Response latency measurements to visual cognitive tasks by normal hearing and deaf subjects

Visual cognitive differences between hearing (N = 16) and deaf (N = 32) high-school and middle-school students were studied. Visual tasks were presented on a microcomputer and response latencies were collected. Significant differences were noted between the deaf and normal groups but not between total communication deaf and oral deaf students. These differences support the hypothesis that deaf students prefer a visual cognitive strategy. Implications for educating the deaf are discussed.     

Self-esteem of adolescent girls as related to weight

The Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale was administered to 550 14- and 16-yr.-old (+/- 6 mo.) girls. Self-esteem scores were categorized by weight and weight by height. Scores on the Quetelet Index for obesity were correlated with self-esteem scores. Mean self-esteem of the low- and middle-weight by height group was significantly higher than the mean of the high-weight by height group. In analyzing weight alone, the self-esteem of the middle-weight group was significantly higher than the self-esteem of the high-weight group. The correlation of the obesity index and self-esteem indicated that as weight increased self-esteem decreased.     

Listeriosis of the central nervous system in children beyond the neonatal period

Observations on three children with neurolisteriosis (one case of meningitis, two cases of meningoencephalitis, each Serovar 4 b), show that even after the neonatal period, listeriosis must not be ignored in the process of diagnosis and therapy. It is the bacteriological examination of the cerebrospinal fluid, together with the blood culture, and not clinical symptoms and serology that guarantee a timely diagnosis and therapy (ampicillin and gentamicin).     

Insight and the analytic dyad

Insight reflects the unitary nature of psychic activity in contrast to the fragmentation created in abstracting categories for the purpose of study and discussion. The unique analytic clinical dyad offers a structure in which intrapsychic fragments can be actualized and integrated. As a result, the analyst's contribution is more crucially one of exploration than of revelation. Whatever the area of examination, past or present, the link to analytic immediacy offers the opportunity to make meanings meaningful, to convert known facts to psychic truths. The analyst's clinical task requires his private self-analysis as part of the collaborative exploration of how the patient's mind works. Higher level ego functioning, including acutely active remembering, is at times transiently loosened in order for the analyst to share in the clinical work of discovery. The words the analyst uses to communicate his understanding convey only approximate manifest meanings, though they structurally reveal deeper messages of importance to the patient. These verbal approximations help stimulate self-reflection in the analysand as a step in the process of gaining insight.     

VOLUNTARY AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT: LEGAL AND RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS

This paper provides a review of recent Supreme Court decisions stemming from the implementation of voluntary AAPs that include preferential treatment as a remedy; the evidence and proof required to establish and defend against reverse discrimination claims is identified. Overall, the courts sanctioned the use of preferential treatment if it occured as part of a well-conceived AAP. However, differences were found in the manner in which the courts adjudicated Title VII and constitutional claims of preferential treatment. The discussion examines research on the potential effects of voluntary AAPs on important organizational and societal outcome variables. We conclude that the impact of AAPs is likely to be far-reaching, exerting an effect possibly well beyond the limits considered in court decisions.     

The role of the right hemisphere in the production of linguistic stress

Recent research has proposed a general prosodic disturbance associated with right hemisphere damage (RHD), one encompassing both affective and linguistic functions. The present study attempted to explore whether the ability to produce linguistic prosody was impaired in this patient population. Productions of phonemic stress tokens (e.g., Re'dcoat vs. red coa't) as well as examples of contrastive stress, or sentential emphasis (e.g., Sam hated the movie), were elicited from eight male speakers with unilateral right hemisphere CVAs and seven male control subjects. Two types of analyses were conducted on these utterances. Acoustic analysis focused on the correlates associated with word stress, namely changes in amplitude, duration, and fundamental frequency. The perceptual saliency of emerging cues to stress was also examined by presentation of test tokens to phonetically trained listeners for identification of stress placement. The patients as a group produced fewer acoustic cues to stress compared to the normal subjects, but no statistical differences were found between groups for either stress at the phrase level or at the sentence level. In the perceptual analysis, stress produced by the patient group was judged to be less salient than that for the normal group, although a high degree of variability was evident in both populations. The data suggest a spared processing mechanism for linguistic prosody in RHD speakers, thus mitigating against the view of a general dysprosody tied to RHD.     

Expert knowledge as mnemonic cues

It is proposed that expert knowledge can operate as a cognitive cueing structure for the acquisition and retention of new information in memory. Two experiments are reported which demonstrate that expert knowledge about football and clothing can act as mnemonic cues for the recall of information newly associated with that knowledge. In Experiment 1 expert terms from the domains of football and clothing and those neutral nouns paired with them were both better recalled by experts than by non-experts. In Experiment 2 passages containing information contrary to factual knowledge about football and clothing were recalled better by experts than by non-experts, in spite of the fact that information in the passages contradicted what the experts already knew. The results of the two experiments were interpreted as showing that expert knowledge provides mental cues that have desirable mnemonic properties such as constructibility, associability, discriminability and invertibility. Also, the interpretation of expert knowledge as a cognitive cueing structure is compared to Ausubel's ideas regarding advance organizers.     

Personal Versus Vocational Focus in Career Counseling: A Retrospective Outcome Study

In this archival study the authors sought to determine the relationship, if any, between counseling outcomes and the topical focus in career counseling. Twenty-two counselors saw 46 adult clients at a community-based clinic for an average of eight sessions. Counseling outcome and topical focus (the extent to which the actual content of counseling sessions reflected relatively more vocationally or personally focused topics) were assessed from follow-up questionnaires to former career clients and from trained raters' evaluations of the counselors' written progress notes. Results showed that, from the counselors' perspective, outcomes were better when the focus of the sessions was relatively more vocational than personal and when relatively more interviews were held. Client satisfaction, on the other hand, was predictable only from the counselor's level of experience. Satisfaction with occupational status was not associated with any of the client, counselor, or treatment factors. Discussion focuses on the contribution of the results to career counseling practice and on the feasibility and validity of retrospective, archival research.