Identifying a school's real agenda: Nine steps

Nine steps are described which enable a school psychologist to determine the real agenda of a school system. The “real” agenda of a school is defined as those behaviors that are encouraged and discouraged by each school's culture on a daily basis. These steps include (a) community expectations, (b) grading system, (c) testing program, (d) school achievement level, (e) curricular options, (f) changes in personnel, (g) organizational changes, (h) budget implications, and (i) walking the halls.     

Evaluations of the Work of Men and Women as a Function of the Sex of the Judge and Type of Work

Forty-two male and 42 female subjects selected from a large city, a small town, or a university campus were asked to evaluate four pen and ink sketches and four quotations. Two sketches and two quotations were associated with fictitious women's names while the remainder were associated with fictitious men's names. A three-way interaction indicated that women tended to discriminate against the productions attributed to men, and men significantly discriminated against the productions of women. But all discriminations were limited to intellectual productions (quotations).     

Book Reviews

J oseph B. W heelwright (Ed): The analytic process: aims, analysis, training
A. A lvarez : The savage god
B ernard A aronson and H umphrey O smond (Eds.): Psychedelics: the uses and implications of hallucinogenic drugs
E rnst B ernhard : Mitobiografia
B arbara H annah : Striving towards wholeness
C raig R. E isendraht : The unifying moment: the psychological philosophy of William James and Alfred North Whitehead     

Choice between delayed reinforcers in an adjusting-delay schedule: The effects of absolute reinforcer size and deprivation level

Choice between two reinforcers differing in magnitude and delay was investigated in rats using an adjusting-delay discrete-trials schedule in which the two reinforcers were associated with two levers (A and B). The delay to Reinforcer A (the smaller reinforcer) was always 2 sec, whereas the delay to Reinforcer B was varied in accordance with the distribution of choices in successive blocks of trials. In Experiment 1, the mean delay to the large reinforcer during the last 5 of 60 training sessions was greater when the rats were maintained at 80% than when they were maintained at 90% of their free-feeding body weights. In Experiment 2, the delay to the larger reinforcer was greater when the two reinforcers consisted of one and two 45-mg food pellets than when they consisted of three and six pellets. The results are consistent with a model of “self-control” which posits hyperbolic relations between reinforcer value and reinforcer magnitude, and between reinforcer value and delay of reinforcement.     

Intervention in the Library: The Effect of Increased Responsibility on Bystanders' Willingness To Prevent a Theft

Two field experiments tested the hypothesis that a bystander's increased responsibility to act increases the likelihood of his helping the victim of an emergency. In Experiment 1, an individual asked or did not ask the bystander to protect his property in his absence. In Experiment 2, the presence/absence of an unattentive confederate was varied orthogonally to the request/no request manipulation. The results of both experiments indicated that bystanders who received a prior request for protective assistance felt more personally responsible for protecting the individual's property and were more likely to prevent a theft of that property than were bystanders who received no request. The presence of a confederate in Experiment 2 decreased bystanders' felt responsibility and their willingness to intervene on the victim's behalf. The results were interpreted as support for the "felt responsibility" proposition of the Latané and Darley (1970) model of bystander intervention.     

A HULLIAN CONSTANT AS AN INDEX OF INTELLIGENCE: TWO EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS

Following Clark Hull, it is widely considered that the asymptote of the learning curve represents motivational factors, but that rate of approach to asymptote ('i') represents associational factors. The suggestion that i may be a measure of intelligence was tested empirically in two studies. An initial exploratory study yielded a positive correlation between i and IQ. A more rigorous replication did not. The results are discussed briefly.     

Pavlovian theory of dreaming

Pavlovian theory provides a conceptual scheme for the examination of recent empirical data on dreaming. Consistencies are examined between these data and Pavlovian theory of the general properties of the nervous system. An equation is made between Pavlov’s excitation-inhibition continuum, the REM-NREM cycle, and the basic rest-activity cycle. Speculations, based on this equation, are made about the inter-relation between waking and sleeping behaviors. Testable hypotheses are suggested throughout the paper.