Subliminal stimulation, choice behavior and some personality correlates of subliminal sensitivity

The aim of this study was to investigate the possible relations between specific personality variables and the effect of subliminal stimulation on choice behavior. It was hypothesized that subjects with low anxiety, less neuroticism, and external locus of control and the trait of extraversion would be more susceptible to subliminal stimulation. 38 undergraduate students were exposed to subliminal messages urging them to choose symbols instead of numbers or letters. Analysis showed that subliminal stimulation did not generate a preference for symbols over numbers or letters. No support was observed for the hypothesis of an association between susceptibility and personality variables. These results may be explained in terms of symbol choice being a neutral message that did not relate to the subjects' needs and motivation.     

Early lexical development in children with focal brain injury

Early lexical development in 27 children with focal brain injury was studied cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Data were obtained from children between 12 and 35 months of age who acquired their lesion prenatally or within the first 6 months of life. Results for the group as a whole provide clear evidence for delays in lexical comprehension and production, and for a larger number of comprehension/production dissociations than would be expected by chance. In addition, a significant number of children were observed having unusual difficulty mastering predication and/or using an atypically high proportion of closed class words (suggesting reliance on holistic/formulaic speech). Analyses by lesion type revealed no effect of lesion size. Analyses according to side of lesion revealed that children with right-hemisphere damage produced a higher proportion of closed class words, suggesting heavy reliance on well-practiced but under-analyzed speech formulae. Children with left-hemisphere damage were slightly better in comprehension than children with right-hemisphere damage. In addition, left posterior lesions were associated with greater delays in expressive language, and delays were more protracted in children with left posterior damage. No differential effects of left posterior damage were found for lexical comprehension.     

The development of therapeutic consultations in child-focused family work

This paper outlines the theoretical influences that have led to our use of a consultation approach to work with children and families. Winnicott's notion of therapeutic consultation, the narrative approach in family therapy, the use of letters in therapeutic work and the two-plus-one model of therapeutic contact are discussed. A model of the consultation interview and process is presented together with examples of consultation letters responding to typical client expectations of the process.     

Formal and Informal Counselling Help: Students' Experiences

The experiences reported by students who sought help from formal counselling sources were compared with those reported by students who sought assistance from informal helpers. The two groups of students had similar types of problems, but the counselling clients reported (a) higher levels of problem seriousness, (b) lower levels of comfort with the interaction, and (c) higher levels of satisfaction with the help offered.     

Teaching minority high school students to recruit helpers to attain personal and educational goals

Recruiting help from mentors and other potential helpers is a promising strategy for helping disadvantaged and minority youths meet their personal and educational goals. Three African-American high school seniors participated in a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training procedures that would allow them to ask for help in attaining educational and other personal goals. A behavioral training procedure that included instructional materials, role-play practice, praise, and feedback was used. Targeted skills included goal setting and 30 responses involved in the process of meeting with a potential helper. Role-play situations were used to evaluate participants' help-recruiting skills before and after training. Participants increased their help-recruiting skills from an average of 38% during baseline, to an average of 75% after training. Self-reported measures of goal attainment suggested that the students benefited from the training. Implications for mentoring programs designed to increase minority students' opportunities to reach educational goals were discussed.     

Toward understanding sex differences in pay allocation: Agency,communion, and reward distribution behavior

This research examined the extent to which the personality characteristics of agency and communion are sex linked, and the extent to which differences in these orientations can account for sex differences in reward distribution behavior. In two studies, the agency and communion level of large samples of male and female undergraduates were assessed. As expected, males were more agentic and females were more communal. Moreover, when subjects who scored high or low on agency and high or low on communion were asked to allocate rewards between themselves and a co-worker, these personality differences were related to their allocation decisions. These results were used as the basis for discussing the role that sex-linked personality differences might play in distributive justice judgments.This article is an adaptation of a colloquium presentation at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, August 1981. The research reported here was supported by NIMH grant MH29987-1, Goals, Motives, and Norms of Reward Distribution, and by NIMH Biomedical Research Support Grant from the College of Social Science, Michigan State University. The authors wish to thank Andrea Doughty for her valuable advice, and to gratefully acknowledge the help of Mark Teicher, Julie B. Klein, Sue Schnelbach, Pat Loepp, Barb Allen, Gavin Goodrich, Bob O'Hara, Kelly Bowen, Rod Hollenstein, Steve Schultz, and Mary Hurst.     

An analysis of performance by pre-school children on the KRISP and on a length discrimination task

The speed and accuracy of judgements made by pre-school children on the Kansas Reflection-Impulsivity Scale for Pre-schoolers (KRISP - Wright 1971, 1973) and on a two-choice length discrimination task were investigated. If subjects were relatively accurate on the KRISP then correct responses tended to be faster than errors while if subjects were relatively inaccurate errors were the faster. It is inferred that accurate subjects respond asymptotically in terms of a speed-accuracy tradeoff while inaccurate subjects set a less demanding criterion. Accurate subjects showed a tendency to increase inspection time as a function of item difficulty. This relation did not hold for inaccurate subjects.However, groups classified by means of the KRISP did not differ in either the speed of correct responses or accuracy of line length discriminations. For all groups judgement times were significantly related to stimulus differences and to stimulus ratios. There was no evidence that so-called impulsive children engage in less efficient and less detailed processing than other children.It is argued, contrary to the view of Kagan and his co-workers (e.g. Kakan 1966), that speed and accuracy of responding may not reflect a stable trait dimension. Rather children appear to be able to change their strategies according to the particular demands, implicit or explicit, of the task.     

Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phones arise spontaneously?

It was found that illiterate adults could neither delete nor add a phone at the beginning of a non-word; but these tasks were rather easily performed by people with similar environment and childhood experiences, who learned to read rudimentarily as adults. Awareness of speech as a sequence of phones is thus not attained spontaneously in the course of general cognitive growth, but demands some specific training, which, for most persons, is probably provided by learning to read in the alphabetic system.