes was decreased. Since “distance” is a structural property of the number system, this indicated that the competing response tendencies aroused by the irrelevant numericals involved the semantic structure for numbers. The same results were obtained when numerical quantity, rather than ellipse size, was the relevant attribute.     

Logical and memory processes in a unidimensional concept identification task by children and adults

Behavior of 12-year-old children and of adults was studied in a unidimensional concept identification task. Data have been analyzed within the framework of a hypothesis testing model involving a testing process and a memory process. The data show that testing strategy, as it is described in the model, is very close in children and adults. In children, however, who exhibit lesser retention of information preceding the last trial, the memory process suffers from more limitations than in adults.     

Opinion revision and the influence of corresponding and conflicting adjectives

The hypothesis was tested that Bayes' theorem would be a good model to predict the revision of opinion about other people in the light of information about these people. This hypothesis was tested in 5 different diagnostic situations. A further purpose was to investigate the influence of corresponding and conflicting items of information on opinion revision. The items of information consisted of 4 successively presented adjectives, favorable (H) and/or unfavorable (L) ones. The Ss revised their opinion after each adjective. Each sequence of 4 adjectives was presented twice, the second time in reversed order.     

The interaction of veracity and syntax in the processing of sentences1

The reaction times of 80 Ss in judging sentences true or false with respect to pictures were analyzed, and it was noted (a) that true sentences containing an expected surface structure required less time than false sentences of the same structure, (b) that latencies to true sentences containing an unexpected surface structure were longer than latencies to the same sentences when their structure was identical to that of previous sentences, and (c) that transitive-verb constructions appeared easier to judge than predicate nominatives of the same length.