Scaling questions: asking and answering them in counselling1

Solution-focused counsellors use “scaling questions” to construct understandings of clients’ concerns and solutions to them. We examine how these questions are asked and answered, offering evidence of what is constructed from within counselling discourse. Also, clients and counsellors offer their retrospective accounts of their participation in question and answer sequences in their dialogues. We conclude by speaking to the implications we see from this research as it relates to collaborative and resourceful dialogue between counsellors and clients.     

Longitudinal Changes in Acculturation for Immigrant Women from the Former Soviet Union

Most research on immigrant acculturation has been conducted with cross-sectional samples, using statistical designs that may not capture different trajectories for the components that contribute to this complex concept. The purpose of this study was to examine change over time in acculturation for 226 women from the former Soviet Union who had lived in the US fewer than eight years when recruited. Using self-report data from four annual waves, growth trajectories were examined in four components of acculturation (American behavior, Russian behavior, English language proficiency, and cultural generativity). Results indicate that these components changed at varying rates. Acculturation is a process with multiple distinct components which should be measured separately to obtain a full profile of change over time.     

Constraints on enhanced extinction resulting from extinction treatment in the presence of an added excitor

Three Pavlovian fear conditioning experiments with rats as subjects explored the effect of extinction in the presence of a concurrent excitor. Our aim was to explore this particular treatment, documented in previous studies to deepen extinction, with novel control groups to shed light on the processes involved in extinction. Relative to subjects extinguished on the target CS alone, Experiments 1 and 2 found across a range of parameters that any appreciable effect of facilitated extinction due to the concurrent excitor was submerged by generalization decrement going from extinction to testing. In Experiment 3 we used different durations for the target and concurrent stimuli in order to discourage configuring and an ABC renewal design to increase sensitivity, and observed diminished renewal resulting from extinction in the presence of a second excitor. Our findings suggest that there are distinct limits to the observation of enhanced extinction in the presence of an excitor and identifies some of the sources of these limitations.     

Automatic and controlled processes in the first- and second-language reading of fluent bilinguals

Many fluent bilinguals read their two languages with equal levels of comprehension but read their second language at a slower rate. The present study examined whether, compared with first language reading, slower second-language reading is associated with reduced involvement of automatic processing during lexical access. Subjects were bilinguals with fluent speaking and listening skills under ordinary conditions of communication and with equivalent comprehension of their first and second languages when reading and listening under speeded conditions. Half these subjects, however, read their first and second languages equally fast, and half read the second language more slowly than the first. Subjects were tested on a lexical decision task that manipulated expectations about the semantic relatedness of prime and target words and the stimulus onset asynchrony between them. Bilinguals with equal first- and second-language reading rates produced in each language a pattern of reaction times suggesting automatic processing, whereas bilinguals with a slower second-language reading rate did so in their first language but not in their second.     

A tactile suffix effect

Evidence for a representational tactile memory was obtained from a tactile analogue of the auditory suffix effect. In two experiments, a short sequence of tactile stimuli applied to the fingers was followed by an acoustic (control) or tactile (suffix) recall signal. The serial position curves for the two conditions were compared. They revealed similar and strong primacy effects, but recall of the last few stimuli was higher in the control condition. This terminal control advantage was attributed to the retention of raw tactile information.     

Disbelief,lies, and manipulations in a transactional discourse model

Disbelief, lies, and manipulations have been objects of scholarly consideration from widely different perspectives: historical, sociological, philosophical, ethical, logical, and pragmatic. In this paper, these notions are re-examined in the framework of a Transactional Discourse Model which operates in terms of the location and relocation of various knowledge items within two sets of knowledge, A and B, representing two interlocators A and B, and two of their subsets C_a and C_b, which constitute the sets of the matters of A's and B's current concern. This approach reveals certain formal features shared by lies, disbelief, and manipulations that indicate that these three types of discourse behavior constitute a deviation from successful interpersonal communication as defined in the proposed model. The model, moreover, enables us to explicitly capture both the similarities and the differences of lies and manipulations with other pragmatic phenomena, such as jokes, impersonating, role-acting, memory failure, politeness expressions, and tact; the comparison suggests that certain modifications of Gricean conversational maxims may be in order.     

Echoic memory and voice quality: Recency recall is not enhanced by varying presentation voice

Three experiments explored the effects on immediate recall of varying voice of presentation. Experiment 1 showed that the free-recall recency effect was not enhanced by presenting list words alternately in a male and a female voice. Experiment 2 replicated this result and also showed that recall of a given recency item from such a list was no more probable when the subjects were informed immediately following presentation that they need not recall the words presented in the other voice. Experiment 3 replicated previous findings of a reduction in the “suffix effect” when presentation voice is changed for the suffix item. The relation of this result to those of Experiments 1 and 2 is discussed.     

Recency-to-primacy shift in cue competition

Three experiments were conducted using a lick-suppression preparation with rats to determine whether temporal and physical context shifts modulate the effectiveness of 2 sequentially trained blocking stimuli. Experiment 1 ascertained that it is possible to obtain blocking by conditioning rats to react to a target cue using 2 different blocking cues, each trained with a single-phase blocking paradigm. Experiment 2 showed that the more recently trained blocking stimulus was more effective (i.e., showed a recency effect) when testing was conducted immediately after training, but a long retention interval attenuated blocking by the most recently trained blocking stimulus and increased blocking by the initially trained blocking stimulus (i.e., a recency-to-primacy shift). This shift from recency to primacy affected in Experiment 2 by varying the retention interval was replicated in Experiment 3 by changing the physical context between training and testing. Taken together, the results indicate that the effectiveness of sequentially trained competing stimuli follows the same recency-to-primacy shift rule that is seen in traditional interference phenomena.