Physique and personality in kindergarten children

Ectomorphy scores were not associated with cerebrotonia scores in a sample of 105 kindergarten children.     

Perception of dynamic information for vowels in syllable onsets and offsets

It has been demonstrated using the “silent-center” (SC) syllable paradigm that there is sufficient information in syllable onsets and offsets,taken together, to support accurate identification of vowels spoken in both citation-form syllables and syllables spoken in sentence context. Using edited natural speech stimuli, the present study examined the identification of American English vowels when increasing amounts of syllable onsetsalone or syllable offsetsalone were presented in their original sentence context. The stimuli were /d/-vowel-/d/ syllables spoken in a short carrier sentence by a male speaker. Listeners attempted to identify the vowels in experimental conditions that differed in the number of pitch periods presented and whether the pitch periods were from syllable onsets or syllable off-sets. In general, syllable onsets were more informative than syllable offsets, although neither onsets nor offsets alone specified vowel identity as well as onsets and offsets together (SC syllables). Vowels differed widely in ease of identification; the diphthongized long vowels /e/, /ae/, /o/ were especially difficult to identify from syllable offsets. Identification of vowels as “front” or “back” was accurate, even from short samples of the syllable; however, vowel "height" was quite difficult to determine, again, especially from syllable offsets. The results emphasize the perceptual importance of time-varying acoustic parameters, which are the direct consequence of the articulatory dynamics involved in producing syllables.     

Individual and developmental differences in working memory across the life span

The effects of secondary tasks on verbal and spatial working memory were examined in multiple child, young adult, and older adult samples. Although memory span increased with age in the child samples and decreased with age in the adult samples, there was little evidence of systematic change in the magnitude of interference effects. Surprisingly, individuals who had larger memory spans when there was no secondary task showed greater interference effects than their age-mates. These findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that age and individual differences in working memory are due to differences in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, at least as this hypothesis is currently formulated. Moreover, our results suggest that different mechanisms underlie developmental and individual differences in susceptibility to interference across the life span. A model is proposed in which memory span and processing speed both increase with development but are relatively independent abilities within age groups.     

False or recovered memories?: Legal and ethical implications for therapists

The allegation that therapists encourage false memories of abuse in their clients presents a challenge to practitioners in the UK and USA. The development of the debate over false or recovered memories is briefly placed in its social and historical context. Some of the ethical and legal implications of this area of work for therapists are identified, using the concept of the Drama Triangle. Therapists may become involved in ethical dilemmas, and even in legal proceedings, by unwittingly being perceived by third parties as having taken on the roles of 'rescuer', persecutor' or 'victim'. Responses by therapists to this potential development could include adopting defensive forms of practice, promoting self-regulation, and establishing a more active presence in this wider debate.     

The effects of marital disharmony on prepubertal children

The study investigated the association between marital disharmony and childhood behavior problems in a sample of families drawn from a general population. Eighty-three families where the marital relationship had previously been rated as disharmonious were matched with an equivalent number of families where the marriage was rated harmonious. Mothers, fathers, and children were interviewed, using a semistructured interview format. Children living in disharmonious homes had significantly more problems than children from harmonious homes, and control for confounding variables, such as the mothers' mental health, did not alter this relationship. The main effects found were in antisocial symptomatology. Gender differences and differences according to the accounts of different respondents were found. One possible interpretation is that mothers perceived their sons as more affected by marital disharmony, while evidence from children suggested that boys and girls were equally affected.     

Dynamics of the relationship in clinical work with African-American clients

The high drop-out rate from psychotherapy for minority clients signals the need for increasing our skills with this population and exploring the possibility of treatment innovations. However, at the same time, there are developments in traditional psychodynamic theory that are relevant to work with African-American and other minority clients. The emerging emphasis in modern psychoanalytic theory on the therapist-patient relationship as a medium of change provides the background for this paper. Black clients typically operate in an interpersonal mode in the early phases of therapy. Unless they satisfy themselves as to the therapist's capacity to be sensitive to their sociocultural as well as to their personal situation, these clients often will not move into an instrumental mode, that is, one of working on the personal problems that brought them. In this paper, the dimensions of empathy and countertransference are discussed with respect to their particular relevance for Blacks in treatment and in the context of a telic-humanistic approach to psychology.A version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Ethnic Minority Perspectives in Human Development and Clinical Psychology held at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, May 15–16, 1986.     

SOCIAL-SKILLS TRAINING TO MODIFY ABUSIVE VERBAL OUTBURSTS IN ADULTS

Social-skills training was used to modify abusive verbal outbursts displayed by two adult psychiatric patients. Five target behaviors—looking, irrelevant comments, hostile comments, inappropriate requests, and appropriate requests were monitored during role-played situations. Social-skills training, consisting of behavior rehearsal with modelling, focused instructions, and feedback, was introduced in a multiple-baseline design across individuals. Training improved all target behaviors. The improved behavior generalized to: (1) novel scenes role-played with the original respondent, (2) training and novel scenes role-played with a different respondent, and (3) interpersonal situations on the hospital ward.     

Verbal feedback and the feature-positive effect in children

A pair of displays having common elements may be differentiated by the presence of a distinctive feature in one of the displays. When required to discriminate between such displays presented simultaneously, young children more readily learn to confine their responses to the display containing the distinctive feature (feature-positive condition) than to the display which does not contain the distinctive feature (feature-negative condition). The effect of explicit verbal feedback for incorrect choices on the learning of discriminations of this type was examined in 3- to 5-year-old children. In the feature-positive case, explicit feedback for incorrect responses increased the tendency to respond directly to the distinctive feature when responding on the positive display and greatly reduced errors. In the feature-negative case, explicit feedback for incorrect responses increased the tendency to avoid the distinctive feature in favor of a common feature when responding on the negative display. In this case, however, consistent avoidance of the distinctive feature on the negative display was not always followed by the development of consistent choice of the positive display, and errors continued to occur at a high rate throughout training for most subjects. These results reflect the difference in the structure of the feature-positive and feature-negative tasks.     

An instrumental cigarette smoke monitor designed for the direct measurement of smoke particulate matter generated in human smoking studies

An instrumental cigarette smoke monitor (CSM) system designed for human smoking studies has been developed and validated using a smoking machine as a human surrogate. The cigarette holder contains both smoke-mixing and flow-measurement orifices and a smoke-concentration sensor. Smoke flow through the holder and smoke concentration in the holder are determined simultaneously. The two signals are multiplied electronically and the product signal integrated. The integrated response is directly proportional to the amount of particulate matter collected immediately downstream of the holder, regardless of cigarette type or the particular way in which the cigarette is smoked. The CSM is sufficiently sensitive to quantitatively determine the amount of smoke TPM generated from cigarettes in the 1-mg Federal Trade Commission tar-delivery category.     

Providing systematic individual teaching for severely disturbed and profoundly mentally-handicapped adults in residential care

An organizational system for providing individualized behavioural teaching to severely and profoundly mentally-handicapped adults was developed by adapting the materials and procedures used in the Portage model of domiciliary teaching. Implementation of the system following a short training workshop was monitored in four residential units in turn over a 3-month period. The progress of each of 6 severely and profoundly mentally-handicapped adults in each unit was assessed on a defined task before and subsequent to teaching using a multiple time-series design. Little skill acquisition was found and the results are contrasted with evaluations of Portage services to pre-school mentally-handicapped children. Methodological considerations in the evaluation of progress in profoundly mentally-handicapped adults are raised.