Changes in information as a function of a culturally appropriate smoking cessation community intervention for Hispanics

Tested a 7-month, media-based, community intervention among Hispanics in San Francisco designed to change levels of information on the damaging effects of cigarette smoking and on the availability of culturally appropriate cessation services. Three community-wide surveys of Hispanics were conducted with independent random samples, two as baselines (n = 1,660 and 2,053) and one postintervention (n = 1,965). Results showed that changes in the level of awareness of cessation services had taken place after implementation of the intervention. Furthermore, those changes took place primarily among the less acculturated Spanish-speaking Hispanics who were the target of the intervention. The changes in information reported here demonstrate that a culturally appropriate information dissemination campaign that utilizes multiple channels can produce changes in a community's level of information even when the campaign is implemented for a relatively short period.     

Latinas with Arthritis: Effects of Illness, Role Identity, and Competence on Psychological Well-Being

Tested a theoretical model on the effects of social role identity, illness intrusion, and competence on psychological well-being among 109 low-income Latinas with arthritis. All six roles studied were rated as highly important identities. Sex-role nontraditionalism was associated with less importance of the homemaker, mother, and grandmother roles. Negative affect increased as a function of intrusions into valued identities. Having important role identities contributed to feelings of competence (i.e., self-esteem and self-efficacy), which in turn, contributed to psychological well-being. Competence also mediated the effects of pain, identity, and illness intrusions on psychological well-being. Results suggest competence processes play an important role in well-being.     

An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses

Methodological difficulties are identified in the assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses (RCs) by means of the standard acting-out procedure. An alternative experimental task is proposed which attempts to minimize these difficulties while exploring the advantages of the acting-out technique. An experiment is reported in which Portuguese-speaking 3- to 6-year olds were tested by means of this alternative task. The results show children being affected by both the position and the focus of the RC in the same way adults have been reported to be and an error analysis suggests that most of children's difficulties can be ascribed to memory overload while RCs are processed as noun modifier sentences. These results contradict the view that there are developmental differences with regard to the way sentences with RCs are parsed and that processing load induces errors particularly manifested in right-branching subject focus sentences. Developmental changes taking place between the ages of 3 and 6 are considered and questions are raised concerning development from the age of 5.The research reported here was carried out while the author read for the PhD degree at the University of London. The writing up of this paper was financially supported by a postdoctoral grant from the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq: 302103-86.4).     

Women preparing for traditionally male professions: Physical and psychological symptoms associated with work and home stress

Gender differences in well-being often are attributed to differential exposure of women and men to stressors, either from different distribution of the genders across roles or from different stressors within roles. An alternative hypothesis is that men and women differ in their vulnerability, although not necessarily in their exposure, to stressors. The relevant research often has confounded gender with work roles. Therefore, women and men preparing for the same traditionally male professions, as well as another group of women preparing for traditionally female professions, were included as participants in the current study (n = 397, almost all white). Even with exposure to stressors controlled statistically, nontraditional women were more susceptible than men with the same professional goals to several physical and psychological outcomes. These gender differences were not accounted for by differential vulnerability to the stressors measured in this study. However, chronic job tension and home (non-work) life events were stronger predictors of certain symptoms for these women preparing for traditionally male professions than for women preparing for traditionally female professions. Thus, both gender and career track differences were demonstrated, in susceptibility to symptoms developed and in vulnerability to stressors, respectively.     

Report of the ACA Ethics Committee: 1993–1994

The activities of the American Counseling Association (ACA) Ethics Committee are reviewed for the year 1993–1994. Summary data of ethical complaints and formal inquiries received during the year are presented followed by a brief discussion of trends noted. Updated information about the revision of the ACA Ethical Standards and the Policies and Procedures for Processing Complaints of Ethical Violations is also provided.     

Beyond belief bias: Reasoning from conceptual structures by mental models manipulation

Mental models constitute an alternative to the rule-based systems in the explanation of human reasoning (Johnson-Laird, 1983). In this paper, we claim that the concept of believability generally used to categorize content and context effects is of little use within a semantic theory. Thus, we propose the use of categories that are directly extracted from subjective relations among concepts within the reasoning problem. We demonstrate that manipulations based on this kind of categorization produce predictable patterns of responses in reasoning problems. We present two experiments to test our predictions, using conditional and syllogistic reasoning problems, and in both cases, we demonstrate the influence of conceptual knowledge not only in natural contexts, but also in experimentally created artificial contexts.     

Text Comprehension Training for Disabled Readers: An Evaluation of Reciprocal Teaching and Text Analysis Training Programs

Forty-six reading disabled adolescents were randomly assigned to one of three 25-hr instructional programs. Two programs provided training in expository text comprehension, and a third offered training in academic problem solving and organizational and study skills (an alternative treatment control). One reading comprehension program was designed to remediate a deficient knowledge base, forcing disabled readers to elaborate and further process new text knowledge, focusing on both specific informational content in a text and knowledge of text structure per se. The second program was patterned after the Palincsar and Brown (1984) reciprocal teaching techniques and focused on training four text comprehension strategies used by skilled comprehenders. Both the “knowledge-base” and the “strategy” training approaches were associated with significant improvement in disabled readers' comprehension skills, although training effects did not generalize across all aspects of reading comprehension performance. Strategy-trained readers applied the trained strategies with equal success on instructed and uninstructed text materials, providing strong evidence of transfer of learning. Knowledge-base readers also demonstrated successful transfer of specifically trained procedures (semantic mapping, text analysis) to unfamiliar text. In both programs, the best outcomes were obtained when specific strategies and operations were targeted for training.     

Disintegrated experience: the dissociative disorders revisited

We present proposed changes to the dissociative disorders section of the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and review the concept of pathological and nonpathological dissociation, including empirical findings on the relations between trauma and dissociative phenomenology and between dissociation and hypnosis. The most important proposals include the creation of two new diagnostic entities, brief reactive dissociative disorder and transient dissociative disturbance, and the readoption of the criterion of amnesia for a multiple personality disorder diagnosis. We conclude that further work on dissociative processes will provide an important link between clinical and experimental approaches to human cognition, emotion, and personality.     

The effect of exercise on the selective performance of an instrumental response

Dogs were used to condition two instrumental reactions—bending of the left or of the right forepaw respectively. In the experimental situation a dish containing food was presented to the dog at a distance but could be drawn close and retained by lifting the forepaw to which (left or right) a lever had been attached. If both paws were simultaneously attached to levers, the dog had to choose between two reactions. Preliminary trials showed a right paw preference in spite of the equal effectiveness (food reinforcement) of the left paw. The aim of this experiment was to alter this right paw preference by a paradigm of differential practice with left paw dominance. The plan was to have ten training sessions followed by one test with choice. According to the probabilities, P_left = 0.8, P_right = 0.2, a random table was used to determine the order of the right-left paw attachments to the levers during training. In all, 1,000 training sessions and 100 tests with choice were carried out in each of three dogs. According to the training program, in every 100 training sessions the left paw had to perform the reaction a total of 80 times and 20 times by the right paw. An absolute alteration in paw preference occurred P_lelt = 1.0) even though both forepaws were equally effective in obtaining food reinforcement on the test trials. The present results indicate that not only the Law of Effect but Exercise is also important in instrumental conditioning.