Aversive Conditioning as L'Enfant Terrible: Scientific Findings on Therapists' Preferences and Tolerance

The integration of different theoretical schools in the practice of psychotherapy is a widespread phenomenon, and eclectic therapists make a large part of the subject pool in studies regarding therapeutic approaches. This eclectic trend has its own ideology, and empirical evidence for its efficacy is being investigated. Taking this into account, it seems desirable to study the professional tolerance of therapists toward approaches different from their own. This professional tolerance is investigated in the present study of Israeli psychotherapists holding different theoretical approaches. The vast majority of the subjects chose the psychoanalytic-psychodynamic approach as their preferred theoretical orientation. The therapists' own orientations influenced their selection of the mode of therapy from which they felt most distant (DTM). Thus, most of the psychodynamic therapists chose aversive conditioning and most of the behavioral-cognitive therapists chose classical psychoanalysis (i.e., on the couch) as their DTMs. The readiness of the opponents of classical psychoanalysis to cooperate with an orthodox analyst was significantly higher than the readiness of the opponents of aversive conditioning to cooperate with a therapist identified with this mode of therapy. It is suggested that DTM selection is determined by its extremeness and the orientation of the therapist. The DTM selected determines in turn the therapists' tolerance.     

Gender typing,importance of multiple roles,and mental health consequences for women

The present study examined the interactive influence of gender role typing and multiple role involvement with regard to specific mental health concerns among middle-class Caucasian women. As with previous research, depression and anxiety proved to be a function of gender role typing (feminine-typed and undifferentiated women displayed greater depression and anxiety relative to masculine-typed or androgynous women) with no differences attributable to multiple role involvement. For substance abuse, however, an interaction effect was obtained. Gender-typed (both masculine and feminine) women striving to excel across multiple roles engaged in greater substance abuse than women not gender typed (androgynous and undifferentiated); indeed, the latter displayed low risk comparable to women not similarly striving at multiple roles regardless of gender typing. A similar interaction previously has been reported with regard to disordered eating. These findings suggest that the lack of gender typing for women may enable them to cope more effectively with the conflicting demands of multiple roles and thereby reduce certain health risk behaviors (e.g., disordered eating and substance abuse), but that other mental health concerns (e.g., depression and anxiety) may not be similarly affected.     

An examination of practice effects in recognition

A study of practice effects in recognition performance is reported. In each of two experiments, different conditions of training were followed by a critical final test. In Experiment 1, a yes-no procedure was used on the critical test. During the training phase, some subjects were tested by the same method, either with or without item-by-item feedback, whereas others were given forced. choice tests. No significant changes in recognition accuracy were observed, either during the training trials or on the final test. However, feedback and experience with forced-choice tests both served to increase the bias toward positive responding. In Experiment 2, the forced-choice procedure was used on the critical final test. Either forced. choice tests or yes-no tests were given on the training lists. Again, there were no significant changes in performance. The absence of practice effects is attributed to the difficulty of identifying and implementing test-appropriate strategies.     

The Proofs Of The Grundgedanke In Wittgenstein's Tractatus

The Tractatus contains twodifferent proofs of the Grundgedanke, or thenonreferentiality of logical constants. In thispaper, I explicate the first proof in TLP 5.4s andreconstruct the less explicitly stated second proof. My explication of the first proof shows it to beelegant but based on an invalid inference. In myreconstruction of the second proof, the main argumentis that the sign of a logical constant does not denotebecause it possesses the punctuation-mark-nature. Andit possesses the punctuation-mark-nature because,given the analyticity thesis in TLP 5, one canestablish for everyday language an adequate symbolismwith N as the sole fundamental operation such that itssign is a bar indicating merely the order and scope ofits application.     

A theoretical frame of reference for family systems therapy? An introduction to Luhmann's theory of social systems

The starting point for this paper is that family therapy lacks a theoretical frame of reference of its own; thus a stepwise search for such a frame of reference is described. First, social systems are defined as communication systems. Second, it is shown in what way a family can be seen as a social system. With the help of the theory of social systems of the sociologist Luhmann, a theoretical frame of reference for systems therapy is drafted. Finally, we hint at the implications such a theoretical framework could have for clinical practice.     

Socrates questions Gorgias: The rhetorical vector of Plato's “Gorgias”

This essay argues that Plato's Gorgias, a dialogue lauding dialectic over rhetoric, uses a question-and-answer format as a heuristic of argument. Specific observations are advanced to explain the implications of Plato's techniques and to provide a more sensitive understanding of the process by which sought to gain the adherence of his readers.     

Tests of the generality of the principle of encoding specificity

Two empirical tests of the principle of encoding specificity are reported. In Experiment I, the normative strength of the cues presented on the input and on the recall trial was varied factorially. To lessen the emphasis on strictly associative learning, only half the items were cued in each phase of the study-recall cycle. Recall was higher when the cues remained the same than when they changed. However, regardless of the condition of input cuing, strong output cues were substantially more effective than weak ones. In Experiment II, the to-be-remembered words were shown in the presence of weak cues on the input trial. Recognition in the context of strong extralist cues was compared with recall to the original input cues. On the test of cued recognition, the target words were either generated by the subjects as free associates or presented to them as items on a test constructed by the experimenter. Contrary to previous findings, recall was not found to be superior to recognition. The phenomena of cue-dependent forgetting that have been interpreted as evidence for the principle of encoding specificity appear to have limited generality.     

On the estimation of parameters in latent structure analysis

In this note, we describe the iterative procedure introduced earlier by Goodman to calculate the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters in latent structure analysis, and we provide here a simple and direct proof of the fact that the parameter estimates obtained with the iterative procedure cannot lie outside the allowed interval. Formann recently stated that Goodman's algorithm can yield parameter estimates that lie outside the allowed interval, and we prove in the present note that Formann's contention is incorrect.This research was supported in part by Research Contract No. NSF SOC 76-80389 from the Division of the Social Sciences of the National Science Foundation. The author is indebted to C. C. Clogg for helpful comments and for the numerical results reported here (see, e.g., Table 1).