Adult age differences in the effects of sentence context and stimulus degradation during visual word recognition

I investigated adult age differences in the efficiency of feature-extraction processes during visual word recognition. Participants were 24 young adults (M age = 21.0 years) and 24 older adults (M age = 66.5 years). On each trial, subjects made a word/nonword discrimination (i.e., lexical decision) regarding a target letter-string that was presented as the final item of a sentence context. The target was presented either intact or degraded visually (by the presence of asterisks between adjacent letters). Age differences in lexical decisions speed were greater for degraded targets than for intact targets, suggesting an age-related slowing in the extraction of feature-level information. For degraded word targets, however, the amount of performance benefit provided by the sentence context was greater for older adults than for young adults. It thus appears that an age-related deficiency at an early stage of word recognition is accompanied by an increased contribution from semantic context.     

Remarriage as a coping response for widowhood

Consideration and use of remarriage as a response to cope with the death of a husband was examined in 39 women who had been widowed and had subsequently remarried, 192 widows who had considered remarriage but had not yet remarried, and 420 widows who had not considered remarriage. Controlling for age, we found that women who had remarried reported fewer current concerns than did the other two groups. Furthermore, we found that women who retrospectively recalled the most concerns immediately after the death of the spouse were the ones who eventually remarried. The remarried group believed that they were experiencing significantly fewer concerns now than they had after the spouse's death; the women who had not considered remarriage believed that they were experiencing the same number of concerns now as before; and those women who had considered remarriage believed that they were experiencing significantly more concerns. Implications for remarriage as a coping mechanism for widowhood and the relation of age to remarriage decisions are discussed.     

Personal Versus Vocational Focus in Career Counseling: A Retrospective Outcome Study

In this archival study the authors sought to determine the relationship, if any, between counseling outcomes and the topical focus in career counseling. Twenty-two counselors saw 46 adult clients at a community-based clinic for an average of eight sessions. Counseling outcome and topical focus (the extent to which the actual content of counseling sessions reflected relatively more vocationally or personally focused topics) were assessed from follow-up questionnaires to former career clients and from trained raters' evaluations of the counselors' written progress notes. Results showed that, from the counselors' perspective, outcomes were better when the focus of the sessions was relatively more vocational than personal and when relatively more interviews were held. Client satisfaction, on the other hand, was predictable only from the counselor's level of experience. Satisfaction with occupational status was not associated with any of the client, counselor, or treatment factors. Discussion focuses on the contribution of the results to career counseling practice and on the feasibility and validity of retrospective, archival research.     

Menopause: Salient Issues for Counselors

Counselors are in ideal positions to help change attitudes toward viewing menopause as a time of positive change, rather than a time of psychological distress. Following definitions and a review of historical, sociological, psychological, and attitudinal factors that account for negative responses associated with menopause, recommendations for counselor interventions are proposed.     

A Gender Role Workshop Focused on Sexism,Gender Role Conflict,and the Gender Role Journey

A 6-day gender role workshop for adult men and women, using the phases of the gender role journey, is presented. The workshop's curriculum and process are described, including its assumptions, norms, and media. Movie clips, music, music videos, and academic content were used to promote participants' learning in both the cognitive and affective domains. Systematic follow-up evaluations of participants ( N =84) in three separate workshops are reported using Likert scaled questions. These evaluations assessed participants' personal learning, emotional reactions, and the workshop's overall impact over l-month and 1-and 2-year follow-up periods. Results indicate that participants were affected personally and professionally over the various time periods.     

Mass media treatment of violence in sports and its effects

There appears to be a strong relationship between mass media portrayals of violence and real-life violence itself. This article reviews the available literature on the effects of media treatment of sports violence; analyzes the theoretical explanations for this treatment; and makes proposals on how the problems of both sports violence and its media coverage may be remedied, with a particular focus on amateur hockey in Canada.     

Predicting diagnosis performance with measures of cognitive style

This study examines the relationship between performance on a context-independent fault diagnosis task and two dimensions of cognitive style: field dependence/independence (D-I) and focusing/scanning (F-S). The effects on diagnosis performance of training and the ability of both dimensions of style jointly to predict fault-finding ability were considered. The results showed that field independents and focusers were superior fault diagnosticians. Training, in the form of verbal feedback messages, was uniformly effective for the D-I dimension although field independents maintained a superior level of performance, over field dependents. In general, for the F-S dimension, training had little effect on either the focusers or scanners. A combination of scores on the F-S and D-I dimensions significantly enhanced the proportion of the variance in testing efficiency that could be accounted for during fault-finding. Finally it is argued that the F-S and D-I dimensions should be recognized as measures of ability, not style. Future research should be directed at identifying between subject differences on fault diagnosis tasks with reference to theories of information processing.     

Daily stress and anxiety and their relation to daily fluctuations of symptoms in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients

Although stress and anxiety have long been assumed to play an exacerbatory role in asthma, no study has systematically documented that daily exacerbations of asthma symptoms are related to stress and/or anxiety. In this study, 24 airways obstruction patients (12 asthmatics and 12 chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients) were instructed to monitor the severity of daily respiratory symptoms. In addition, subjects recorded their daily anxiety level and the number and perceived impact of daily stressors. The results showed that although there were differences between high- and low-stress days for both groups, there were no differences between groups on symptom severity or between high- and low-anxiety days, as measured by the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Thus, although the number and impact of daily stressors were found to be directly associated with the severity of asthma symptoms, anxiety does not appear to have a direct role in the exacerbation of asthma. The findings failed to support the anxiety theory of asthma but provided an explanation for the poor results obtained in previous treatment studies which employed anxiety management with asthmatics.     

Central clinical states: An examination of the Profile of Mood States and the Eight State Questionnaire

Two multidimensional mood-state inventories, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) and the Eight State Questionnaire (8SQ), were administered to 289 Australian college undergraduates. Intercorrelations for the combined 14 subscales were subjected to a higher-order factor analysis in order to elucidate the central clinical states within the mood-state sphere. Results suggested four major state dimensions pertaining to Neuroticism, Hostility/Anger, Vigor, and a combined Extroversion/Arousal-Fatigue entity. Both three- and five-factor solutions were taken out for comparative purposes. Furthermore, separate higher-order factorings of the POMS on normative samples of 350 male and 650 female psychiatric outpatients were conducted, corroborating three of the four central state dimensions, at least in the case of females. The implications of these findings for behavioral assessment are discussed.This study was supported by a Research Development Grant awarded to the author by the University of Melbourne.