Team building and the problem of regression: the personal management interview as an intervention

This article describes the characteristics of a Personal Management Interview (PMI) and reports the results of its implementation in 16 different organizational contexts. Based upon Group Behavior Inventory and personal interview data collected from 208 participants (135 experimental and 71 comparison group members), the results show that the implementation of regular PMIs can prevent the regression or fade-out which often occurs after off-site team-building sessions.     

Personality and aging: a study of the MMPI-2 among older men

We examined whether separate norms for older men are necessary for the revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2). Scores from 1,459 men in the Normative Aging Study (NAS) (age: M = 61.27, SD = 8.37) were contrasted with those from 1,138 men from the MMPI Restandardization Study (age: M = 41.71, SD = 15.32). Results showed that scores on the MMPI-2 validity, clinical, and content scales for the NAS men were highly similar to those from the MMPI-2 Restandardization sample. There were also few differences between the two groups at the item level. Within-sample analyses revealed some differences between age groups. However, the magnitudes of these differences were small and may represent the single or combined effects of cohort factors and age-related changes in physical health status rather than age-related changes in psychopathology per se. We concluded that special, age-related norms for the MMPI-2 are not needed for older men.     

Maintenance of fluency: A review

Three purposes for writing this paper are: to review specific work done on the maintenance of fluency in the post-treatment environment, to abstract and discuss pertinent issues in maintenance, and to present several speculative positions which might account for the relapse phenomenon and stimulate further research.     

Predictors of depression in caregivers of dementia patients: boundary ambiguity and mastery

This study examined the role of two perceptual variables in predicting the development of depressive symptoms in caregivers. The first, boundary ambiguity, refers to whether the dementia patient is perceived as psychologically in or out of the family system. The second, an orientation toward mastery, is related to how persons manage various stressful situations, including caring for a dementia patient. This study included 70 patients and their caregivers. Stepwise regression and path analytic techniques were used to compare the impact of variables related to the illness per se and of variables related to caregivers' perceptions of their situations. Results indicate that both perceptual variables, boundary ambiguity, and mastery, are significantly related to a caregivers' depression level whereas severity of the patient's dementia is not. In sum, the more a caregiver perceives a mate as psychologically absent, the less masterful and the more depressed she or he is.     

Naming and categorization in young children: III. Vocal tact training and transfer of function

Following pretraining with everyday objects, 10 children aged from 1 to 4 years were given common vocal tact training with a set of three pairs of arbitrary stimuli of differing shapes; Set 1. Nine children learned to tact one stimulus as "zog" and the other as "vek" in each pair, and all passed subsequent pairwise tests for the corresponding listener behavior to each listener stimulus (i.e., /zog/ and /vek/, respectively). The children were next trained to clap to one stimulus of Pair 1 and wave to the other, and all then showed name-consistent transfer of these behaviors to the stimuli of Pair 2 and Pair 3. Seven children also were given a test of listener responding to experimenter-modeled clap and wave gestures, respectively, which they all passed. Four of the children next participated in a category match-to-sample test for the Set 1 stimuli; all 4 passed. For each pair of two additional six-stimuli sets, Set 2 and Set 3, 3 children were trained to wave to one stimulus and to clap to the other. For each set, all 3 children showed perfect transfer of the vocal tacts trained to Set 1, and of listener behavior both to the auditory stimuli /zog/ and /vek/ and to experimenter-modeled clap and wave gestures. They also sorted the stimuli perfectly in category match-to-sample tests for Set 2, Sets 1 and 2 combined, Set 3, and Sets 1, 2, and 3 combined. The results show that even in very young children, naming is a powerful means of generating new category relations among as many as 18 arbitrary stimuli.     

The relationship between masculine gender role stress and psychological adjustment: A question of construct validity?

Masculine gender role stress is a theoretical construct that describes the stress created in men when they feel they are not meeting society's expectations for masculinity, or when the situation forces men to act in feminine-typed ways. The stress produced by these feelings or actions are thought to be related to negative psychological outcomes for men, but should be unrelated to well-being for women. The present study investigated the validity of the masculine gender role stress construct, especially with regard to the assumption that masculine gender role stress is related to negative psychological outcomes for men more than for women. Participants were a group of mostly Caucasian undergraduates. Results indicated that masculine gender role stress was related to depression, hostility, and anxiety, but to the same degree for both men and women. These findings suggest that, if MGRS is a valid construct, then researchers need to explore other ways in which this type of stress can negatively affect men, but not women.     

New directions for family therapy: rubbish removal as a task of choice

Family therapy may be accompanied by laughter and wit as well as serious labour. Family life has a great deal to laugh about, and family therapists, if they take families seriously, need to be able to laugh and joke with them.     

Rapid word learning in 13- and 17-month-olds in a naturalistic two-word procedure: looking versus reaching measures

This study investigated infants’ rapid learning of two novel words using a preferential looking measure compared with a preferential reaching measure. In Experiment 1, 21 13-month-olds and 20 17-month-olds were given 12 novel label exposures (6 per trial) for each of two novel objects. Next, in the label comprehension tests, infants were shown both objects and were asked, “Where’s the [label]?” (looking preference) and then told, “Put the [label] in the basket” (reaching preference). Only the 13-month-olds showed rapid word learning on the looking measure; neither age group showed rapid word learning on the reaching measure. In Experiment 2, the procedure was repeated 24 h later with 10 participants per age group from Experiment 1. After a further 12 labels per object, both age groups now showed robust evidence of rapid word learning, but again only on the looking measure. This is the earliest looking-based evidence of rapid word learning in infants in a well-controlled (i.e., two-word) procedure; our failure to replicate previous reports of rapid word learning in 13-month-olds with a preferential reaching measure may be due to our use of more rigorous controls for object preferences. The superior performance of the younger infants on the looking measure in Experiment 1 was not straightforwardly predicted by existing theoretical accounts of word learning.