Differential effects of high-level and low-level postpassage questions

This experiment compared the effects of high-level and low-level postpassage questions, when presented immediately after the passage segment containing the answer to the question, on college students' free recall of expository prose passages. Low-vocabulary subjects' recall of high-level information not specifically quizzed by the postpassage questions was significantly greater in the condition in which the questions quizzed a high-level unit than in the low-question and no-question conditions, p less than .05. These results are interpreted as being consistent with a direct-access explanation which assumes that questions presented in close temporal contiguity to the quizzed information directly access that information in memory and that fewer associative links have to be traversed in the spread of activation from high-level units to other related information in the hierarchy. The effect of type of question in this experiment was compared with that found in an earlier experiment (Wilhite, 1982) involving delayed question presentation.     

Our Personal and Professional Lives: Learning Positive Connotation and Circular Questioning

The work of the Center for the Study of the Family in Milan has had wide influence. We describe its influence on us--the positive connotation of many car journeys, our self-training, and changes in how we view, and function in, our personal and professional lives.     

From General Laws To Singularities

This article comprises several sections. The first is devoted to an explanation of a number of notions stemming from work by Ilya Prigogine and others on open systems far from equilibrium. As a result of this work, I have been able to stand back from the traditional approach employed in family therapy, that of open systems at equilibrium (the theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy). The second section describes a clinical example based on elements close to Prigogine's theories. In the third part I develop an approach that--although continuing to draw on Prigogine's work--is much more closely linked to the research I have carried out with Félix Guattari over recent years. In this part I attempt to study a level that, in my view, has too often been left outside the field of inquiry: that of couplings between "singularities" of members of the family system and the therapist. A clinical case is presented in which this "semiotic" level, as Guattari terms it, is used together with that of the "intrinsic rules" of the system. Finally, I propose a few avenues of inquiry and research on the basis of the concepts presented.