PYRAMIDAL PARENT TRAINING BY PEERS

This study replicated a pyramidal model of parent training by peers and compared its effects with training by a professional with 26 parents of children with disabilities. A multiple probe design across 3 tiers of parents showed that both types of training produced acquisition, maintenance, and to varying extents, generalization of parents' teaching skills, with concomitant increases in the children's performance in most cases. Improvements were comparable for parents trained by a professional or by peers, and for parents who did and did not serve as peer trainers.     

Parsing surrounding space into regions

Surrounding space is not inherently organized, but we tend to treat it as though it consisted of regions (e.g., front, back, right, and left). The current studies show that these conceptual regions have characteristics that reflect our typical interactions with space. Three experiments examined the relative sizes and resolutions of front, back, left, and right around oneself. Front, argued to be the most important horizontal region, was found to be (a) largest, (b) recalled with the greatest precision, and (c) described with the greatest degree of detail. Our findings suggest that some of the characteristics of the category model proposed by Huttenlocher, Hedges, and Duncan (1991) regarding memory for pictured circular displays may be generalized to space around oneself. More broadly, our results support and extend thespatial framework analysis of representation of surrounding space (Franklin & Tversky, 1990).     

Beliefs about female and male nonverbal communication

Participants (N= 441) rated from 1 to 10 how frequently or well they believed hypothetical women and men performed each of twenty nonverbal behaviors or skills. Women were believed to use more expressive and involved nonverbal behaviors than men, and to be more skilled at sending and receiving nonverbal messages. Men were believed to be louder and more interruptive, and to display more nervous, dysfluent behaviors. Ratings given to females by females were higher than were ratings in the other gender combinations for over half the variables, which may accurately describe female—female interaction. Perceived gender differences correlated positively with differences reported in observational studies, indicating that beliefs about nonverbal gender differences were generally accurate. The authors wish to thank Tom Leahy for his assistance in data collection.     

Contrasting Approaches in Marital Counseling

My Aim in this paper is to look at the therapist-marital couple relationship as a social system, and from this perspective to outline some aspects of the difference between treating a husband or wife as an individual patient and treating them together as a marital couple.
I will try to differentiate individual treatment and treatment of the marital pair on two dimensions: their respective use as sources of data about the marital relationship, for both therapy and research, and their potentialities for changing the marital interaction.     

Evoked potentials and stages of information processing: Methods of analysis

The use of principal components analysis (PCA) for the study of evoked-response data may be complicated by variations from one trial to another in the latency of underlying brain events. Such variation can come from either random intra-and intersubject variability or from the effects of independent variables that are manipulated between conditions. The effect of such variability is investigated by simulation of these latency-varying events and by analysis of evoked responses in a behavioral task, the Sternberg memory search task, which is well known to generate variation in the latency of brain events. The results of PCA of within-subjects differences in these two situations are plausibly related to underlying stages of information processing, and the technique may augment reaction time data by providing information on the time of occurrence as well as the duration of stages of information processing.     

Brain imaging: Applications in psychiatry

For more than a century psychiatrists have suspected neuropathology in patients with mental illness. In the last decade there have been developed several technologies that are capable of looking at both neuroanatomy and neurophysiology in the brains of living humans. First, x-ray computerized axial tomography led the way in visualizing the living brain, and now magnetic resonance imaging allows brain structure to be shown with even more clarity. Brain electrical activity mapping allows computerized maps of electrophysiological activity to be visualized in a way never before possible. Nuclear medicine has provided the means of looking at various metabolic and neurochemical parameters in the living brain. These include regional cerebral blood flow studies using xenon¹³³, single photon emission tomography, and positron emission tomography. Psychiatrists are cautiously optimistic that these various brain imaging technologies will be important new tools in continued exploration of the causes of mental illness and ultimately may lead to more effective treatments.     

Resolving arguments accurately

This empirical investigation examined how ordinary language users resolved disagreements over the solutions to categorical syllogisms. Forty-six participants completed puzzles in logic. After completing the puzzles, participants were then randomly paired into 23 to compare their answers and to resolve 159 disagreements. Results indicate that the most frequently used strategies for resolving disagreements centered on: (a) arguing over the merits of the position (47% of the time) and (b) appealing to past solutions as a means of addressing current disputes (28% of the time). In addition, the data revealed that the most frequently used strategy (arguing the merits of the positions) was no more effective than random choice (52% increase in correct solutions) while the strategy of appealing to past solutions significantly aided dyads in reaching correct solutions (70% increase in correct solutions).