The school psychologist as expert witness in due process hearings

As a consequence of the Consent Agreement reached between the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, school of psychologists are finding themselves increasingly in the role of expert witness in due process hearings. The paper identifies a number of problems regarding the witness behavior of psychologists in these hearings and proposes some recommendations and resolutions.     

Individual differences in the verbal coding of familiar visual stimuli

Two experiments were performed both of which involved the same-different comparison of pairs of alphabet letters. "Same" reaction times were obtained for both physical matches (e.g., AA) and name matches (e.g., aA). The results of both experiments supported the hypothesis that individual subjects would differ with respect to whether or not they based their physical matches on a comparison of verbal codes. In Experiment I, subjects differed in the size of their reaction time difference between physical and name matches, and in Experiment II, individuals differed with respect to whether or not the frequency of usage of the letters affected their reaction time for physical matches. In both experiments, the individual differences in verbally coding physical matches were related to Hock's (1973) individual differences distinction between subjects emphasizing analytic processes and subjects emphasizing structural processes.     

Amplitude of visual suppression during the control of binocular rivalry

To investigate the precise mechanism of control of binocular rivalry, Ss were instructed to attend actively to whichever pattern was momentarily in the nonsuppression phase. Test stimuli were presented tachistoscopically for recognition in either phase of rivalry. Because the differential recognition between nonsuppressed and suppressed phases was no greater for an active condition than for a passive viewing condition, it was concluded that control is not mediated by varying the amplitude of the suppression effect. This result was consistent with control that is exercised by selecting the eye to receive a constant amplitude suppression. In addition, it was found that visual sensitivity of rivalry nonsuppression and nonrivalry were the same for the ocular dominant eye but different for the nondominant eye.     

Conditioning two types of enuretics

Acquired enuretics (children who resume wetting after a period of dryness) have been distinguished from persistent enuretics (children who were never dry) in that the wetting of the former has been viewed as symptomatic of conflict and not modifiable by conditioning procedures. The present study compares these two types on measures of conditioning outcome and effectiveness, initial pathology and post-treatment adjustment.     

The equity restoring components of retaliation

Previous research has shown that retaliation can be an effective means of restoring equity to the relationship between a harm-doer and his victim The present study investigated the equity restoring properties of two components of retaliation the harm-doer “paying the price” for his harmful act, and the victim being given an opportunity to inflict harm Equity was restored to the relationship between the harm-doer and his victim when the harm-doer believed that his victim would be given an opportunity to inflict harm either upon the harm-doer or a neutral party When the harm-doer was led to believe that he would be retaliated against by someone other than his victim, equity restoration did not occur. The suggestion was made that the crucial factor in equity restoration may be the way in which the harm-doer thinks the relationship is viewed by his victim     

The effect of meaningfulness in tachistoscopic word perception

Studies of tachistoscopic word perception were reviewed under two theoretical headings: the structural approach, in which the variables of interest are linguistic relations among letters, and the lexical approach, where the interest is in the availability of words in lexical memory. The results of a recent tachistoscopic recognition study question the importance of lexical availability by finding no difference in performance between meaningful words and well-structured, pronounceable nonwords. In the present study, further comparisons between words and pronounceable nonwords were performed, and a meaningfulness effect was demonstrated. The generality of this finding was discussed, and alternative models accounting for the effect were considered. Two of these were capable of explaining structural effects as well as the meaningfulness effect: a translation model and a lexical discrimination net.