The training of telephone crisis intervention volunteers

Telephone crisis intervention services are growing at a very rapid rate. A review of the literature reveals that there are very few references to this new phenomenon and even fewer that deal with evaluating the effectiveness of telephone crisis training. Herein 7 articles are reviewed which deal with volunteer selection and training. These articles demonstrate that no consistent rationale for volunteer selection or training exists. Selection of volunteers typically consists of a gross screening to eliminate any obviously unsuitable persons, with training serving as a further sorting procedure where volunteers who are uncomfortable with the role of a crisis interventionist can be encouraged to drop out. The authors suggest that a training model be built around crisis intervention theory using principles of social learning as the methodology for training.     

Job Evaluation and Gender: The Case of University Faculty

This study examined the effects of students' and professors' sex on student evaluations of professors' teaching effectiveness. Ratings of over four hundred faculty made by over nine thousand students were analyzed. After controlling for a large number of variables, the main results showed that (a) male faculty were given significantly higher evaluations on global teacher effectiveness and academic competence than female faculty; (b) when controlling for extraneous variables, female faculty were not found to be rated as more sensitive to student needs than male faculty; and (c) when making overall, global judgments of faculty performance, students seem to place more weight on academic competence for male faculty than for female faculty.     

Two components of need for approval score and their relationship to cheating following success and failure

Subjects completed a simulated “intelligence test” on which they were given bogus feedback indicating that they had either met college norms or had failed substantially to meet norms. Immediately following was a period in which subjects could modify their scores and believe that their modification would go undetected. The relationship of need for approval to “cheating” and amount of “cheating” was analyzed. The results supported an “avoidance” interpretation of approval motivation. Two separate components of need for approval score were identified and found to be differentially related to avoidance behavior for men and for women.     

Predicting Athletic Performance with Self- Confidence and Somatic and Cognitive Anxiety as a Function of Motor and Physiological Requirements in Six Sports

The purpose of the present study is to examine the ability of certain psychological attributes to predict performance in six National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I collegiate sports. Eighty-four athletes from the varsity sports teams of cross country running, alpine and nordic skiing, tennis, basketball, and track and field at the University of Colorado completed a questionnaire adapted from Martens (1977; Martens et al., 1983) that measured their trait levels of self-confidence (Bandura, 1977), somatic anxiety, and cognitive anxiety (Martens, 1977; Martens et al., 1983). In addition, at three to six competitions during the season, the members of the cross country running and tennis teams filled out a state measure (Martens et al., 1983) of the three attributes from one to two hours prior to the competition. Following each competition, subjective and objective ratings of performance were obtained, and, for all sports, coaches' ratings of performance and an overall seasonal team ranking were determined as seasonal performance measures. The sports were dichotomized along motor and physiological dimensions. Results indicate that all three psychological attributes were significant predictors of performance in both fine motor, anaerobic sports and gross motor, aerobic sports. Further, clear differences in these relationships emerged as a function of the dichotomization. In addition, unexpected sex differences emerged. The findings are discussed relative to prior research and their implications for future research.     

The madman theory of war: a possible application in therapy

In therapeutic work a systemic approach has characteristically focused on the family or marital system. In this paper the author focuses on the patient/health care system in a particular case and argues that chronic disability can be seen as a systemic feature rather than a characteristic of the individual patient. A strategy is taken from the field of international conflict and its therapeutic value is explored.     

Equivalences Among Polarity Algorithms

The concept of polarity is pervasive in natural language. It relates syntax, semantics and pragmatics narrowly (Giannakidou, in: Maienborn, von Heusinger, Portner (eds.), Semantics: an international handbook of natural language meaning, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2011; Israel in The grammar of polarity: pragmatics, sensitivity, and the logic of scales, Cambridge studies in linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014), it refers to items of many syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs and adverbs. Neutral polarity items appear in affirmative and negative sentences, negative polarity items cannot appear in affirmative sentences, and positive polarity items cannot appear in negative sentences. A way of reasoning in Natural Language is through Natural Logic (van Benthem in Essays in logical semantics, vol. 29 of Studies in linguistics and philosophy, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986; Language in action: categories, lambdas, and dynamic logic, vol. 130 of Studies in logic, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1991). This logic is based on the concept of polarity in order to make the meaning of a sentence weaker o stronger without changing its truth value. There exist many proposals to compute polarity in the Natural Logic context, the most widely known are the ones by: van Benthem (1986, 1991), Sánchez-Valencia (Studies on natural logic and categorial grammar, Ph.D. thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1991), Dowty (Proceedings of the 4th conference on semantics and theoretical linguistics, Cornel University, CLC Publications, Rochester, 1994), and van Eijck (in: ten Cate, Zeevat (eds.), 6th international Tbilisi symposium on logic, language, and computation, Batumi, Georgia, Springer, 2007). If Natural Logic is going to be used, as an inferential mechanism between text fragments, in Natural Language Processing applications such as text summarization, question answering, and information extraction, it is a priority to know what the existing relationship among the aforementioned algorithms is; for example, to implement the most general. We show in this paper the equivalence among the analyzed algorithms, filling a gap in Natural Logic research, particularly in computing polarity, and the soundness of their algorithms.