HIV counselling in the national blood transfusion service

The problems caused for the NBTS by the advent of HIV are reviewed, with particular reference to the impact on blood donor numbers, the strategies adopted to minimise the risk of HIV infection through blood transfusion, and the counselling dilemmas faced by the Service in the setting of the blood donor clinic. The notification procedure for blood donors found anti-HIV positive is described, with the importance of confirmation of such results before approach to the donor emphasised. Counselling issues arising from indeterminate and false positive lest results are explored and those arising from enquiries generated by cases of possible post-transfusion HIV infection are examined.     

The role of situational involvement in consumers' attitude polarization

This investigation examines the effect of consumers' situational involvement on attitude polarization. The level of involvement of subjects with well-developed restaurant schemas was manipulated, and evaluations of a group of restaurants were obtained on three different occasions under conditions favorable to attitude polarization. Contrary to expectations, the evaluations exhibited no tendency toward greater extremity, even when situational involvement was high. Although inconsistent with some previous findings about attitude polarization, the results are explained in terms of schema complexity and structure. Managerial implications are discussed.     

Conversational skills for autistic adolescents: An autistic peer as prompter

In this study, an autistic youth served as peer prompter for three other autistic adolescents. The peer prompter encouraged the other boys to talk about sports, a topic frequently discussed by typical teenagers. A multiple-baseline design across participants was used to assess the effectiveness of the peer-prompting procedure. During baseline, the youth rarely talked about sports, although all three had previously completed a sports-appreciation class and had displayed large pre-to-post gains on a paper-and-pencil test. During intervention, when a peer prompted sports discussions, all three youth engaged in much more sports-related conversation. Generalization measures indicated that: (1) the youth engaged in sports discussions in groups, as well as in the dyads that characterized the training situation; (2) they talked about sports in a setting other than the training setting; (3) they discussed sports with their peers when an unfamiliar teacher was present; and (4) they continued to discuss sports when training tapes and behavioral contracts between the teacher and the peer prompter were withdrawn. Previously, it has been common to use nonhandicapped or less-handicapped peers as tutors; this study demonstrates that an autistic youth may also effectively serve as a prompter who assists his schoolmates in acquiring conversational skills that contribute to their normalization.     

The role of visual information in the processing of

Visual information provided by a talker’s mouth movements can influence the perception of certain speech features. Thus, the “McGurk effect” shows that when the syllable /bi/ is presented audibly, in synchrony with the syllable /gi/, as it is presented visually, a person perceives the talker as saying /di/. Moreover, studies have shown that interactions occur between place and voicing features in phonetic perception, when information is presented audibly. In our first experiment, we asked whether feature interactions occur when place information is specified by a combination of auditory and visual information. Members of an auditory continuum ranging from /ibi/ to /ipi/ were paired with a video display of a talker saying /igi/. The auditory tokens were heard as ranging from /ibi/ to /ipi/, but the auditory-visual tokens were perceived as ranging from /idi/ to /iti/. The results demonstrated that the voicing boundary for the auditory-visual tokens was located at a significantly longer VOT value than the voicing boundary for the auditory continuum presented without the visual information. These results demonstrate that place-voice interactions are not limited to situations in which place information is specified audibly. In three follow-up experiments, we show that (1) the voicing boundary is not shifted in the absence of a change in the global percept, even when discrepant auditory-visual information is presented; (2) the number of response alternatives provided for the subjects does not affect the categorization or the VOT boundary of the auditory-visual stimuli; and (3) the original effect of a VOT boundary shift is not replicated when subjects are forced by instruction to \ldrelabel\rd the /b-p/auditory stimuli as/d/or/t/. The subjects successfully relabeled the stimuli, but no shift in the VOT boundary was observed.     

Woman and athlete: Toward role consistency

The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes of a general population toward female participation in sports and to replicate a previous study. The two areas investigated were (1) the perception of enhancement or detraction of femininity by girls' participation in athletics, and (2) whether different sports elicited different attitudes towards female participation in athletics. A town in Iowa was sampled. The results indicated that, in general, participation in sports neither detracted from nor enhanced femininity. Furthermore, most of the people wanted their daughters to play basketball, even though it neither detracted from nor enhanced femininity. The data suggest that traditional, rigid sex-role stereotypes were transcended and the opportunity set was dominant.This study was partially funded by a grant from the University of Iowa Graduate School. Appreciation is expressed to Dr. Eldon Snyder for graciously sharing his instrument and recent work.     

Causal internalization of academic performance as a function of self-esteem and performance satisfaction

In the present investigation, we integrated self-theories (specifically, theories of cognitive consistency and self-esteem) with attribution theory. Our intent was to clarify the effects of different levels of self-esteem and performance satisfaction on causal internalization of academic performance. Subjects were 162 university students who attributed causality for their individual performances on a midterm examination. Attributions to four internal and four external causal sources were analyzed with a 2 × 2 (Self-Concept × Performance Satisfaction) MANOVA and with follow-up univariate F ratios. Most of the findings support the predictions based on self-esteem theory; i.e., satisfaction with performance, rather than consistency of performance with self-esteem, served as the primary influence on internalization of causality, with students internalizing satisfying outcomes more than dissatisfying outcomes. Cognitive-consistency theory and B. Weiner's (1979, Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 3–25) attribution proposal regarding maintenance of a stable self-concept also received support, as attributions to the internal and stable causal sources of ability and general effort were a function of an interaction of self-esteem and performance satisfaction. Hence, neither self-theory adequately anticipated the effects of self-esteem and performance satisfaction on causal internalization. Rather, a consolidation of theories is needed to explain the results.     

Sex roles and depression: A preliminary investigation of the direction of causality

The present study examined the direction of the relation between sex role self-concept and depression. A total of 23 males and 32 females were given the Personal Attributes Questionnaire and the Beck Depression Inventory at two times separated by a 3-month interval. Results of a cross-lagged panel correlational analysis found no evidence for sex role orientation as a cause of depression. Instead, the data suggested that emotional well being precedes self-perceived instrumentality, but the influence of third variables could not be overlooked. The implications of these data are discussed with particular reference to the need for more complex theoretical formulations of the relation between self-perceived instrumentality and adjustment.     

Learning to argue with parents and peers

The infant's first natural response when faced with opposition or when he opposes others' actions is to cry. As this kind of behavior becomes ineffective, the responses of the individuals with which he interacts force him to adopt more conventional — especially verbal — patterns of arguing, leading him to rational argumentation. The purpose of the present paper is to observe progressions in children's earliest verbal arguments and to see how and when they learn to adjust their strategies for different kinds of opponents (peers; parents; other adults). In order to examine the emergence of such persuasive strategies, and their distribution according to the different categories of opponents, systematic audiotape recordings of two Spanish-speaking girls between 2 and 3 years were analyzed. The data suggest that, although there were some differences in how the girls argued with parents versus peers, they were only beginning to adjust their speech to make it appropriate for one or the other type of listener. In general, they resorted to one dominant strategy for all listeners (insist, repeat, cry, scream, ...). Each girl, however, developed a small number of less frequently used strategies that she reserved for a subcategory of opponents. For example, one of them, Nancy, only threatened and insulted peers, while the other, Marisa, only used please and a temporizing strategy with parents. The girls used less adaptive, more agressive strategies (e.g. threats and insults) with their peers. With one exception, all of the girls' moves were self-centered. In fact, the girls had not yet reached the stage of rational argumentation.