School Counselors’ General Self-Efficacy,Ethical and Legal Self-Efficacy,and Ethical and Legal Knowledge

School counselors encounter ethical and legal situations that necessitate the knowledge and confidence to apply decision-making skills. We report the findings from a correlational investigation that examines practicing school counselors’ (N = 287) ethical and legal self-efficacy, ethical and legal knowledge, and general self-efficacy. Higher ethical and legal self-efficacy was associated with higher general self-efficacy and ethical and legal knowledge. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Restoration of the orienting response to a light by a change in its predictive accuracy

In three experiments the orienting response (OR) to a light was reduced by presenting rats with a serial conditioning schedule in which the light was always followed by a tone, and the tone was intermittently paired with food. The original strength of the OR was then restored by changing the nature of the serial conditioning: the light was followed either by the tone and food, or by nothing. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that this change resulted in an increase in the OR relative to control groups, which continued to receive the original training. Experiment 3 revealed a similar effect using a within-subjects design. A further finding from the first two experiments was that the recovery of the OR was accompanied by an enhancement in the conditionability of the light. Overall, the results suggest that the accuracy with which the light signals the events that immediately follow it is an important determinant of the strength of the OR it elicits.     

Does it all go together when it goes? The nineteenth Bartlett memorial lecture

As groups of people age, the differences in the cognitive abilities of the most and least able become more extreme. This increase in between-individual variance is accompanied by an increase in within-individual variance: the difference between individuals' levels of performance on their best and least well retained skills. The implications of increasing between-individual variance are discussed in terms of the range of different factors that may affect cognitive ageing. Increases in within-individual variance are discussed in terms of differences betweeen “fluid” and “crystallized” abilities. The usefulness of this distinction and its functional implications are questioned. The hypothesis that age-related declines in “fluid” abilities are best modelled in terms of declines in a single factor is evaluated. Evidence is presented of disparate rates of decline, even of “fluid” cognitive abilities, such as performance on IQ tests, ability on information-processing tasks, and efficiency on memory tasks. Data from large-scale cross-sectional studies suggests that cognitive skills do not “all go together when they go”, but that there may, rather, be characteristic patterns, or syndromes, of cognitive ageing.