The family of origin scale: A construct validation study

Data from 69 women and 63 men along with ratings from a panel of expert judges were used to assess the construct validity of the Family Of Origin Scale as a measure of family health. Loevinger's conception of construct validity, focusing on the substantive, structural, and external components of validity, was employed to organize the research procedures followed and the data analytic techniques used. Results showed that the instrument appears to be a useful measure of a warmth-coldness affect dimension in the family of origin, but the multi-dimensional structure of the test, as a measure of family-of-origin health, could not be validated. Suggestions for use, score interpretation, and further development are discussed.     

Review article

A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 1993. Cambridge, The Islamic Texts Society. 270 pp., ISBN 0–946621–51–9

Seyyed Hossein Nasr's new book is intended both for the young Muslim born in the West and for overseas Muslim students who are studying here. It demands the serious attention not only of these groups but of all who inhabit our ‘global village’. In order to gather a range of views four postgraduate students from CSIC were invited to review the book from their particular perspectives. Two of the students were Muslim and two Christian. In both cases, one student was born in the West and the other was an overseas student. What follows are their analyses of the book.     

TIME DELAY: A TECHNIQUE TO INCREASE LANGUAGE USE AND FACILITATE GENERALIZATION IN RETARDED CHILDREN

Institutional breakfast-serving procedures were manipulated to assess what effect changes in that aspect of the environment would have on requests for food. During baseline, six severely retarded children were required to pick up their food trays and return to their seats. The first manipulation, delaying the giving of the food tray for 15 seconds, served as a cue to evoke meal requests by three of the six children. Two of the remaining three required a model of an appropriate meal request (i.e., “Tray, please.”) at the end of the 15-second delay before they began requesting their meals. To evoke meal requests from the sixth child, an intensive training procedure, consisting of massed trials of delay and modeling, was required. Three different probes were administered to assess generalization across the people serving the meals, across mealtimes, and across both people and mealtimes. Typically, generalized responding in these new situations could be prompted by use of the 15-second delay procedure. Functional aspects of the delay procedure and its potential usefulness for evoking speech and facilitating generalization are discussed.     

Semantic errors or statistical flukes? a note on allport's “on knowing the meaning of words we are unable to report”

Allport (1977) has claimed that normal subjects who view briefly a multi-word array, which is then pattern-masked, produce semantic errors analogous to those made by subjects with “deep dyslexia”. We claim that the rate at which normal subjects make such errors is consistent with their arising purely by chance.     

A multimethod generative CAI system for remedial mathematics

A computer-assisted instruction system for remedial mathematics has been written to yield four teaching methods based on two orthogonal variables: (1) With ad hoc frame orientation (AFO), training modules have a fixed order for all students, strict performance criteria must be met before moving to new modules, and students can ask only for problem solutions. With information structure orientation (ISO), the first two AFO conditions are dropped and students can also request partial answers and hints. (2) A confluent (affective) mode contrasts with didactic instruction by adding use of given names, self-report of moods, relaxation procedures, some communication with another student, and so on.     

The determination of optimal exposure to phobic stimuli in flooding therapy

The present study compared the value of various criteria for determining exposure duration to phobic stimuli in flooding therapy. Results indicated that basing exposure termination on a return to resting ranges of HR was not effective in increasing approach behavior, whereas basing termination on observer's judgements was quite effective. Employing self-reported anxiety reduction as the termination criterion was no more effective than using either the HR criterion or a procedure that combined all three criteria (HR, self-report, and observer's judgements). Self-reported fear data showed similar trends with the HR criterion again failing to produce any greater benefits than control procedures. Nine-weeks follow-up indicated a persistence of the behavioral changes with some loss of the gains in subjective anxiety, and a reduction in the differences between groups.     

Speech in mania: Syntactic aspects

In this study, we observed and linguistically analyzed the verbal behavior of six manic subjects, looking specifically for those linguistic capacities which were intact and for those which were disrupted. From interviews and tape-recordings of manic subjects in both analytic-protocol and discourse situations, we observed a preservation of basic speech capacities, including the ability to comprehend and generate grammatical sentences and to utilize highly complex linguistic transformations. We noted, however, a disruption in the ability to properly utilize ellipsis and semantic (discourse) anaphora such that manic subjects did not maintain a meaningful progression of thought in discourse.     

Effects of training to increase self-monitoring accuracy

We examined the effects of teaching children to monitor and record their attending behavior accurately. On the basis of their low levels of attention to task and agreement with an observer about their attending, we selected four students from a class of 11, all of whom were practicing self-recording. The classroom teacher trained the students to make their judgments about their attention to task correspond with hers. The accuracy training, which was applied according to a multiple baseline (across subjects) design, produced salutary increases in levels of attention to task. But changes in accuracy of the students' self-recording were small and unstable. Although the procedures used in this study produced high levels of reactivity, they do not support the position that accuracy in self-monitoring is required for reactivity.