College Counseling: Union and Intersection

College counseling can best be understood as the intersection of a professional activity and an environment. The specialty has developed from the merging of several movements: vocational guidance, mental health, and student personnel work. These elements are reflected in the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives represented by college counselors and in differing models of counseling services. College counseling will be affected by trends including health care reform, scarcity of resources in higher education, changing student demographics, and complex societal issues.     

Persistent crying and parenting: Search for a butterfly in a dynamic system

The risks and causes of persistent crying in early infancy are discussed on the basis of a study of 61 infants referred to the Munich Interdisciplinary Research and Intervention Program for Fussy Babies for persistent crying between 1 and 6 months of age, and of a community sample of 51 infants of the same age. Particular attention was paid to pre-verbal parent-infant communication, the development of which was interpreted in terms of a dynamic interactional system including both regulatory and communicative predispositions in infants and intuitive competence for supporting infant predispositions in parents. Neither a gut problem nor any other single causal factor was identified for persistent crying in the majority of cases. In contrast, persistent crying was significantly associated with multiple biological and psychosocial risk factors for both parents and infants. Neurological immaturity, difficult temperament and sleep problems in infants, and impaired psychological conditions, limited resources and failures of intuitive competences in mothers were found to threaten the developmental process in infants and give rise to ‘vicious circles’ which were destabilizing the interactional systems. Increased attention to intuitive parental competences is recommended as one effective model for therapeutic interventions.     

Good governance,law and social reality: Problematic relationships

This article examines the ways in which the linkage between good governance and economic development has originally developed as alegal discussion constrained by the constitution of the World Bank. This normative character of the linkage has subsequently shaped discussions about good governance. It is here argued that this tends to lead these discussions to focus on selective and normative aspects of the interrelations between economic, political and legal-administrative structures and institutions. While the role of law is increasingly acknowledged in more recent debates and policy statements, law tends to be approached from a normative economic or legal perspective that does not provide much insight into the social significance of law. Too little attention is given to anthropological or sociological approaches to legal pluralism in society. These factors combine to detract attention from the fact that governance issues in reality deal withbad rather than with good governance. Franz von Benda-Beckmann is professor in the department of Agrarian Law of the Agricultural University Wageningen and teaches on law and rural development in Third World states and anthropology of law. He holds a doctorate in law and aHabilitation in anthropology. His primary research interests are issues of property rights and social security in rural development, legal pluralism and legal anthropological theory. This is a revised version of a paper presented in the 1993 RAWOO (Advisory Council for Scientific Research in Development Problems) lecture series.     

Local and global factors of similarity in visual search

Effects of the similarity between target and distractors in a visual search task were investigated in several experiments. Both familiar (numerals and letters) and unfamiliar (connected figures in a 5 × 5 matrix) stimuli were used. The observer had to report on the presence or absence of a target among a variable number of homogeneous distractors as fast and as accurately as possible. It was found that physical difference had the same clear effect on processing time far familiar and for unfamiliar stimuli: processing time decreased monotonically with increasing physical difference. Distractors unrelated to the target and those related to the target by a simple transformation (180° rotation, horizontal or vertical reflection) were also compared, while the physical difference was kept constant. For familiar stimuli, transformational relatedness increased processing time in comparison with that fort unrelated stimulus pairs. It was further shown in a scaling experiment that this effect could be accounted for by the amount of perceived similarity of the target-distractor pairs. For unfamiliar stimuli, transformational relatedness did have a smaller and less pronounced effect. Various comparable unrelated distractors resulted in a full range of processing times. Results from a similarity scaling experiment correlated well with the outcome of the experiments with unfamiliar stimuli. These results are interpreted in terms of an underlying continuum of perceived similarity as the basis of the speed of visual search, rather than a dichotomy of parallel versus serial processing.     

Carnap und der Physikalismus

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

De Finetti's earliest works on the foundations of probability

Bruno de Finetti's earliest works on the foundations of probability are reviewed. These include the notion of exchangeability and the theory of random processes with independent increments. The latter theory relates to de Finetti's ideas for a probabilistic science more generally. Different aspects of his work are united by his foundational programme for a theory of subjective probabilities.This work would not have been possible in its present form without the generous help of Prof. Maria Carla Galavotti. For several years, she has unfailingly answered all my requests for papers difficult of access, and discussed the details of interpretation as well as the philosophy of probability in general. To her I express my gratitude for everything.     

Role of optical flow field asymmetry in the perception of heading during linear motion

During linear translation through a stationary environment, the pattern of optical flow generated on each retina is symmetrical when the head is aligned with the heading, but during lateral gaze the optical flow is asymmetric. We assessed whether human subjects could use the magnitude of this asymmetry to determine the direction of heading during passive translation through a 3-D environment. When allowed to move their heads in order to look in the direction of self-motion, subjects indicated their heading precisely and accurately. When the head was locked in alignment with the misaligned body, and gaze adjustments were not allowed, responses were quite precise, but showed a large bias which increased with increasing heading angle.