Cluttering and stuttering exhibited in a young professional

S 18, a young adult professional, was self-referred for stuttering. Assessment indicated deficits consistent with both stuttering and cluttering, including prolongations, syllable repetitions, secondary escape behaviors, rapid speech rate, and poor expressive language. The client had no awareness of cluttering characteristics. Therapy goals included improved breath control, slowed rate, easier onset of articulation, and increased awareness of speech. Progress toward therapeutic goals was consistent. However, his motivation decreased as therapy progressed. He was discharged from direct treatment after 13 months, at which time he could employ therapeutic techniques to improve his fluency and intelligibility when speech was disordered.     

Mentoring to prevent school drop outs

American businesses have established partnerships with schools in an effort to upgrade the quality of education and increase the number of skilled workers for the future. In these partnerships, business employees act as mentors to help develop human and social capital in at-risk children beginning at an early age so that they will graduate from high school and be prepared for post-secondary education. The purpose of this study was to examine mentoring policy in two elementary schools in an urban district. Participants in the study included central office administrators, principals from the two schools, 10 fourth-grade at-risk students in each school who had been mentored for at least one year, their mentors from local businesses, their teachers, and parents. Data were gathered from interviews, documents, and observations. The successes and limitations for mentoring programs in these two schools depended on policy, implementation, school governance, and support from central office. The study provided implications for improving these programs and providing a model for future mentoring programs.     

Realities Confronting Elementary School Guidance

Overlap among 8 pupil personnel services, having implications for elementary school guidance, is illustrated by quotations from Scope of Pupil Personnel Services, written by representatives of the 8 disciplines. The overlap is viewed as advantageous in helping children if pupil personnel services are organized to accommodate flexibility. Guidance personnel are urged to borrow extensively from research in all behavioral sciences in developing an elementary school guidance program catering to known and anticipated requirements of young children for succeeding in a technological society. Other disciplines are cited for their potential contributions to elementary school guidance in some areas not usually emphasized in professional literature.     

Client characteristics associated with behavior change for treated and untreated aggressive boys

This study examined the relationship between subject characteristics of aggressive boys and their behavioral changes during a school year. Seventy-six boys in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were identified by their teachers as the most disruptive and aggressive in their classes. These boys were assigned to untreated control, anger-coping, anger-coping plus goal-setting treatment, and minimal treatment goal-setting cells. The anger-coping treatment was based on cognitive behavioral procedures. In both anger-coping cells, greater reductions in rates of disruptive/aggressive off-task classroom behavior was predicted by having higher rates of these behaviors initially, and greater reductions in parents' ratings of aggression was predicted by having poor social problem-solving skills initially. Additional predictors of reductions in parents' ratings of aggression in one, but not both, anger-coping cells included having higher rates of somatic symptoms and poorer social acceptance by peers. In contrast to the other cells, those boys in the no-treatment group who demonstrated the greatest spontaneous improvement on these change measures were the ones who initially were the best problem-solvers and who had higher levels of self-esteem. This cognitive-behavioral treatment appeared to have most impact with those boys who were the most in need of intervention.Portions of this paper were presented at the American Psychological Association annual convention, Anaheim, California, August 1983. Acknowledgment is made of the administrative and/or financial support provided by the Durham County School System, the Duke University Medical Center Department of Psychiatry, and the Durham Community Guidance Clinic. Appreciation is expressed to the other coleaders of the groups: Rosalyn Alexander, Steve Harris, Pat Kirkley, Val McLean, Kathy McSwain, Connie Scott, Barbara Thornton, Mary Ann Black, Harvey Botman, Dr. Bonnie Gregory, and Dr. Renee Schoenfeld.     

Happiness: When does it lead to self-indulgence and when does it lead to self-denial?

Previous research on self-gratification in children has found that happiness, compared to a neutral affective state, sometimes causes self-indulgence and sometimes causes self-denial. Review of this research led to the hypothesis that happiness leads to self-indulgence when children have no reason to believe that excessive self-gratification is morally wrong but that happiness promotes selfdenial when children fear that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral rule. In the present study, children were first placed in either a happy or neutral mood. They were then given an opportunity to help themselves freely to a reward supply, but half the children in each affect condition were warned that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral rule whereas the other half were not. In the absence of information that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral standard, happiness produced self-indulgence, but when children were told that excessive self-gratification would be wrong, happy children denied themselves significantly more than neutral-mood children. It was suggested that happiness motivates children to try to sustain their elevated mood; the behavioral route to maintaining positive mood, however, depends on how children perceive the moral implications of their actions.     

A test of the discrimination account in equivalence class formation

An equivalence class is typically established when a subject is taught a set of interrelated conditional discriminations with physically unrelated stimuli and additional, untaught, conditional discriminations are then demonstrated. Interestingly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, the relations among the stimuli within such a class are not necessarily equal. Rather, some members of the class are differentially related to other class members. There are two opposing theories of why relations among stimuli are unequal: nodal and discrimination accounts. The former suggests that delayed emergence is due to nodal distance (i.e. the number of intervening stimuli) while the latter suggests that delayed emergence is an artifact of the training procedure itself. The current paper reports on the first empirical study that directly compares these theories. Forty participants were given training designed to establish two 5-member equivalence classes. Participants’ response speed supported the nodal account, thus suggesting that unequal relations among equivalence class members is not an artifact of the training procedure.     

Acceptability of traffic safety measures with personal privacy implications

The aim of the present study was to examine knowledge, beliefs, and acceptability of three information and communications technology (ICT) safety measures with personal privacy implications, that is, section control, informative intelligent speed adaptation (ISA), and event data recorder (EDR). A questionnaire study was carried out among car users in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (n = 1319). Results demonstrated that the respondents displayed a low level of knowledge of the measures, although the level of acceptability was relatively high. Notably, EDR was perceived to be a greater threat to personal privacy than section control and ISA, and acceptability was also lower for EDR than for the other measures. In regression analyses, background factors, knowledge, and general and specific beliefs were entered as predictors of acceptability (Adj R² was approx. 0.70). Awareness that speeding is a problem and evaluating the measures as fair, effective, and a less infringement on personal freedom and personal privacy, resulted in higher levels of acceptability. The effects of background factors and knowledge were limited after controlling for different beliefs.