Marriage and Family Counseling

This article provides an overview of marriage and family counseling, including the growth and interest of this specialty within the American Counseling Association (ACA). Areas discussed include the evolution of marriage and family counseling within ACA, standards for training, credentialing, and unique ethical considerations when counseling couples and families.     

The role of fairness orientation and supervisor attributions in absence disciplinary decisions

The present study investigated the role of the work value of fairness and attributions regarding the causes of absence in supervisor disciplinary decisions. It was hypothesized that supervisors who valued fairness, and those who made internal attributions regarding the cause of a particular absence incident, render more severe disciplinary decisions than supervisors who value fairness less, and who make external attributions. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that the degree to which supervisors valued fairness moderates the relationship between external attributions and the severity of disciplinary decisions. Using a policy capturing approach, results were consistent with predictions. Implications of the results for research and practice are discussed.     

Children's capacity to agree to psychological research: knowledge of risks and benefits and voluntariness

A series of studies investigated the capacity of children between the ages of 7 and 12 to give free and informed consent to participation in psychological research. Children were reasonably accurate in describing the purpose of studies, but many did not understand the possible benefits or especially the possible risks of participating. In several studies children's consent was not affected by the knowledge that their parents had given their permission or by the parents saying that they would not be upset if the children refused. In contrast, other studies found that children were much more likely to stop their participation if the experimenter said explicitly that she would not be upset if they stopped. We suggest that experimenters should pay more attention to describing the possible risks and benefits of participation in research, and that they should also make it clearer to children that they are free to stop once they have begun.     

Brain dynamics,psychophysiological uncertainty and behavioral learning

The present paper takes a first step toward the integration of recent findings on brain dynamics and learning into established fields of psychophysiological science. Leading-edge studies of brain dynamics have shown that the brain manifests an inherent variability and that, when new stimuli (i.e., “problems”) are presented to the organism, brain chaos increases.     

Assessing Multicultural Counseling Competence: A Review of Instrumentation

The authors review four new instruments designed to assess multicultural counseling competence in trainees and practicing professionals. The Cross-Cultural Counseling Inventory—Revised (CCCI-R), the Multicultural Counseling Awareness Scale—Form B (MCAS:B), the Multicultural Counseling Inventory (MCI), and the Multicultural Awareness-Knowledge-and Skills Survey (MAKSS) were each critically reviewed in terms of item development, psychometric properties, and pragmatic utility. Specific research suggestions for continued empirical validation on the instruments are posited, and strong cautions regarding their current use in training are leveled.     

Extra-legal factors and product liability: The influence of mock jurors' demographic characteristics and intuitions about the cause of an injury

Two experiments were performed to investigate the role of extra-legal factors in a simulated product liability trial. In cases where the factual evidence was identical, subjects' liability judgments varied as a function of the case-specific factor of the alleged source of the plaintiffs injury. In deciding cases differently depending on the alleged cause, subjects relied on intuitions about what injury sources are more or less likely to cause a certain kind of injury. Juror-specific factors also influenced subjects' verdicts. There was no difference between students and non-students, but race and SEC—factors that are often correlated with student status—did affect subjects' verdicts. Low-SES and minority subjects were more likely to find the defendant liable than high-SES and white subjects. The results are considered in terms of general decision-making processes, and the implications for jury selection and mock jury research are discussed.     

Health and behavior: The coming together of science and practice in psychology and medicine after a century of benign neglect

For thousands of years, physicians had available only a few drugs with which to minister to patients and the practice of psychology was an integral and therapeutically powerful component in the practice of medicine. Thus, good bedside medicine consisting of empathy, compassion, and a nurturant attitude toward the ill individual was a major component of the physician's armamentarium until relatively recently. However, the explosion in scientific knowledge in biology, physiology, chemistry, and microbiology which began a century ago and has continued through the twentieth century helped produce several generations of physician specialists and subspecialists with little knowledge of the powerful role psychological factors play in health and illness. As a result, practitioners of medicine and practitioners of psychology have had little or no contact during most of this century. However, as advances in microbiology, public health, and nutrition have eradicated many of the infectious diseases, infirmities associated with one's lifestyle have replaced the latter as the major causes of death today. One offshoot of this shift is that after a century of benign neglect, physicians and psychologists have rediscovered a common ground in the arena labeled health and behavior. Some factors responsible for these recent developments are highlighted.This article was an invited address delivered to a group of Japanese health psychologists as part of a Health Sciences Seminar in Tokyo on July 24, 1993. Concurrent with its publication here in English, it is being published in the Japanese language in the March 1994 issue of the journal,Japanese Health Psychology.     

The calibration and resolution of confidence in perceptual judgments

Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontariot Canada Confidence rating based calibration and resolution indices were obtained in two experiments requiring perceptual comparisons and in a third with visual gap detection. Four important results were obtained. First, as in the general knowledge domain, subjects were underconfident when judgments were easy and overconfident when they were difficult. Second, paralleling the clear dependence of calibration on decisional difficulty, resolution decreased with increases in decision difficulty arising either from decreases in discriminability or from increasing demands for speed at the expense of accuracy. Third, providing trial-by-trial response feedback on difficult tasks improved resolution but had no effect on calibration. Fourth, subjects can accurately reportsubjective errors (i.e., trials in which they have indicated that they made an error) with their confidence ratings. It is also shown that the properties of decision time, conditionalized on confidence category, impose a rigorous set of constraints on theories of confidence calibration.     

On the scaling of visual space from motion—in response to Pizlo and Salacfa-Golyska

Pizlo and Salack-Golyska (1994) have raised an important question about the validity of the interpretation of experiments reported by Lappin and Love (1992)—based on the fact that alternative cues in the image plane might have supported the shape discriminations in those experiments. The meaning of the hypothesis that visual space may be scaled by congruence under motion is clarified, pertinent evidence is reviewed, and new experimental evidence is reported We conclude that visual space can be metrically scaled by congruence of moving shapes.