Using What Premarital Couples Already Know to Inform Marriage Education: Integration of a Gottman Model Perspective

The Marriage Preparation and Preservation Act of Florida stimulated a study of premarital couples. What are the best things that you do in your relationship was asked in a survey of persons seeking marriage licenses. The sample consisted of 962 participants. Responses were examined using Gottman's Sound Marital House (1999) as a theoretical framework. Results indicate that premarital participants view specific aspects of the Sound Marital House as the best things they contribute to their relationship. Responses can be used as a guide to the development of a Gottman-based marriage preparation curriculum.     

Effectiveness Research: Transporting Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents (IPT-A) From the Lab to School-Based Health Clinics

This paper describes the process of modifying and transporting an evidence-based treatment, Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents (IPT-A), from a university setting to school-based health clinics. It addresses conceptual issues involved in the shift from efficacy to effectiveness research as well as operational issues specific to the transport of IPT-A into school-based health clinics. Consideration is given to the rationale for an IPT-A effectiveness study, methodological concerns, and the timing of the move from the lab to the community. The authors identify challenges and barriers to initiating effectiveness and transportability research and provide suggestions for overcoming these barriers. Recommendations for conducting research in school-based practice settings are provided.     

Senior capstone design and ethics: A bridge to the professional world

A senior level capstone design experience has been developed and offered with a particular emphasis on many of the professional issues raised in Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criterion IV. The course has sought to develop student awareness of the ethical foundation of the engineering profession, the global and societal framework within which engineers practice, and the environmental impact on engineering. The capstone design course also focused upon improving the technical communications skills of the graduating senior class with both extensive instruction in writing and multiple workshops dealing with the art of making an effective oral presentation. The effectiveness of the design course was assessed using Kirkpatrick’s model for evaluating training programs. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

Perceptions of Ethical Behaviour among Business Faculty in Canada

Faculty members at Canadian business schools were surveyed regarding their ethical perceptions of behaviours related to undergraduate instruction. Fifty-five behavioural statements were listed and respondents were asked to rate the extent to which they felt each behaviour was ethical or unethical. The only item that respondents endorsed as unequivocally unethical (90% indicated it was definitely unethical) was Becoming sexually involved with an undergraduate in one of your classes. We also compared the results of our sample to those of an American sample. Overall, an interesting pattern of differences emerged between the responses obtained in Canada and the U.S. In general, the direction of the significant differences was such that Canadian professors viewed the behaviours in question as less ethical than did their American counterparts.     

Comparison of two creativity style measures

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between two measures of creativity style for a sample of beginning teachers. 116 student teachers enrolled in an undergraduate teacher-education program in a medium-sized, metropolitan university completed the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory and Basadur Creative Problem Solving Profile measures. A preference for an Innovator style (higher scores on Kirton's inventory) was correlated with the Generator profile on the Basadur profile (r=.36, p<.01). The KAI Efficiency scores, suggesting a preference for broad, global ideas as opposed to narrow, specific ones, was correlated with the Basadur Conceptualizer scores (r=.26, p<.01). Implications are discussed for teachers who must adapt to newer instructional and assessment methods designed to foster students' higher-level thinking skills.     

Online cognitive engagement of boys with ADHD

The present study was designed to examine the role that attentional problems may play in accounting for difficulties in story comprehension experienced by children with ADHD. A secondary task methodology was used to examine whether or not online variations in cognitive engagement with a televised story were related to the continuity of central or incidental information. Twenty-two 9- to 11 -year-old boys with ADHD and 36 of their nonreferred peers watched a television program and responded to auditory probes presented at preselected points during continuous sequences of central or incidental information. The reaction times to the probes for nonreferred boys showed the expected linear increase in cognitive engagement (i.e., the RTs increased) as central, plot-relevant sequences continued. In contrast, boys with ADHD showed the expected increase in RTs relatively late in the central sequences. The results were discussed in terms of how delays in engaging with central information may contribute to the academic difficulties experienced by boys with ADHD.     

