Aspects of family-oriented diagnosis in compulsory legal family expert assessment

In forensic psychology, recommendations that courts request when granting one of the parents the right of child upbringing after a divorce pose a problem for the person who is required to give such expert judgment. The authors describe the difficult situation he faces when having to decide for and, at the same time, against one of the parents. A good knowledge of family psychology and pathopsychology is essential, and for drawing up the expertise and stating his reasons, the expert requires methodical resources. The authors describe four procedures of relational diagnosis and recommend the combined use of these in conjunction with methods that have been employed so far.     

Attributions in marriage: review and critique

The prevailing behavioral account of marriage must be expanded to include covert processes. This article therefore examines the attributions or explanations that spouses make for marital events. A review indicates that dissatisfied spouses, compared with satisfied spouses, make attributions for the partner's behavior that cast it in a negative light. Experimental, clinical outcome, and longitudinal data suggest further that attributions may influence marital satisfaction. Rival hypotheses for these findings are examined. Because continued empirical development in this domain depends on conceptual progress, a framework is presented that integrates attributions, behavior, and marital satisfaction. This framework points to several topics that require systematic study, and specific hypotheses are offered for research on these topics. It is concluded that the promising start made toward understanding marital attributions holds considerable potential for enriching behavioral conceptions of marriage.     

Learning disabilities: an appraisal of Rorschach response patterns

Recent developments with the Rorschach invite research concerning cognitive and coping styles of learning disabled students. This study, based on an N of 25 (12 learning disabled and 13 controls), was designed to assess group differences in perceptual accuracy, self-concept, and reactivity. Analysis showed that learning disabled students represent a diverse population for which highly individualized understanding is required if appropriate schooling strategies are to be devised. Such students, compared with controls, were more inclined to have lower self-confidence, to be more reactive, to avoid emotionally-laden stimuli, to manifest a higher proportion of responses involving perceptual inaccuracies, and to be less spontaneous and less inclined to take risks. Some curricular implications of the findings are discussed.     

Benefits of humor in reduction of threat-induced anxiety

The benefits of humor in reducing anxiety were investigated in a laboratory study, in which subjects were falsely led to believe that they would receive a shock in 12 min. Participants were 53 undergraduate students with either high or low sense of humor as measured by the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire of Martin and Lefcourt (1984). During the anticipatory period, subjects listened to either a humorous tape, a nonhumorous tape, or no tape. Dependent variables were repeated measures of self-reported anxiety, heart rate, and zygomatic facial activity. Anxiety increased over the anticipatory period, as predicted. A significant interaction between condition and time indicated that subjects from the humor condition consistently rated themselves as less anxious and reported less increase in stress as the shock approached. A three-way interaction concentrating on the final 3 min. indicated a tendency for subjects with low sense of humor to have higher heart rates in the no-tape condition than in the humorous or nonhumorous tape conditions. Analysis for zygomatic activity indicated more smiling by subjects with high sense of humor and by subjects in the humor condition. Also, the humorous tape elicited more smiling by subjects with high sense of humor.     

Distorted body image as a risk factor in anorexia nervosa: replication and clarification

This study replicated the results of an earlier one in which college women showing psychological similarities to anorexics indicated an unrealistically larger body-image relative to controls but only if they were relatively thin. This kind of perceptual enhancement was not found when inanimate objects were rated. The proposal that an enhanced body image plays a dynamic role in motivating food restraint (and may increase the risk of becoming anorexic) was supported by an analysis of dieting strategies.     

Construction of a multidimensional scale of job satisfaction

A comprehensive, multidimensional scale measuring job satisfaction was constructed for use in a major project concerned with personnel recruitment and retention of health professionals. 11 dimensions relating to opinions of immediate supervisors, physical working conditions, satisfaction with coworkers and with pay, aspects related to promotion and work motivation, are identified. These dimensions are shown to distinguish among health professionals on sex and between locations and different occupations. The scale also has high internal validity, producing a multiple R of .78 with over-all job satisfaction.     

Neural nets for generalization and classification: comment on Staddon and Reid (1990)

The neural net model of Staddon and Reid (1990) explains exponential and Gaussian generalization gradients in the same way as the diffusion model of Shepard (1958). The "cognitive" generalization theory of Shepard (1987), which also has been implemented as a connectionist network, goes beyond both of these models in accounting for classification learning.     

Measures of concurrent validity and alternate-form reliability of the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence

The subjects, 60 undergraduate students, were administered the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI) individually. The Shipley Institute of Living Scale was administered in small groups. A Pearson correlation of .56 was obtained for TONI Quotients, Forms A and B. TONI Quotients, Forms A and B, correlated with Shipley estimated WAIS--R IQ .50 and .46, respectively, and correlated to .71 and .64, with Shipley Total T scores, .52 and .44, respectively (corrected to .71 and .61), with Shipley Abstraction T scores, .51 and .42, respectively (corrected, .63 and .52), and with Shipley Vocabulary T scores .26 and .32, respectively (corrected to .63 and .52). TONI scores seem more closely related to Shipley Total and Abstraction scores than to Shipley Vocabulary.     

Psychotherapists' religious beliefs and their perception of the psychotherapy process

In a comparison of religious and nonreligious psychotherapists' perceptions of a portion of a psychotherapeutic session no significant differences were found on the Vanderbilt Psychotherapy Process Scale for four groups of therapists designated according to their scores on three religious questionnaires. While the results suggest attitudes toward religion are not reflected in therapists' practice of psychotherapy, limitations of the study indicate the need for more rigorous testing of this possibility.     

Sex differences in memory performance for odors, tone sequences and colors

Sense of olfaction would seem to be of little importance for human behavior. However, a closer look at this from the psychological point of view reveals many interesting aspects, such as sex differences in olfactory perception, that are of interest to differential psychology. The present study deals with sex differences in the memory for odors; we assume that women will do better here than men while other memory tasks involving acoustical and optical stimuli will show no such differences. Sixty women and 40 men were examined. On the first day, they had to retain 10 odors, 10 random-generated tone-sequences, and 10 colors. On the second day, 20 such stimuli for each memory task were presented, and the subjects had to remember and to tell which were known and which of them were unknown stimuli to them. A significant advantage in the olfaction memory task was found for women, while acoustical and optical memory scores showed no such differences. This expected finding is discussed in two ways. First, the female advantage might result from phylogenetic sources. Second, it might arise because women in general more often than men seem to deal with olfactory cues, so that they might simply have more experience and therefore the greater chance to score higher in an odor memory task.