Bereavement support groups: Who joins; who does not; and why

Compared widowed spouses who joined (n = 40) bereavement support groups (BSGs) during the first 13 months of bereavement with those who declined to join (n = 96). Controlling for gender, age, and socioeconomic status, no differences were found for perceived levels of social support, but joiners, compared with nonjoiners, reported experiencing more stressful events and scored significantly higher on measures of depression, anger, anxiety, and subjective stress. Nonjoiners and, to a lesser extent, joiners viewed those attending groups as less self-sufficient (e.g., need help, lonely), suggesting a mildly stigmatizing image of BSGs. A dialectical model is proposed in which BSG utilization rates are seen as the product of an avoidance-avoidance conflict involving the choice between suffering emotional distress on one's own or the perceived stigma of joining a BSG. Implications for future research on participation in self-help and mutual support groups are discussed.     

The life of order and the order of life: Eric Voegelin on modernity and the problem of philosophical anthropology

This paper was delivered to The Eric Voegelin Society at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, in Atlanta, Georgia, between 31 August–3 September 1989.     

Gender schemas and the salience of gender: Individual differences in nonreversal discrimination learning

Sixty-seven 3–6-year-old children, identified as gender schematic and aschematic, completed a nonreversal discrimination learning task. This task permits examination of children's abilities to attend selectively to particular dimensions of a multidimensional stimulus. Gender typing and size of stimulus were the relevant target dimensions. Gender schematic children required significantly more trials to criterion when the shift was from sex type to size of stimulus, and significantly fewer trials to criterion when the shift was from size to sex type of stimulus, than did aschematic children. Gender aschematic children's performance was relatively unaffected by type of stimulus dimension. Results support predictions of the differential salience of the gender dimension to gender schematic and aschematic children.     

Gender-Typed and Non-Gender-Typed Category Awareness in Toddlers

Thirty toddlers (15 boys, 15 girls) participatedin a sequential touching task to examine their awarenessof own-sex and other-sex gender-typed, andnongender-typed, categories. Twenty-, 24-, and28-month-olds' awareness of gender-typed and non-gender-typedcategories were tested with contrasts of masculine,feminine, ball, and block categories. Toddlers' accuracyat labeling sex was also measured. Toddlers' patterns of touching to both nongender-typed (balls,blocks)and gender-typed (masculine toys, feminine toys)categories exceeded chance. Consistent with genderschema theory and research, boys and girls showedgreater than chance patterns of sequential touching toown-sexgender-typed category items, but notto other-sexgendertyped ones. Contrary to predictions, toddlers whocould accurately label sex (i.e., gender label) did not demonstrate greater sequential touchingof masculine or feminine gender-typed category itemsthan toddlers who could notgender label. Results suggesttoddlers possess greater awareness of gendertyped categories, particularly own-sex gender-typedones, than previously suggested. Additionally, toddlers'awareness of gender-typed categories does not appearrelated to their abilities to label accurately the sexes.     

Fast and slow namers: benefits of segmentation and whole word training.

Poor readers in Grade 2 (mean age 7 years 7 months) were categorized into fast and slow namer groups based on their performance on a Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) task. The fast and slow groups were then trained to read words using 3 different training regimes: one that taught onset/rime segmentation, one that taught phonemic segmentation, and one that used whole word repetition. The main results were that the slow namers acquired the words more slowly across experiences than the fast namers, irrespective of training condition, but they were particularly disadvantaged when trained with word-level units. Unlike beginning nonreaders, poor Grade 2 readers showed poorer retention following onset/rime training compared with phoneme or word level training, even when final level of learning was controlled. Further, they showed the best generalization to reading new words and nonwords following phoneme training and the worst following whole word training, even when final level of acquisition was controlled. The data are related to the P. G. Bowers and M. Wolf (1993, Reading and Writing, 5, 69-85) double-deficit hypothesis and to the specific deficits associated with early reading failure.     

A developmental investigation of selective attention to graphic,phonetic, and semantic information in words

Second and fifth-grade and college-age subjects made similarity judgments on sets of three words that required attention to orthographic, phonetic, or semantic information. Accuracy and speed increased with age. Even the youngest subjects were able to perform the task of selecting a given feature of a word reasonably well. Differences in difficulty among the three tasks decreased with age, suggesting a developmental change (primarily between second and fifth grade) toward facility in extracting phonetic and semantic information from words. The presence of confusable, potentially relevant information had detrimental effects overall which decreased with age and varied with the type of task and type of distractor. For all ages, performance was better when all trials of a particular task were blocked together than when trials of the three tasks were randomly ordered.     

The verbal helping skills of trained and untrained human service paraprofessionals

The verbal helping skills of human service paraprofessionals in a youth service agency were studied. Workers who had previously completed a 10-week systematic training program in basic helping skills were compared to untrained volunteer staff. Using simulated helping interviews, it was found that training made a significant impact on trainees' verbal helping responses. Skill level was maintained at a 2-month follow-up for certain responses whereas others returned to pretraining levels. Trainees were found to use significantly more "helpful" responses than volunteers. The need for training even carefully selected paraprofessionals is discussed.     

Excusing Responsibility for the Inevitable

It is by now well established that the fact that an action or aconsequence was inevitable does not excuse the agent from responsibilityfor it, so long as the counterfactual intervention which ensures thatthe act will take place is not actualized. However, in this paper I demonstrate that there is one exception to this principle: when theagent is aware of the counterfactual intervener and the role she wouldplay in some alternative scenario, she might be excused, despite the fact that in the actual scenario she acts, as we say, of her own freewill. I illustrate this contention by way of a critique of Fischer andRavizza's well-known account of responsibility for consequences.     

Experimental test of the prospect theory value function: A stochastic dominance approach

According to prospect theory, individuals are risk averse regarding gains but risk seeking regarding losses, implying an S-shaped value function. The S-shaped value function hypothesis is based on experiments in which subjects are asked to choose separately between alternatives with either only positive or only negative outcomes, alternatives which rarely exist in the capital market. In addition, the S-shaped findings may be biased by the “certainty effect” and by probability distortion. In this paper we employ the recently developed prospect stochastic dominance criterion to test the prospect theory S-shaped value function hypothesis with mixed outcomes and with no “certainty effect.” Assuming that subjects do not distort moderate probabilities, we strongly reject the prospect theory S-shaped value function, with at least 76–86% of the choices being inconsistent with such preferences. When possible subjective probability distortions are taken into account, we find that at least 50–66% of the choices are inconsistent with an S-shaped value function.