Visual perspective taking for avatars in a Simon task

In modern digital applications, users often interact with virtual representations of themselves or others, called avatars. We examined how these avatars and their perspectives influence stimulus–response compatibility in a Simon task. Participants responded to light/dark blue stimuli with left/right key presses in the presence of a task-irrelevant avatar. Changes in stimulus–response compatibility were used to quantify changes in the mental representation of the task and perspective taking toward this avatar. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perspective taking for an avatar occurred in orthogonal stimulus–response mappings, causing a compatibility effect from the avatar’s point of view. In the following two experiments we introduced a larger variety of angular disparities between the participant and avatar. In Experiment 3, the Simon effect with lateralized stimulus positions remained largely unaffected by the avatar, pointing toward an absence of perspective taking. In Experiment 4, after avatar hand movements were added in order to strengthen the participants’ sense of agency over the avatar, a spatial compatibility effect from the avatar’s perspective was observed again, and hints of the selective use of perspective taking on a trial-by-trial basis were found. Overall, the results indicate that users can incorporate the perspective of an avatar into their mental representation of a situation, even when this perspective is unnecessary to complete a task, but that certain contextual requirements have to be met.     

Storage of features, conjunctions and objects in visual working memory

Working memory can be divided into separate subsystems for verbal and visual information. Although the verbal system has been well characterized, the storage capacity of visual working memory has not yet been established for simple features or for conjunctions of features. The authors demonstrate that it is possible to retain information about only 3-4 colors or orientations in visual working memory at one time. Observers are also able to retain both the color and the orientation of 3-4 objects, indicating that visual working memory stores integrated objects rather than individual features. Indeed, objects defined by a conjunction of four features can be retained in working memory just as well as single-feature objects, allowing many individual features to be retained when distributed across a small number of objects. Thus, the capacity of visual working memory must be understood in terms of integrated objects rather than individual features.     

Knowledge level learning and the power law: A soar model of skill acquisition in scheduling

Zusammenfassung. Das hier vorgestellte Modell lernt graduell, Planungsaufgaben aus der Klasse der Maschinenbelegungsprobleme (job-shop-scheduling problems) zu lösen. Mit Hilfe des Chunking-Mechanismus von Soar wird episodisches Wissen über die Belegungsreihenfolge von Aufträgen auf Maschinen memoriert. Bei der Entwicklung des Modells wurden zahlreiche qualitative (z. B. Transfereffekte) und quantitative Befunde (z. B. Bearbeitungszeiten) aus einer früheren empirischen Untersuchung berücksichtigt. In einer Validierungsstudie wurden dieselben Aufgaben von 14 Probanden und dem Modell bearbeitet. Die Passung von Simulationsdaten und empirischen Ergebnissen fiel insgesamt gut aus. Allerdings löst das Modell die Aufgaben schneller und zeigt auch einen etwas besseren Lernverlauf als die Probanden. Das Modell liefert eine Erklärung für das Rauschen, das typischerweise bei Bearbeitungszeiten zu beobachten ist: es handelt sich um erworbenes Wissen, das mehr oder weniger gut und auch unterschiedlich häufig auf neue Situationen übertragen wird. Der Lernverlauf der Probanden entspricht nur für aggregierte Daten einer Potenzfunktion (power law). Der vorgestellte Mechanismus zeigt, wie ein symbolisches Modell der Informationsverarbeitung graduelle Verhaltensänderungen generiert und wie der offensichtliche Erwerb allgemeiner Prozeduren ohne explizites Lernen von deklarativen Regeln erfolgen kann. Es wird nahegelegt, daß es sich hier um die Modellierung einer Form impliziten Lernens handelt. Summary. The model presented here gradually learns how to perform a job-shop scheduling task. It uses Soar's chunking mechanism to acquire episodic memories about the order to schedule jobs. The model was based on many qualitative (e.g., transfer effects) and quantitative (e.g., solution time) regularities found in previously collected data. The model was tested with new data where scheduling tasks were given to the model and to 14 subjects. The model generally fit these data with the restrictions that the model performs the task (in simulated time) faster than the subjects, and its performance improves somewhat more quickly than the subjects' performance. The model provides an explanation of the noise typically found in problem solving times - it is the result of learning actual pieces of knowledge that transfer more or less to new situations but rarely by an average amount. Only when the data are averaged (i.e., over subjects) does the smooth power law appear. This mechanism demonstrates how symbolic models can exhibit a gradual change in behavior and how the apparent acquisition of general procedures can be performed without resorting to explicit declarative rule generation. We suggest that this may represent a type of implicit learning.