Reducing the effects of adjacent distractors by narrowing attention.

Three experiments explored the gradual narrowing of visual attention to a letter target when other letters were positioned close by. The method by which attention was narrowed involved presenting a digit target immediately prior to the latter target and in the same location for progressively shorter durations and requiring the subject to identify both the digit target and the letter target before responding. The response time data from the first 2 experiments indicated that shorter durations of the digit reduced the amount of information processed from noise letters positioned on either side of the letter target. In the third experiment, in which separation of letters was increased slightly, the response times indicated that the information from flanking noise letters may have been virtually eliminated.     

From the desk of the IFA president : International fluency association priorities: A poll of potential members

Potential members of the International Fluency Association (IFA) were polled regarding their fluency interests and perceived priorities for the organization during the year it was founded (in 1990). Results from 201 respondents indicated that a need for the IFA existed among researchers, clinicians, and representatives of self-help organizations for people who stutter. Improving the quality of treatment for those who stutter was considered the highest priority by all three groups. Researchers were of the opinion that the Journal of Fluency Disorders should be of higher quality than it had been in the past, and clinicians were most interested in reviews of new and relevant materials.     

Dual relationships in psychotherapy

A dual relationship in psychotherapy occurs when the therapist engages in another, significantly different relationship with the patient. The two relationships may be concurrent or sequential. For both sexual and nonsexual dual relationships, men are typically the perpetrators and women are typically the victims. This article presents examples of dual relationships, notes the attention that licensing boards and other agencies devote to this topic, reviews the meager research concerning nonsexual dual relationships, and discusses common strategies that promote both sexual and nonsexual dual relationships.     

Mirror-reading in right- and left-handers

In mirror-reading, words are read from right to left and letters are read in a reverse right-to-left orientation. In one experiment we compared the ability of normal right- and left-handed subjects to mirror-read and found that the left-handers made fewer errors and could read mirror print more rapidly. In a second experiment we attempted to learn whether there is a hemifield superiority for reading mirror words and whether there are any differences between left- and right-handers in a hemifield. We found that although both right- and left-handers more rapidly detected mirror words projected to the left visual half-field, there were no differences between groups. However, in the right visual half-field, the performance of left-handers was superior to that of the right-handers. The results of the hemifield study suggest that left-handers may be superior at reading mirror words because they can more easily reverse their scanning pattern.     

Psychophysiological effects of noxious imagery: Prevalence and prediction

Research suggests that people who generate psychophysiological arousal in emotive imagery therapies are likely to show the largest therapeutic gains. This study investigated the frequency of occurrence and methods of predicting this imagery skill. The effects of five fearful imagery themes on 95 undergraduate volunteers were evaluated in individual sessions by psychophysiological (SRL, EKG and EMG), self-report (anxiety and clarity ratings) and behavioral (motoric expression) measures. Additionally, four questionnaires (Betts, Gordon, APQ and STAI) were administered in a group session. EKG arousal occurred in 66% of our subjects, SRL arousal in 38% and EMG arousal in 16%. Only 9% of our subjects experienced arousal in all three psychophysiological responses and 24% experienced arousal in neither. Motoric expression (overt behavioral emoting) best predicted psychophysiological arousal, self-report ratings were a distant second, and the questionnaires were worthless in this regard. Imagery-induced psychophysiological arousal appears to be a fairly common phenomena, though it eludes convenient prediction. Some training strategies were discussed, (response proposition instructions, biofeedback and motoric coaching), which could be employed with persons deficient in psychophysiological imagery skills prior to their commencing an emotive imagery therapy.     

Undermining the Zeigarnik effect: Another hidden cost of reward

Forty college students participated in a study ostensibly designed to obtain measures of the hemispheric activity while they worked on a spatial reasoning task. In fact, our true interest was in determining whether subjects would return to the spatial reasoning task once the hemispheric recordings were completed. Subjects would normally be expected to return to the task by virtue of the Zeigarnik effect because no subject completed the task during the “hemispheric recording” phase. The manipulation involved telling one group of subjects that they would be paid $1.50 for participating in the study (expected reward group). The remainder of the subjects were not led to expect the reward (unexpected reward group). The result was that 86% of the unexpected reward subjects but only 58% of the expected reward subjects (p < .05) manifested the Zeigarnik effect. This differential tendency to return to the task was further reflected in time differences. The average unexpected reward subject spent 3 min 48 sec of a five-minute free-choice period at the task, whereas the average expected reward subject spent only 2 min 20 sec (p < .05). Reward expectancy, therefore, led to an undermining of the Zeigarnik effect. This observation supports Condry's prediction that rewarding performance at a task can lead to premature task disengagement.     

An application of a biased version of the Bradley-Terry-Luce model to professional basketball results

Some extensions of the Bradley-Terry-Luce model for paired comparisons are presented and used to assess the existence of a home court advantage for professional basketball teams. It is shown how maximum likelihood estimates for these models can be obtained from a simple iterative scaling algorithm. Won-loss records for the regular season are used to make predictions for playoff series. The models are extended to include possible differences among divisions. These models can be applied in many other situations to incorporate group effects and order effects into analysis of paired comparisons.     

Choice,consciousness and ideological language

Because psychotherapists are not moral teachers, they ought not to advise their clients about evaluative questions. This means that their advice must be limited to a concern with the client's view of reality. It happens that in our times, there are prefabricated views of reality on offer from a variety of ideologies-Marxism and feminism being currently the most influential. Ideologists not only offer prefabricated realities-called consciousness- but also present a set of arguments to show that because choice is unreal, consciousness is all that matters. Adopting the ideological concept of consciousness thus becomes a backdoor variant of the ultimate sin against scientific method: namely smuggling unsubstantiated, indeed undiscussed, values into therapy.