Irrational Beliefs, Interpersonal Perception and Marital Adjustment

To test the hypothesis that the major evaluative beliefs postulated by Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy are related to marital adjustment, 50 married couples completed the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) and the Survey of Personal Beliefs (SPB). Significant correlations were found between DAS scores and three subscales (Other directed shoulds, Low frustration tolerance and Self worth) of the SPB. On the interpersonal dimension of assumed similarity, females in the high dyadic adjustment group were better able to predict their spouses' awfulizing, low frustration tolerance and self-worth beliefs than were females in the low adjustment group. However, the present study offers only limited support for the hypothesis that interpersonal perception of irrational evaluative beliefs is related to marital adjustment.     

Spontaneous Imitation of Fundamental Frequency and Speech Rate by Nonstutterers and Stutterers

Speech can be described either in terms of acoustics, as a perceptual outcome, or as a motor event. Central to theories of speech perception and production is an attempt to describe how these aspects of speech are interrelated. The present experiment investigated how the nonstutterers' and stutterers' reproductions of acoustically presented interrogative sentences were influenced by experimental variations of intonation (sentence initial vs. sentence final) and speech rate (normal vs. time compressed). We studied the effects of these stimulus manipulations on the speech rate and fundamental frequency (F₀ ) of 10 adult German-speaking nonstutterers and seven stutterers. Experimental manipulations of intonation and speech rate significantly influenced the syllable duration and speech rate of both normal speakers and stutterers. The fundamental frequency of the subjects' responses were also significantly influenced by the intonation of the stimulus. But the stutterers' increase in F₀ for stressed syllables was generally less pronounced than that of nonstutterers. These results imply that (a) the subjects not only extract linguistic meaning from intonation but that they also store extragrammatical speech rate information, and (b) the speakers adopt these speech rate variations for their own productions. Generally, these results demonstrate that speech perception is not limited to extracting linguistically invariant information. The results show that speakers actively generate their own prosody and that this generative process is influenced by the prosodic structure of another speaker's antecedent speech. The implications of these results for theories of speech production are discussed.     

Conversations on contexts and meanings: On understanding therapeutic change from a contextual viewpoint

Recent developments within family therapy theory, often referred to as the Post-Milan Movement, have once again stressed the therapeutic encounter'squality of conversation. When therapy is looked upon as conversation, attention is not only paid to the fact that most of what happens in a session is talking. Rather, a more fundamental stance towardshuman life as basically meaning- making is taken. This is one of the essential premises of the contextualist approach to the social sciences.When applied to human problems this approach claims that symptoms evolve when (1) a person gives meaning to and performs a social act within a context inappropriate to the socially shared meaning of that act, and (2) the behavior of the person is accepted as a symptom by him/herself and the observing community. The therapeutic conversation establishes an exclusive context within which the domains of discourse of the client's life can be accounted for and renegotiated. With the acceptance of these accounts, changes evolve in the context-act relationships (i.e. meanings) construed by the client. This appears to be the basis for the self-healing aspects of psychotherapy.     

Mood and belief-value correlation

This is an investigation of belief-value distortion as measured by the correlation between sets of beliefs and values for a given attitude object. Correlations were computed for each subject separately. Initial mood levels and mood changes subsequent to ratings of attitudes to nuclear power were investigated in the first two studies. In Study 1 mood changes were positively correlated with attitude. In Study 2, mood levels were positively correlated both with attitude, optimism, and tendency towards extreme belief-value correlations (belief-value distortion). In a third study, attitudes were studied both towards nuclear power and alcohol. There were no clear relations between the two fields of contents. Mood changes were small and inconsistent. However, tendency to act correlated with both optimism and belief-value distortion, also with the level of attitude kept constant. A model relating mood, optimism, belief-value distortion, and action is suggested.     

Temporal precision of coding as a basic factor of laterality effects in the retention of verbal auditory stimuli.

It is proposed that the encoding of temporal or sequential information is of crucial importance for the explanation of the laterality effect. Evidence favoring this hypothesis is provided by reanalysing the experiment recently published by Mainka and Hörmann (1971). These investigators instructed Ss in a dichotic listening experiment to attend exclusively to material presented either to the right or the left ear. In the present paper free recall performance for words presented to the right and to the left ear was analysed separately with respect to the correspondence between the sequence of presentation and that of recall. It was found that the sequence of presentation and the sequence of recall correspond to a greater extent in the case of right ear material.It is suggested that the well-known laterality effect can be accounted for by assuming differences in the temporal precision of encoding the items presented to the right and left side. This interpretation is substantiated by a review of the research literature. It was assumed that this different accuracy in encoding the sequential aspects of a series of verbal items should result in a different speed in the retrieval of this series. This expectation was confirmed by the data of the experiment of Mainka and Hörmann. Thus, the encoding of temporal or sequential information is supposed to be effected primarily by the left hemisphere.     

Preschool children's understanding of the coordinators “and” and “or”

The development of the understanding of the words and and or was studied. Children in the age interval 2:0–7:6 received two tests of word understanding, varying in the degree to which the context of the test items contributed in determining the meaning of the connectives, and one test of spontaneous usage. The results from the tests of word understanding showed that the context variable facilitated small children's responding, and that most reponses were correct at the age of four and beyond. The results from the production test indicated that and was used to express enummerations and or to express alternatives. The difference between the linguistic and the logical meaning of the connectives was discussed.