Discursive Construction of Political Categories and Moral Fields: God Versus Rights and Access in a Reproductive Health Legislative Debate

Using a discursive lens, we argue that politicians rhetorically construct categories, storylines, and moral fields. We further claim that such discursive products are action‐oriented toward gaining popular support in a public sphere that is politically fault lined along similar moral orders. As a case in point, we analyze speeches delivered during congressional voting on a Reproductive Health bill (RH bill). Employing a mixed methods strategy, we first implement a quantitative lexical analysis of frequently used words, followed by a qualitative detection of cohering storylines on both sides of the debate. Results show that oppositionists mark their speeches with a deployment of the word God, while bill supporters use the word access conspicuously. One storyline claims that The RH bill stands against God, while the other purports that The RH bill advocates rights and access. Although both storylines assert moral righteousness, they invoke two different moral orders backed by power blocs and the public at large. The God story appeals to a Catholic discourse and the moral order loudly supported by the politically powerful Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. The rights/access narrative references a liberal morality frame maintained by social liberals and Philippine President Aquino. We end our paper by introducing the idea of an intrastate discursive lens to analyze moral fields constructed by politicians, oriented toward winning support from the public at large.     

Using a Constant Family in Role-Plays for Training MFTs

Marriage and Family Therapy training programs use role-plays and simulations to train their students in interviewing skills and in various therapeutic models. A review of literature shows that these training tools do not allow student-therapists to experience therapy beyond the first session. This article presents a modified version of the role-play, in which a constant family is used in preparing student-therapists for clinical work. This article describes a training scenario using the constant family role play and includes feedback from student-therapists. The authors present the benefits, limitations, and potential training considerations that can enhance use of the constant family role play.     

Psychology without p values. Data analysis at the turn of the 19th century

Although the fledgling psychology of 100 years ago was assertively empirical, there were no inferential statistics to guide psychologists' data analyses. However, 19th-century developments had left psychology with a rich array of techniques for analyzing and presenting data, some of which remain underutilized today. These include comparisons across replications, within-subject designs, reanalysis of data, analyses of factorial designs, and especially the use of tables and graphs. As the merits of hypothesis-testing statistics are debated at the turn of the 21st century, the history of data-handling practices can remind psychologists that there are many ways to overcome the current uniformity of statistical practice.     

Children's attitudes toward physically handicapped peers

The present study is a detailed exploration of children's attitudes toward physically handicapped peers. Subjects were 52 children, 26 handicapped and 26 nonhandicapped, ranging from 2nd through 8th grade. Along with 11 drawings depicting various physical impairments, children were administered an adjective checklist measure to assess affective responses toward target pictures, a preference questionnaire to assess behavioral intentions toward target pictures, a ranking task to assess perceptions of the physical capabilities of the target pictures, and a social desirability questionnaire to assess the children's desire to appear socially acceptable. In general, results indicated that older nonhandicapped children were more positive toward handicapped peers than were younger children and this was especially true for target pictures they perceived as least physically active. In addition, handicapped children held less positive attitudes toward the more “normal” target pictures than did nonhandicapped children. The present findings have important implications for the mainstreaming of physically handicapped children.     

The influence of sex-role orientation on ratings of perceived exertion

Previous research has shown that feminine-typed women have an aversion to strenuous physical activity and when engaging in cross-sex behavior may experience psychological distress. Given the growing interest in aerobic exercise, the present study was designed to test whether sex-role orientation mediated the report of physical exertion. Subjects were 33 college-aged women selected from three categories: masculine, feminine, and androgynous. Procedures required that each subject complete two one-hour testing sessions. The first session was employed to collect anthropometric data and to evaluate maximum aerobic capacity, while the second session consisted of subjects completing a preperformance affect scale and subsequently running for 30 minutes at a preestablished work intensity. Results revealed that those who were feminine-typed gave significantly higher exertional ratings than either the masculine or androgynous women. The fact that the feminine group was less positive about the task suggests that the observed perceptual differences may have been due to affective schemata which have been hypothesized to mediate the perception of pain.This article is based on a master's thesis by the first author, but the second author assumed primary responsibility for the preparation of the present article.     

Smoking Prevention and the Concept of Risk1

Sixth-grade children in 22 schools received either a social-influences smoking-prevention program or routine health education. The social-influences program was designed to teach youth about peer, parent, and media influences affecting smoking onset and to provide them with skills in resisting these influences. Comparison schools were given no program, but were permitted to continue their usual provision of health education. Program impact was evaluated as a function of pretreatment risk of future smoking. Risk was defined with respect to both (a) the prevalence of social models who smoked and (b) previous smoking experience. Two-and-a-half-year results show program impact to vary with both kinds of risk. Smoking-experience risk interacted such that, at first, there was greater impact on children with experience, but on later follow-up the pattern reversed, with the greater treatment effects seen for those initially with limited experience. Social-models risk showed a direct relationship, with greater risk being associated with greater program impact. Implications both for evaluation research and prevention programs are discussed.     

Examination of perceptual reorganization for nonnative speech contrasts: Zulu click discrimination by English-speaking adults and infants

The language environment modifies the speech perception abilities found in early development. In particular, adults have difficulty perceiving many nonnative contrasts that young infants discriminate. The underlying perceptual reorganization apparently occurs by 10-12 months. According to one view, it depends on experiential effects on psychoacoustic mechanisms. Alternatively, phonological development has been held responsible, with perception influenced by whether the nonnative sounds occur allophonically in the native language. We hypothesized that a phonemic process appears around 10-12 months that assimilates speech sounds to native categories whenever possible; otherwise, they are perceived in auditory or phonetic (articulatory) terms. We tested this with English-speaking listeners by using Zulu click contrasts. Adults discriminated the click contrasts; performance on the most difficult (80% correct) was not diminished even when the most obvious acoustic difference was eliminated. Infants showed good discrimination of the acoustically modified contrast even by 12-14 months. Together with earlier reports of developmental change in perception of nonnative contrasts, these findings support a phonological explanation of language-specific reorganization in speech perception.