The justification of paternalistic actions in psychotherapy

This article defines the nature of paternalistic interventions in psychotherapy and discusses reasons why the client's right to consent to treatment is important. We describe a reasoning process developed by Culver and Gert (1982) that can be used to determine when paternalistic actions are and are not ethically justifiable in mental health practice. We demonstrate how this procedure may be applied to psychotherapy by using a number of case illustrations.     

Transfer of control in ambiguous discriminations

Rats' acquisition and transfer of performance in ambiguous discriminations was examined using discrete-trial operant lever-press procedures. Rats learned serial ambiguous discriminations (X----A+, A-; B+, X----B-) by acquiring both positive and negative occasion setting functions to the X feature. Mutual transfer occurred among cues from serial ambiguous, feature positive (Y----C+, C-), and feature negative (Y----C-, C+) discriminations, but that transfer did not extend to cues not trained within one of those serial discriminations. The ambiguous feature's positive occasion setting powers were unaffected by nonreinforced presentation of that feature alone, and posttraining counterconditioning did not eliminate the feature's ability to serve as a negative occasion setter. Occasion setting was not acquired with simultaneous ambiguous discriminations (XA+, A-; XB-, B+), which apparently were solved with a configural strategy.     

Applying an occupational classification to the work histories of young men and women

Holland's occupational classification was used to analyze the work histories of a national representative sample of young men and women ages 14 through 24. Hypotheses tested were concerned with the psychological orderliness of occupational changes, the relationship between occupational experiences and aspirations, and the relationship between consistent occupational codes and the stability of work histories. The analyses supported the usefulness of the occupational classification for organizing the work histories of both young men and young women. For both sexes, the classification reflected regular patterns of job changes. The category of a person's earlier job was an efficient predictor of a person's subsequent jobs; likewise, the category of a person's current job forecasted the category of his vocational aspiration. The consistency of an occupational code was also related to job stability for whites but not for blacks.     

The duration and generalization of attraction

Tested in the present study were the propositions that attraction toward others is lasting and that liked and disliked individuals serve as a basis for liking others. On the first day, subjects received interpersonal evaluations (e.g., judging the intelligence of others) which supposedly had originated with an anonymous person. Following a delay of 1 to 3 days, the attraction of some of the subjects toward the anonymous person was assessed while the attraction of other subjects toward a second anonymous person, who presumably had also evaluated the subjects, was also assessed. These latter subjects were never exposed to the alleged evaluation by the second person. Attraction toward the first person tended to endure and to generalize to the second person.     

Factors affecting utilization of evaluation findings by direct service staff

Simulated evaluation report abstracts were used to determine whether factors previously identified as enhancing utilization of evaluation findings by policy level decisionmakers and agency directors also enhance utilization by direct service staff. Respondents were 238 direct service staff members in mental health agencies. Dependent variables were perceived usefulness and perceived truthfulness. The predictor variables were relevance of the evaluation, staff participation, quality of research design and specificity of recommendations. All predictor variables except the last were significant but relevance explained almost all the variance. The two dependent variables were highly correlated and virtually could not be distinguished from each other. Rosemary Holland is currently working as a private consultant to mental health agencies for program development and program evaluation. She has extensive experience in the administration and planning of mental health services. Dr. Holland's primary interest is in user-initiated evaluations. She is on leave this year from the social work department of the University of Detroit.     

Constraints on spontaneous transfer in problem-solving tasks

In three experiments, we investigated the conditions under which relevant knowledge is spontaneously transferred to problem-solving tasks. Subjects were presented with key concepts that could help them solve problems presented at a later time in the experiment. The key concepts were embedded in statements that had surface structures similar or dissimilar to those of the problems and that emphasized relevant or irrelevant properties of the key concepts for the problemsolving task (contextual relevance). The results indicated that the spontaneous transfer of clue information to subsequent problem-solving tasks is affected by the contextual relevance and the surface-structure similarity of the clue statements to the problems. The findings also suggested that the surface-structure similarity and the contextual relevance of clue statements differentially affect the accessibility and appropriate application of key concepts in problem-solving tasks. The implications of these results for understanding the transfer of knowledge in problem-solving tasks are discussed.     

Use of semantic context by patients with Alzheimer's disease

In this study we used semantic-priming procedures to examine limitations in the use of semantic context by patients with Alzheimer's disease. We also tried to determine whether any such contextual effects were mediated solely through automatic processes or whether attentional processes were also involved. Three tasks were applied to examine the effect of semantic context on the performance of 18 normal elderly and 18 normal young subjects, and on 18 patients with Alzheimer's disease. When normal and demented subjects were asked to decide whether a given item was a member of a certain category, results showed that their response times were equally affected by the item's dominance in the category. The time that demented patients took to recognize a word was actually affected more by the semantic context provided by a priming sentence than was that of normal subjects. When asked to generate the final word of an incomplete sentence, demented subjects performed very poorly unless potential responses were highly constrained by sentence context.     

Control by stimulus features during fading.

Sixteen children were given four successive circle-size discrimination problems with luminance as the fading stimulus. Children who were first presented with a difficult size discrimination failed to acquire this discrimination. Those who first received an easy discrimination learned the difficult discrimination. At the end of each 10-trial block, two probe stimuli were presented to monitor any shift in control from luminance to size. One probe was the same size as the positive stimulus but of different luminance; the other was the same luminance but of different size. If, in the course of fading, size and luminance both controlled responding, fading was successful. If luminance alone controlled responding until the end of fading, the size discrimination was not established. Dual control, and thus successful fading, resulted when the target stimuli were very discriminable, or when the target stimuli were subtly different provided that previous fading series had first established less subtle discriminations.     

Canonical versus factor analytic perspectives on the structure of associations between the MMPI and the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory

A canonical correlational analysis of MMPI profiles versus Buss-Durkee hostility and aggression scales was conducted, resulting in the identification of a general hostility-aggression-maladjustment dimension and three relatively specific aggression-personality relationships. These findings were contrasted with those obtained from a factor analysis of the combination of both sets of scores. Though often used in previous studies of associations between the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory and other measures, factor analysis was seen to be less than optimally suited to such a purpose. It was concluded that canonical correlation is preferable to factor analysis when seeking to clarify the multivariate structure of relationships between two sets of variables.