Unemployment in the Postindustrial Age: Counseling Redundant Workers

Currently, in the United States, redundancy counseling, dealing with jobless or displaced workers, is the exception rather than the rule in cases of plant closures. It is likely, however, that redundancy counseling will become more common in the future, as more U.S. manufacturers turn to production sharing. Indeed, it has been suggested that redundancy counseling might replace the traditional unemployment compensation system as a better method of dealing with unemployment in a rapidly changing, highly technological world.     

Taking DNA to market and regulatory default

The public debate on recombinant DNA research has ended even though significant issues of public interest remain undecided or untouched. The reason for the termination of other than muted public discussion is not simply the removal of an initial fear of catastrophic biohazards. With the cessation of public debate over such hazards came also the dissolution of most public forums. The ends to which recombinant DNA research and development ought to be directed are not matters of public debate. With the transfer of basic research knowledge to the private sector, that sector's proprietary interests and ownership prerogatives effectively deny any continued public participation in charting the future of genesplicing technology and its application.     

Time-series analysis of long-term cardiovascular response

The purpose of this study was to illustrate the use of time-series analysis with long-term cardiovascular responding. Analyses of two successive 1000-minute mean blood pressure and heart-rate series in five chronically instrumented dogs showed that the autocorrelation function of the original series appeared highly nonstationary and that differencing the data produced a simple autocorrelation pattern which could be successfully modeled with stepwise autoregression. Evidence for reliable individual differences as well as change over sessions is presented and discussed.     

Parafoveal information is not sufficient to produce semantic or visual priming

Marcel (1978) has shown that semantic priming can occur in the lexical-decision task even if the prime is masked to the point at which its presence cannot be detected. The purpose of the present experiments was to determine if primes that begin four or five spaces to the right of fixation can also produce semantic facilitation even though they are very difficult to recognize. Experiment 1 showed that facilitation did occur when the parafoveal primes used in the subsequent experiments were presented foveally. In Experiment 2, the primes were moved to the parafovea, but the task demands directed the subject’s attention toward the fovea. When subjects were ignoring the information presented to the parafovea (an allocation pattern that should correspond to that used during normal reading), neutral primes were just as effective as either semantically related or identical primes. In Experiment 3, the task demands were altered so that subjects were actively attending to the parafoveal primes. Although subjects were trying to process the primes, there was still no evidence that benefits could be derived from parafoveal primes. A final experiment showed that subjects given extensive practice with the materials will produce large amounts of identity and semantic priming. The results support the conclusion that readers can benefit little from the preprocessing of information in the parafovea unless that information can be supplemented with contextual expectations.     

The role of symmetry in the good continuation ratings of two-part tonal melodies

Subjects heard a series of two-part melodies, in which each part was a random sequence of eight pitches (Experiment 1) or five pitches(Experiment 2) from the diatonic scale. The task was to rate each melody on how well the second part followed the first. It was predicted that the presence of symmetry between the two parts would increase the perception of good continuation. In Experiment 1, two symmetrical relat/lons—(itinversion) and (itretrograde)—yielded melodies that were more highly rated than the control melodies, which consisted of nominally (itdifferent) parts. A third symmetry, the (itretrograde inversion), did not enhance good continuation ratings. In Experiment 2, inversions and retrograde inversions were compared with control melodies, using shorter sequences and pitches with equal durations. Again, inversions, but not retrograde inversions, were significantly preferred. The results suggest that the aesthetic judgment of good continuation depends at least partially on a cognitive analysis of the relation between the melody parts. The positive symmetry effects are further discussed in relation to other studies of symmetry transformations in the contexts of both musical sequences and visual arrays.     

Subjective contours can facilitate performance in a reaction-time task

Subjective contours were compared with objective contours in their ability to facilitate performance in speeded tasks that required judging the position of a dot or the slope of a line segment relative to the contour. Subjective contours were found to reduce both reaction times and error rates for dot localization but not for the more difficult slope discrimination task. These results add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that subjective contours have functional properties similar to those of objective contours.     

Raising the IQ: The Ramey and Haskins study

The Ramey and Haskins intervention experiment succeeded in producing IQ gains at three years of age averaging about one standard deviation in young children who were selected for being at risk for subnormal intellectual development. The study is examined in terms of its consistency with other findings, the heritability of IQ, the g aspect of IQ, the simplex pattern of longitudinal interage mental test score correlations, mother-child IQ correlations, and criteria for establishing educationally and socially significant gains in intelligence defined as g rather than as a score on a particular test. Narrow transfer of training from cognitive intervention techniques to IQ test performance in early childhood, rather than enhancement of the g factor itself, is hypothesized as a cause of the typical fadeout of early IQ gains in later childhood.     

Isolating causal effects through experimental changes in parent-child interaction

A distinction is made between functionaland intentionalcontrol in parent-child interaction. These concepts are drawn, respectively, from opérant and cognitive models of interaction process. Experimental evidence is presented that cognitive factors such as expectations or hypotheses indeed affect the relations between parents and their own children. This necessitates a further distinction between long-termand short-termcausal effects: Since changes in parents' expectations for their children may lag behind actual changes in children's behavior, short-term effects inferred from observations of ongoing interactions may not reflect the long-term dynamics of the relationship.     

Stuttering and fluency: Exclusive events or points on a continuum?

In recent years, several studies have been conducted in which the fluency of stutterers was compared with that of normal speakers. These investigations have been of two basic types, some involving objective measures of physiologic, aerodynamic, or acoustic features of the subjects' fluent speech signal, and others involving experiments performed in which listeners attempted to distinguish the fluency produced by stutterers from that generated by normal speakers. The body of literature pertaining to each of these two types of investigations is reviewed and interpreted. The interpretations offered are then developed in an effort to shed further light on both fluency and stuttering. Implications for further research, as well as for the evaluation, treatment, and post-therapy assessment of stutterers are drawn.