The relation of family cohesion to marital adjustment

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between family cohesion and marital adjustment. The sample consisted of 70 married graduate students from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale was used to measure family cohesion. The Dyadic Adjustment Scale was used to measure marital adjustment. The Demographic Data Sheet was used for demographic characteristics. Overall, the result of ANOVA with planned comparison revealed that high marital adjustment was not only associated with a moderate level of family cohesion but also associated with a high level of family cohesion.This article is based on the first author's doctoral dissertation at State University of New York at Buffalo.     

Sex, sex-role identification, and awareness of sex-role stereotypes

An experiment was run to determine if androgynous people have transcended traditional sex roles or merely incorporated both sex roles into their repertoire. Masculine sex-typed, feminine sex-typed, and androgynous people listed as many masculine and feminine stereotypes as they could think of in a time-limited task. Highly sex-typed individuals showed more awareness of their own sex's attributes than the other sex's stereotypes. Androgynous people showed greater awareness of both sexes' attributes as compared with sex-typed people, indicating support for the incorporation hypothesis rather than the transcendance hypothesis. However, the stereotypes androgynous people listed were somewhat less evaluative in tone compared with those of sex-typed people, Overall, subjects listed more stereotypes of females than males, and female stereotypes were more negative than male stereotypes.     

Goal attainment and satisfaction scores for CMHC clients

The purpose of this study was to explore the psychometric properties of goal attainment scales and client satisfaction measures. The findings revealed that goal attainment results, like other types of self-report psychotherapy outcome measures, are directly related to (a) indicators of a client's social class, and (b) the manner of treatment termination (unilateral dropout vs. mutual consent). The extent of client--therapist agreement on goal scores was relatively low thereby supporting the necessity of obtaining both perspectives in evaluating treatment outcome. Furthermore, because measures of client satisfaction were found to be sufficiently independent from goal outcome scores, it was concluded that they provide a unique source of program evaluation data. Finally, it was concluded that Goal Attainment Scaling is best considered to be a quality assurance tool for individual client/therapist dyads rather than a mechanism for the determination of the effectiveness of specific mental health programs and services.     

Anonymity reconsidered

This paper questions the concept of the therapist's anonymity and offers as an alternative the concept of an anonymity/self-disclosure dimension along which the therapist can position himself depending on several criteria. These criteria pertain both to characteristics of the therapist, the patient, and the material to be disclosed.     

Gestural impairment and gestural ability in aphasia: A review

Studies of gestural ability in aphasic subjects have found impairment of gestural expression and comprehension, with a close relationship between severity of aphasia and degree of gestural impairment. A few investigators have correlated gestural ability with specific language functions or subcategories of aphasia. Reading appears to correlate better with gestural recognition than does auditory comprehension. Despite the general findings of gestural impairment in aphasia, successes have been reported with gestural training including artificial language techniques, pantomime, Amerind, and American Sign Language. Future studies of gestural therapy in aphasia should examine specific language deficits in order to identify those aphasic individuals who can benefit from gestural training.     

The effect of vowel similarity and syllable length on acoustic memory

Darwin and Baddeley (1974) argue that the presence of recency, suffix, and modality effects are not attributable to the acoustic properties of the stimuli but, rather, to the acoustic distance between the items comprising the test series. The present study is designed to determine whether stimulus duration is a significant variable in acoustic memory. Eight different blocks of synthetic stimuli were prepared; one block each of 60 msec similar and dissimilar syllables and 190 msec similar and dissimilar syllables. The other four blocks consisted of these same vocabularies, but each list in the block had an eighth syllable suffix of the same duration as the syllables in the block. Significant recency and suffix effects are seen for dissimilar syllables of both durations. No effects are demonstrated for 60-msec similar syllables, but both of the effects are seen for 190-msec similar syllables. These results indicate that whether or not a speech sound is preserved in precategorical acoustic storage (PAS) depends upon not only the acoustic distance between the stimuli, but also on other characteristics intrinsic to the stimuli, e.g., stimulus duration.     

Texture size specificity in the slant aftereffect

Transfer of the median plane slant aftereffect was assessed across changes in stimulus texture size (sine-wave grating frequency). Under binocular viewing, reliable decrements in aftereffect magnitude were observed when texture size was changed, compared with no-change control conditions. Under monocular viewing conditions, no significant aftereffects were found. The results indicate a spatial-frequency-specific component of binocular slant aftereffects.