Estimating social and nonsocial utility functions from ordinal data

This paper reports an experiment testing two hypotheses. The first is that the value or utility associated with a payment to one's self and a payment to a co-worker can be represented as an additive function of a utility for own payment (nonsocial utility) and a utility for the difference between own and other's payment (social utility). The second hypothesis is that changes in the amount of work accomplished by one's self and/or the other should influence the social, but not the the nonsocial utilities. Support for both hypotheses is reported.     

USE OF ESCAPE AND REWARD IN THE MANAGEMENT OF YOUNG CHILDREN DURING DENTAL TREATMENT

A reinforced practice procedure was used to facilitate cooperative behavior in five children, aged 3 to 6 years, during dental treatment. In a multiple baseline design across subjects, the children were rewarded with escape, inexpensive stickers, and praise for cooperative behavior in the presence of the sights, sounds, and some sensations of the dental instruments prior to actual dental treatment. Direct observations of disruptive behavior via a 15-s interval recording system indicated baseline levels as high as 90% were reduced to less than 15% by the final treatment visit. In addition, the procedure was effective in reducing overall heart rate and blood pressure reactivity to dental treatment. All children were rated by the involved dental professionals as more cooperative and relaxed following exposure to reinforced practice.     

Book reviews

Current Psychology -     

On becoming a school psychologist: A semiautobiographical account

As an example of the development of an early school psychology program in the Southwest, the beginning of Child Study and Consultation Service is described. The unique aspect of this program undoubtedly had to do with its relationship to a demonstration mental health center and a consultation program started in several elementary school districts in the area. Beginning with a consortium of five school districts, it was later expanded to include 16 school districts with a staff of 15 doctoral-level school psychologists. This account also describes the author's involvement with the Division of School Psychology and some of the major issues facing the division in the late 1950s and 1960s. An attempt is made to show how the author's educational and work experiences contributed to the philosophy, policies, and practices of school psychology.     

Effective functioning in dual-career families: an investigation

This study is concerned with the commonalities inherent in diverse psychotherapeutic strategies, despite seemingly discontinuous theoretical stances. Two approaches were evaluated with respect to effective family functioning, viz. Analytical Psychology and Systems Theory. Analytical Psychology posits the growth of conscious awareness in the individual as the source of therapeutic change. Problem centred systems therapy of the family emphasizes the importance of teaching clinically presenting families to negotiate collectively family rules and expectations and thus to allocate and monitor roles via clear and direct verbal communication. Both positions thus stress the reflective mode as a pivotal factor in effective problem solving. Analytical psychology maintains that conscious awareness expands to the extent that the individual integrates the contrasexual aspect of the personality, that is, the affective, expressive mode or 'feminine principle' in the male, or the instrumental, assertive 'masculine principle' in the female. Such individuals are said to be 'androgenous'. It was therefore hypothesized that such individuals would more readily be able to negotiate family rules and expectations in a manner consistent with a major therapeutic thrust of family therapy. These clinically derived hypotheses were subjected to an empirical test by assessing twenty, non-clinical, dual-career families where both parents pursued careers and were therefore presumably both required to share instrumental and affective roles on the basis of mutual agreement. Results indicated that negotiation contributed significantly to successful role fulfilment and effective family functioning, thus substantiating the focus of family therapy strategies upon clear and direct communication and role allocation.     

The co-therapy relationship: Mutuality,agreement and client outcome

This project, utilizing a pretest and posttest design, studied interactions between co-therapists and the relationships of their interactions to client outcome. Six co-therapist pairs at a counseling center saw two clients in multiple treatments yielding twelve cases. The study investigated co-therapist relationships in regard to: (a) their level of mutuality or caring for their partners, (b) their ratings of the quality of their relationships, and (c) their agreement as to perceptions and behavior during sessions. Also investigated were: the relation of co-therapist interaction to client outcome and the personal growth of the therapists over the course of therapy. Results supported success claims of the literature concerning co-therapy.     

Logic of paradox revisited

Conclusion If, to return to the image with which I started this paper we consider the path of papers written on the logical paradoxes, then there is much to be learnt from the more recent additions, those by Chihara, Dowden and Woodruff included. However, the case for the paraconsistent approach to the paradoxes has not been weakened. In fact, it seems to me to have been strengthened. If we consider the path of papers, not as a signle line, but branching according to the approach to the paradoxes advocated, then the Logic of Paradox would, I still submit, be on the right track.     

Food anticipation and lever-directed activities in rats

Three experiments are described which elaborate some of the conditions under which rats will contact and manipulate a periodically presented retractable lever. Experiment 1 demonstrated that (i) initial manipulative oral and manual contact with the lever was facilitated if the rat had previous experience of food delivery in the experimental chamber; (ii) persistence in contacting the lever on successive presentations was a function of whether food continued to be presented in the experimental environment; and (iii) food satiation significantly reduced the tendency of the rat to contact the lever even though an expectancy of food had previously been established under conditions of food deprivation. Experiment 2 suggested that the tendency to approach and contact the lever was in part a function of the local moment-to-moment conditional probability of food delivery. Experiment 3 found that the probability of contacting the lever was higher during presentation of an auditory CS signaling a high rate of food delivery than during stimuli signaling no food at all. These results are interpreted as suggesting that the food-signaling aspects of an appetitive CS and that CS's ability to generate signal-directed behaviors are experimentall separable properties.     

Least squares metric,unidimensional unfolding

The partial derivatives of the squared error loss function for the metric unfolding problem have a unique geometry which can be exploited to produce unfolding methods with very desirable properties. This paper details a simple unidimensional unfolding method which uses the geometry of the partial derivatives to find conditional global minima; i.e., one set of points is held fixed and the global minimum is found for the other set. The two sets are then interchanged. The procedure is very robust. It converges to a minimum very quickly from a random or non-random starting configuration and is particularly useful for the analysis of large data sets with missing entries.This paper benefits from many conversations with and suggestions from Howard Rosenthal.