African-American Women and the Male-Female Relationship Dilemma: A Counseling Perspective

This article focuses on the historical origin of the African-American male-female relationship dilemma and contemporary forces that have an impact on opportunities for intimacy and marriage among African-American women. Specifically, loss, communication, and stereotypes are examined as counseling issues that are relevant to African-American women in relationships. Implications for counseling and research are also discussed.     

The earth summit and the promotion of environmentally sound industrial innovation in developing countries

With the end of the cold war, issues of environment and economic development are assuming greater international salience. By the 1970s, environmental degradation was becoming pervasive, with growing global effects. Increasingly, global and emergent globalized problems are forcing environmental interdependence on the world. Transboundary threats cannot be addressed unilaterally by any single country or group of countries. The global environmental agenda is reviving the North-South debate and rejuvenating the Third World coalition in international fora. The encouragement of environmentally sustainable forms of industrialization in the South requires expanded and improved international cooperation. However, the North’s greater resources and greater responsibility in causing global environmental degradation require its continuing involvement in the search for solutions, including ones applicable to newly industrializing countries. In June 1992, the largest intergovernmental conference ever held was convened in Rio de Janeiro to address these issues: the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, or the Earth Summit). It produced a consensus action plan of about 700 pages: Agenda 21. Agenda 21 presents massive challenges for international cooperation as well as for national and private actors and scientific and technical institutions. It reflects a complex configuration of demands for institutional arrangements that support environmentally sustainable technical and socioeconomic change. One of the most consistent of the Agenda 21 themes, and one of the most intractable issues, concerns “access to technology.” This can be as straightforward as diagnosing and improving the efficiency of a production process in a small manufacturing firm, or as complex as engineering a technological revolution in which production and consumption take place with virtually no material or energy loss to the environment. The selection of entry points for action is a critical strategic problem as well as an important operational issue. In this paper I identify and describe new initiatives intended to improve the environmental performance of industry in the South, and find that they largely aim to promote incremental industrial innovation through international technology transfer and diffusion. This strategy raises many questions about how to promote effective technology transfer and diffusion. This is a revised version of a paper prepared for the ORSTOM/UNESCO Conference “20th Century Science: Beyond the Metropolis,” Paris, 19–23 Sept. 1994.     

RESOLUTION OF LEXICAL AMBIGUITY BY EMOTIONAL STATE

Abstract— The role of emotion in the resolution of lexical ambiguity was investigated. Happy and sad subjects listened to a list of words that included homophones that had happy and neutral meanings (eg., presents-presence ) and homophones that had sad and neutral meanings (eg., mourning-morning ). Words were presented every 3 s, and subjects wrote down the words, as they heard them (Meaning could be identified by spelling in all cases). An interaction between emotional state and homophone category was observed. Sad subjects were more likely to write down sad meanings than were happy subjects. Results are discussed with reference to the literatures on both emotion and lexical access.     

Embryos created for research purposes.

The creation of embryos for research use has drawn a great deal of criticism. It is difficult to defend an ethical distinction between what one can do to "spare" embryos and what one can do to "research" embryos. The strongest ground on which to argue against the creation of embryos for research is a symbolic one, having to do with respect for human life. Ronald Dworkin's work in Life's Dominion on the symbolic meaning of the abortion debate throws a helpful light on this dispute. By understanding the basic question to be, Does the creation of research embryos weaken or insult our communal respect for the sanctity of human life in some way that in vitro fertilization (IVF) or the experimental use of "spare" embryos does not?, the debate can move in a more constructive direction.     

An historical preface to engineering ethics

This article attempts to distinguish between science and technology, on the one hand, and engineering, on the other, offering a brief introduction to engineering values and engineering ethics. The method is (roughly) a philosophical examination of history. Engineering turns out to be a relatively recent enterprise, barely three hundred years old, to have distinctive commitments both technical and moral, and to have changed a good deal both technically and morally during that period. What motivates the paper is the belief that a too-easy equation of engineering with technology tends to obscure the special contribution of engineers to technology and to their own professional standards and so, to obscure as well both the origin and content of engineering ethics.     

The role of verbal ability in the processing of complex verbal information

Summary This study investigated the relation between psychometric mental-ability test scores and several reaction-time measures; a simple-reaction task, a choice-reaction task, the Posner and Mitchell (1967) letter-identification task, and a variation of the sentence-verification task. Scores on the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Verbal Subtest of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATV) were obtained. The less complex information-processing tasks replicate earlier studies in which general intelligence was only marginally related to reaction-time measures. The sentence-verification task systematically varied task complexity. Several direct and derived measures from the task were significantly correlated with psychometric mentalability measures. However, even though a number of precautions were taken to ensure that the sentence-verification task assessed purely verbal-processing efficiency, there was little evidence for an important task-specific relation between verification measures and verbal ability. Moreover, despite its relative verbal complexity, sentence verification did not reflect a greater relationship to verbal ability than other tasks did. Overall, the information-processing efficiency measures used in this study suggested a fairly general, rather than a task-specific, relationship to intellectual ability.The research presented in this paper was conducted while the first author was affiliated with the University of Georgia, U. S. A.     

Adding elder care to women's multiple roles: A critical review of the caregiver stress and multiple roles literatures

Sex Roles - Research on the effect of multiple roles on women's well-being has focused almost exclusively on the employment and child rearing roles of younger women, and has overlooked the...     

Promotion and employee turnover: Critique,meta-analysis,and implications

Qualitative reviews of the withdrawal literature have reached inconsistent conclusions regarding the strength of the relationship between promotion and turnover. Several issues were addressed in this study which may account for these inconsistencies. First, we differentiate among three distinct operationalizations of promotion: (1) promotion satisfaction; (2) perceptions of promotional opportunity; and (3) actual promotion. We then conduct quantitative reviews using meta-analytic procedures on turnover and the three operationalizations of promotion. We found no significant relationships between promotion satisfaction and turnoveror between perceived promotional opportunities and turnover. However, a significant negative relationship was found between actual promotion and turnover. Theoretical implication of these findings are presented.     

Size scaling and its effect on letter detection

Two ways of scaling letter size across eccentricity were investigated in a choice reaction time (CRT) task. Experiments 1 and 2 tested cortical magnification theory (M-scaling), while Experiment 3 used scaled sizes drawn from Anstis’s regression formula (A-scaling). Experiment 4 compared both scaling techniques, together with the effect of exposure duration and the absolute size of the foveal letter. Results showed that scaling effectiveness improved when large rather than small foveal letters were used. A-scaling with a large foveal letter provided a good fit for the data at parafoveal locations, but underestimated the letter sizes needed at large eccentricities. M-scaling with a large foveal letter size produced CRTs that were independent of eccentricity. Exposure duration did not substantially affect performance.