The role of intuition in family research: Three issues of ethics

The thesis of this chapter is that, unless one has had brain-surgery, a stroke, or has some organic deficiency, we are all whole-brained people, therapists and researchers alike. To elaborate on this point, this article is focused on the role of intuition in family research. Ethical issues in family research are viewed as similar to those in symbolic experiential family therapy. Three ethical issues, counter-transference, mutual benefit, and discovery, are discussed.Appreciation is expressed to the University of Minnesota Agriculture Experiment Station for their support of this work.     

Determinants of seeking timely and necessary pediatric care

Ninety mothers were interviewed in a pediatrician’s waiting room about their reasons for seeking care. We compared their answers, and the pediatrician’s judgment of the visit’s necessity and timeliness to a model which distinguishes appraisal, illness, and utilization stages in seeking medical treatment. Clearly defined symptoms and the use of few home treatments predicted a more rapid assessment that one’s child was ill. No factors predicted how quickly a mother would decide that her child needed professional care, nor how rapidly she would then seek that care. The pediatrician judged visits to be necessary when the child had many physical symptoms, pain, and/or fever, and when the child’s mother was employed. He judged visits to be delayed for mothers who reported that cost of treatment may influence their decisions to seek care. He indicated that only 39% of the visits were both necessary and on time. We discuss ways to encourage appropriate utilization of pediatric visits.     

Cues-pause-point language training: Structuring trainer statements to provide students with correct answers to questions

This study assessed the applicability of Cues-Pause-Point language training procedures in teaching students to obtain information from the statements of others. Two mentally retarded subjects, one of whom was echolalic, received training on one set of stimuli but not on another. During training the subjects were encouraged to remain quiet before, during, and briefly after the presentation of statements and then verbalize (i.e., answer a question) using the verbal cue(s) that had been presented in the statement. Correct responding reached 100% to the trained stimuli and both subjects' responding improved to the untrained stimuli. Posttests revealed that subjects used the trainer's statements to answer novel questions. The results suggest that Cues-Pause-Point procedures may be useful in teaching severely retarded individuals the functional use of observing and listening to others' verbal behavior.     

Heteronyms and polyphones: Categories of words with multiple phonemic representations

Heteronyms are words that have two different possible pronunciations that are associated with two (or more) different meanings. They can be used to investigate psychological mechanisms in reading and other cognitive processes. A corpus of English heteronyms has been collected and is tabulated here. In addition, a corpus of English polyphones is tabulated. These are words with different pronunciations that are not associated with different meanings.     

Assessing compliance to home relaxation: A simple technology for a critical problem

A simple, low-cost, and reliable technology for assessing compliance with relaxation practice in the natural environment is presented. Brief, audible cue tones are overdubbed onto selected client relaxation tapes, which are ordered by the therapist and then played in sequence by the client. The presence/absence or number of cue tones on each tape in the sequence is self-monitored, thereby providing the therapist with a record for objectively assessing whether or not the tapes were used as instructed. A clinical case example is presented to illustrate use of the procedure. Finally, advantages and limitations of the procedure are discussed.A portion of this paper (clinical case study) was presented at the meeting of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, November 1980, New York. This research was partly supported by the Medical Research Service of the Veterans Administration. The authors wish to express their appreciation to Leonard H. Epstein for his support and stimulation in the early development of this and related projects.     

Fully automated psychiatric diagnosis: Some new possibilities

A fully automated psychiatric diagnostic system is outlined that would rely on picture-preference items rather than verbal ones and that would involve a tailored approach rather than conventional “brute-strength” testing. The conditions under which such a system can diagnose patients in a way that might arouse their interest and cooperation are discussed. These include a set of diagnostic categories (perhaps a subset from DSM-III), availability of a single-frame video disk unit allowing random access to each frame, a microprocessor system with a memory capacity of about 32,000 bytes, known base rates of the population of interest, and known probabilities of a particular response to the items for each diagnostic category. Some futuristic extensions of the proposed system are suggested.     

Self-focused attention and belief perseverance

The perseverance of an erroneous belief was investigated in the debriefing paradigm as a function of self-focused attention. Subjects were given either success or failure experiences via bogus performance feedback and received this feedback under high or low mirror self-focusing. All subjects were subsequently debriefed about the false nature of the feedback, and then, before answering questions about their estimated actual performance and ability, mirror self-focus was again manipulated. The results showed that self-focus prior to debriefing increased belief perseverance while self-focus after debriefing reduced the perseverance effects. Discussion of these findings emphasized the role of self-focus in information processing before and adherence to veridical standards after debriefing.     

Vocal changes in stutterers and nonstutterers during monotoned speech

For years, reports have circulated that stutterers experience marked decrements in their stuttering when they speak or read in monotone. Wingate has suggested that the ameliorative effects of various novel speaking conditions on stuttering can be attributed to modifications in vocalization induced by such conditions. The present study was conducted to see whether this explanation would extend to monotoned speech as well. Ten teenage and adult stutterers and 10 normal speakers were tested in control and monotone reading conditions. Dependent measures were the frequencies of disfluency and stuttering, fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency standard deviation, vocal SPL, vocal SPL standard deviation, and fluent reading rate. Only within-group statistical comparisons were made, because members of the two groups could not be matched pairwise along critical vocal parameters. The major findings of this study indicated that across the two conditions, both groups significantly reduced their fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency standard deviation, vocal SPL and vocal SPL standard deviation. Only the stutterers exhibited a significant decrement in disfluency and stuttering. The normals did not evince enough disfluency in the control condition for a reduction to occur during monotoning. Neither group effected a reduction in fluent reading rates. These and other findings and interpretations are discussed relative to Wingate's modified vocalization hypothesis.