An auditory evoked potential study of consonant perception in different vowel environments

Auditory evoked responses (AER) to series of consonant—vowel syllables were recorded from temporal and parietal scalp locations from 20 right-handed female college students. Averaged AERs were submitted to principal components analysis and analysis of variance. Seven components of the group's AERs were found to reflect various aspects of the stimulus parameters. One component reflected changes over only the left hemisphere to different consonants independent of the following vowel sound. A second component changed systematically over both hemispheres in response to only consonant changes. A third component systematically changed for the different consonants depending on the following vowel.     

Preference relations

Various principles about preferences between sets of options are presented and considered with respect to several familiar decision rules. Necessary and sufficient (or minimally sufficient) preference principles are given for each rule. The paper concludes with an example of how easy it is to misjudge the reasonableness of preference principles.     

Perceiving the centroid of configurations on a rolling wheel

Undergraduates observed configurations of point-lights undergoing wheel-generated motions and judged how wheel-like the movement of each stimulus appeared on a 7-point scale. Viewer judgments were predicted by a metric defining the variable parameters for the motion path of each configuration’s geometric center—the centroid. The effects on judgments of eye movement and the stimulus characteristics of rotation, translation, and configuration were explored in six experiments. First, a strain operation on the dynamic stimuli did not affect the ability of the metric to predict perceptual judgments. Second, the predictive strength of the metric did not interact with the type of eye movements used in viewing the stimuli, though judged wheel-likeness was greater under pursuit vision than under static fixation. Third, variations in the extent of translation yielded little, if any, effect on observers’ judgments, nor did translation in a circular path. Finally, for stimuli having two lights extremely close together in the configuration, the metric’s predictive value was slightly lessened but only at the limits of visual acuity. Thus, within a wide range of presentation conditions, and for a wide variety of configurations, a metric that defined the variable parameters for the motion path of the centroid was an accurate predictor of observers’ judgments of goodness of perceived rotary motion.     

Lexical and grammatical processing of unshadowed messages: A re-examination of the Mackay effect

Mackay (1973) claimed to have provided evidence that subjects could process the grammatical structure and lexical content of nonshadowed messages. In the present study, it was found impossible to repeat Mackay's findings when controls for several factors that had been ignored in Mackay's study were employed. Subsequent experiments indicated that two major factors contributing to Mackay's results were that he had a gap between sentences in his experiment and that the nonshadowed material came out of a background of silence. Both of these probably enabled subjects to switch attention to the nonshadowed material without disruption of shadowing performance.     

Group influence and the psychology of cultism within re-evaluation counselling: A critique

Re-evaluation counselling (often known as co-counselling, or simply RC) has recently been described as an ‘innovative’ form of therapy, despite the fact that it has existed for over forty years. It has also been suggested that it is, or is becoming, a psychotherapy ‘cult.’ This paper discusses the key theoretical ideas of re-evaluation counselling (RC) and assesses the extent to which some of these ideas could enable unscrupulous therapists to engineer artificial consent and impose their own belief systems on clients. RC's strong reliance on group based activities is also explored, and the extent to which this facilitates unthinking conformity is considered. Finally, guidelines are discussed which enable therapists and would-be clients to assess more clearly the potentially negative effects of involvement in groups such as RC.     

Teaching the History of Counseling: Training the Next Generation

The authors describe a teaching activity using a poster-session format to teach first-year counseling psychology doctoral students the history of counseling. Evaluative data suggest that the format was an effective and powerful tool to teach beginning counseling psychology students the history of the profession. The implications of the evaluative feedback are discussed in terms of teaching and preparing the next generation of counselors.     

Multitrait-multimethod model of adolescent deviance,drug use,academic, and sexual behaviors

A multitrait-multimethod design was used to test Jessor and Jessor's (1977) problem behavior theory with a sample of adolescents, their parents, and peers. Behaviors included general deviance, drug use, low academic motivation, and precocious sexual behavior. While research has supported this theory, the reliance on self-report data for the majority of this work may threaten the validity of these findings. Results from hierarchical confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the convergent and discriminant validity of the seven behavior constructs was high and method effects were low. A two-factor second-order model, representing General Drug Use and Other Problem Behavior, accounted for a larger proportion of variance in the lower order factors compared to a single-factor model.This research was supported by Grant DA 03706 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.     

The effects of reducing teacher questions and increasing pauses on child talk during morning news

The effects of reducing teacher questions and increasing pauses on student talk during morning news sessions were investigated. The length of student discourse was observed during random 10-min samples of the lesson, together with frequency counts of teacher questions and pauses. Concomitant measures of teacher praise, directives, control statements and student call-outs were also obtained. Within the constraints of a within-subjects reversal design (ABAB), experimentally reducing teacher questions and replacing these with pauses and/or topic-related statements was associated with an increase in child discourse. Teacher praise and directives did not systematically alter across experimental phases but both teacher control statements and child call-outs reduced during the intervention phases. Reducing teacher questions and increasing the use of pauses by the teacher was associated with increases in student discourse without adversely affecting classroom behavior. These results support the hypothesis that teacher questions foil pupil talk in morning news thereby obstructing the pedagogical value of these sessions.