A Developmental Approach to Prevention Research: Configural Antecedents of Early Parenthood

A developmental framework emphasizing the combined impact of correlated constraints within and without the individual was applied to a prospective longitudinal study of early parenthood. The purpose was to use a person-approach to the analysis of longitudinal data to clarify risk for early parenthood and to generate hypotheses about potentially useful intervention strategies. Respondents were 475 youth who were assessed annually from seventh grade through the end of high school and, again, at ages 20 and 24. The risk patterns associated with parenthood were the same for both sexes. Individuals with a middle-school configuration of low socioeconomic status, high aggression, low academic skills, low popularity, and prior grade failure were most likely to become parents by early adulthood. Risk for early parenthood increased substantially for respondents who dropped out of school early, regardless of their initial risk status.     

White Counselor Trainees' Racial Identity and Working Alliance Perceptions

Racial identity has been theorized to significantly affect cross-racial counseling relationships (Helms, 1984, 1995). This study examined the direct impact of White racial identity of 124 counselor trainees on working alliance formation in a same-racial and cross-racial vicarious counseling analogue. Regardless of the race of the client, disintegration and reintegration attitudes negatively affected working alliance ratings, and pseudoindependent and autonomy attitudes positively affected working alliance ratings. Implications for counseling, supervision, training, and research are discussed.     

The Dynamics of Families in Business: How Therapists can Help in Ways Consultants Don't

Family-owned businesses comprise 80–90% of companies in the United States of America and employ almost one-half of the US work force. Only 70% of these companies will make the transition into the family's second generation of leadership, however, sometimes partly because families work differently and toward different goals than do businesses. Interpersonal family dynamics—spousal, parental, father-son, father-daughter, sibling and in-law—can be a major factor in the failure to thrive. Exploring family systems theory, this article explains why these troubled families in business together need therapeutic practitioners' unique experience—experience consultants usually do not possess.     

Effects of Paired and Unpaired Eye-Blink Conditioning on Purkinje Cell Morphology

This experiment addressed (1) the importance of conjunctive stimulus presentation for morphological plasticity of cerebellar Purkinje cells and inhibitory interneurons and (2) whether plasticity is restricted to the spiny branches of Purkinje cells, which receive parallel fiber input. These issues were investigated in naive rabbits and in rabbits that received paired or unpaired presentations of the conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US). To direct CS input to the cerebellar cortex, pontine stimulation served as the CS. Air puffs to the cornea served as the US. Paired condition rabbits received pontine stimulation for 350 msec paired with a coterminating 100-msec air puff. Unpaired condition rabbits received the same stimuli in a pseudorandom order at 1- to 32-sec intervals. Rabbits were trained for a mean of 12 days. Naive rabbits received no treatment. In Golgi-stained Purkinje neurons in lobule HVI, total dendritic length, main branch length, total spiny branch length, and number of spiny branch arbors were all greater in the naive group than in the paired and unpaired groups, which did not differ. No differences were found between the hemispheres ipsilateral and contralateral to the trained eye. The dendritic length and number of branches for inhibitory interneurons did not differ across groups. The Purkinje cell morphological changes detected with these methods do not appear to be uniquely related to the conjunctive activation of the CS and US in the paired condition.     

Establishing and maintaining a low-cost zebrafish breeding and behavioral research facility

The purpose of this paper is to describe how to establish and maintain a low-cost zebrafish facility that can be used for both teaching and research purposes. The cost of the facility ranges from about 250 to250 to 1,000, depending on the size of the facility and the experiments that will be conducted. The facility plan presented here also has the advantage that it can be disassembled so that it need not function year-round. A detailed list of supplies and materials is provided, along with detailed instructions on how to set up and maintain the adult and breeding portions of the facility. Finally, there is discussion of some of the general uses of a zebrafish facility, including a variety of procedures that are currently being used in behavioral research with this species.     

Sissela Bok on the analogy of deception and violence

Conclusion Bok defines lying in the same way as Augustine and Kant. But she wants to oppose their position that one cannot lie to save an innocent life. This position was successfully and consistently opposed by Constant and Grotius who did so by redefining lying so that the untruth one tells to save an innocent life does not count as a lie since it does not violate a right. Bok refuses to use this way. She instead uses her analogy of deception and violence. But this analogy is not, as she believes it is, intuitively clear or a good a fortiori argument. Still, if one pays attention to the ordinary sense of the words Bok uses in her confused analogy, deception and lying, force and violence, one realizes that Bok's analogy has some persuasive power, not because violence and lying are right means to save a life, but because force and deception, or force or deception are. And to see why this is so requires that Constant and Grotius's way of opposing Kant, and their definition of lying, must be adopted. Bok's apparent success with her analogy of force and lying is due to the fact that it is a shadow of the more genuine success of the analogy of force and violence and deception and lying which requires Constant and Grotius's definition of deception and lying. Thus her way of opposing Augustine and Kant is weak in trying to do it in a new approach and demonstrates the advantages of Constant and Grotius's approach.     

Panic disorder: A product of classical conditioning

Contrary to the common view that all panic attacks have a single etiology, it is shown that a distinction must be made between initial attacks, for which there are many causes, and recurrent attacks (panic disorder) which have a common basis. Most initial panic attacks are attributable to the physiological effects of hyperventilation resulting from severe and prolonged anxiety. It has been claimed that the attacks are due to such symptoms as dyspnea, tachycardia and dizziness being misattributed to deadly illness or incipient insanity. We reject this view on several grounds, and in particular because of a pilot study that showed that such attributions follow the onset of panic. Apart from some biological cases, the common initial panic is an unconditioned response to a bizarre stimulus complex produced by excessive hyperventilation, and panic disorder is the result of contiguous stimuli, especially endogenous stimuli, being conditioned to the elicited anxiety. Treatment accords with principles of conditioning.