Young Women's Expected and Preferred Patterns of Employment and Child Care

Researchers have consistently found that evenfemale students who expressed a high value for bothcareer and family roles usually expected to compromisetheir careers to accommodate family responsibilities. However, with the steadily increasinginvolvement of women in careers, it is reasonable to askwhether students still share these expectations.Furthermore, the relationship between expectation andlater behavior merits investigation. This studyaddressed the two questions by determining thepreferences and expectations for career and family rolesof 54 white female students in senior high school, andagain four years later. On both occasions, themajority expected continuous employment. Over time,their values did not change markedly but a discrepancyemerged between their preferences and theirexpectations.     

Experimental measures of cognitive privilege/deprivation and some of their correlates

An operational definition of intellectual privilege and deprivation was used to develop measures of that construct in each sex from information furnished by 10th-grade students in Project Talent about their family and health background. Information such as reports of high school grades that directly reflected the ability of the students was excluded. The correlation between the experimental measure and the Talent intelligence composite is about .65 in contrast to the usual value of about .40 for a traditional measure of socioeconomic status. Sex differences in the items keyed are minimal. Using a similar definition, measures were also developed for Vernon's mechanical-spatial major group factor (1960), but the level of validity achieved is lower. The measures of privilege/deprivation developed for the two criteria show some degree of differential validity, but there is more generality in the two kinds of privilege than in tested abilities. The measures of intellectual privilege are almost congeneric measures of general intelligence, but there are significant departures from parallel profiles of relationships with other cognitive tests in Talent. The measures of intellectual privilege for both sexes add to the accuracy of prediction obtained from the intelligence criterion of scores on verbal academic and aesthetic information, but add nothing in predicting scores on measures of spatial visualization and rote memory. The possibility of constructing a test of general intelligence using item types that would minimize the correlation with privilige/deprivation is discussed.     

Helping Clients Move Toward Constructive Change: A Three-Phase Integrated Counseling Model

This article presents a 3-phase integrated counseling model that draws from object relations and attachment theory for assessment and uses cognitive behavioral techniques to promote constructive client change. A case vignette is presented to illustrate implementation of the model.     

The four-card problem and the generality of formal reasoning

Three experiments were designed to investigate the failure of intelligent adults to solve an apparently simple problem of formal reasoning devised by Wason. Both the mode of presentation and the type of material reduced the difficulty of the problem, while retaining its essential form. However, success on the original problem remained at a low level, even when subjects had attempted an easier version and had been given an explanation.

These results enable one to reject a “strong” formulation of Piaget's theory of formal reasoning. A “weaker” formulation is suggested as a basis for further research.     

Relationship between age, socioeconomic status, and field independence.

The hypothesis was supported that socioeconomic variables confound the relationship between age (20 and 60 yr.) and field independence measured on the rod-and frame task for 54 adult women (nurses).     

Two-component schedules of differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate

Two-component schedules of differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate were presented, where the contingencies specified separately two minimum interresponse times, t₁ and t₂, required for reinforcement, depending on whether the interresponse time was initiated by, in one case, a reinforced response (t₁) or, in the other, a nonreinforced response (t₂). A distinctive pattern of responding developed on each of the two contingencies. Duration of an interresponse time approximated t₁ when the t₁ contingency was in effect, and t₂ when the t₂ contingency was in effect. This relationship persisted even when t₂ was shorter than t₁, and responding at a higher rate on the t₁ contingency would have greatly increased the rate of reinforcement. Increasing the value of t₂ resulted in both longer interresponse times on the t₁ contingency, and a higher probability of a response-burst on those occasions when the contingency switched from t₁ to t₂. The results indicated that both reinforced and nonreinforced responses functioned as discriminative events in determining the duration of following interresponse times.     

Autoshaping in the rat: Effects of omission on the form of the response

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of an omission contingency on behavior related to and characterizing autoshaped lever contacts in the rat. In Experiment I an omission contingency imposed on autoshaped lever contacts forceful enough to produce a press (.078N) resulted in a significant decrease in lever presses, but had no effect on frequency of lever touches (contacts of insufficient force to produce a press) or rate of food tray entry during lever presentation. In contrast, rats which received a similar number of lever-food pairings, but whose behavior had no programmed consequences (yoked control subjects), showed an increase in lever press rate, a significant decrease in rate of food tray entry, and no change in rate of lever-touches. In Experiment II, the effect of a similar omission contingency on the topography of lever contact responses was investigated. Prior to omission training subjects contacted the lever primarily by pawing it. Following omission training this behavior was suppressed, with a subsequent increase in lever contacts characterized as nosing. Yoked control subjects showed no significant changes in lever contact topography. The results indicate that (1) an omission contingency does not simply eliminate wholesale those topographies which incur the contingency but produces subtle adaptive changes in lever contact topography; and (2) the nature of the autoshaped response in the rat does not appear to be rigid enough to depend solely upon the nature of the unconditioned stimulus or the conditioned stimulus, but can also be determined by the relationships existing between the animal's behavior and these stimuli.     

Counselling with the ‘worried well’

This paper introduces the ‘worried well’ as the last in a long line of categories which define people who have concerns about their health. In this case, people who are convinced they have AIDS. The paper describes: 1) their presentation, 2) the main dificulties involved in treatment, and 3) suggests a step wise model for counselling the ‘worried well’.     

Friend or Foe?: Bernard Williams and Political Constitutionalism

Res Publica - This article looks at Bernard Williams’s relevance to particular debates in constitutional theory about the legitimacy of two competing models of institutional design:...