Publishing Action Research in Counseling Journals

The increased use of action research in counseling training and professional publications provides an opportunity to bridge the research‐practitioner gap that has plagued the profession for decades. In this article, action research is defined, and special considerations that counselor researchers need to address when designing, conducting, and reporting action research are presented. Suggestions are included throughout the article to assist counseling action researchers in publishing their studies in American Counseling Association journals.     

Ability,relevant possibilities,and the fixity of the past

Philosophical Studies - In several writings, John Martin Fischer has argued that those who deny a principle about abilities that he calls ‘the Fixity of the Past’ are committed to...     

Can emotions be truly group level? Evidence regarding four conceptual criteria

Recent advances in understanding prejudice and intergroup behavior have made clear that emotions help explain people's reactions to social groups and their members. Intergroup emotions theory (D. M. Mackie, T. Devos, & E. R. Smith, 2000; E. R. Smith, 1993) holds that intergroup emotions are experienced by individuals when they identify with a social group, making the group part of the psychological self. What differentiates such group-level emotions from emotions that occur purely at the individual level? The authors argue that 4 key criteria define group-level emotions: Group emotions are distinct from the same person's individual-level emotions, depend on the person's degree of group identification, are socially shared within a group, and contribute to regulating intragroup and intergroup attitudes and behavior. Evidence from 2 studies supports all 4 of these predictions and thus points to the meaningfulness, coherence, and functionality of group-level emotions.     

Familiarity impacts person perception

We investigated the effects of familiarity on person perception. We predicted that familiarity would increase non‐analytic processing, reducing attention to and the impact of individuating information, and increasing the impact of category labels on judgments about a target person. In two studies participants read either incriminating or exculpatory individuating information about a defendant in a criminal case and made judgments of guilt. In Study 1, participants were subliminally exposed to the defendant's photo, another matched photo, or no photo before seeing the evidence. Participants familiar with the defendant's photo both processed and used the individuating information less. In Study 2, participants were subtly made familiar or not with the incriminating and exculpatory information itself, and the defendant was described either as a priest or as a skinhead. Familiarity with the information reduced attention to its content and also tended to increase reliance on category information in guilt judgments. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Dissociation between Symbolic Number Knowledge and Analogue Magnitude Information

Semantic understanding of numbers and related concepts can be dissociated from rote knowledge of arithmetic facts. However, distinctions among different kinds of semantic representations related to numbers have not been fully explored. Working with numbers and arithmetic requires representing semantic information that is both analogue (e.g., the approximate magnitude of a number) and symbolic (e.g., what / means). In this article, the authors describe a patient (MC) who exhibits a dissociation between tasks that require symbolic number knowledge (e.g., knowledge of arithmetic symbols including numbers, knowledge of concepts related to numbers such as rounding) and tasks that require an analogue magnitude representation (e.g., comparing size or frequency). MC is impaired on a variety of tasks that require symbolic number knowledge, but her ability to represent and process analogue magnitude information is intact. Her deficit in symbolic number knowledge extends to a variety of concepts related to numbers (e.g., decimal points, Roman numerals, what a quartet is) but not to any other semantic categories that we have tested. These findings suggest that symbolic number knowledge is a functionally independent component of the number processing system, that it is category specific, and that it is anatomically and functionally distinct from magnitude representations.     

Overcoming Self-Negation in Women

The significant overrepresentation of women in depression and a seeming addiction to self-downing are viewed as heavily influenced by internalized gender role messages and further compounded by societal discrimination. The healthy self is defined, and ways of helping women in therapy move toward greater self-acceptance are described, with an emphasis on REBT women's groups. A case study illustrates the process.     

Facial expressions and interpretation of emotion-arousing situations in deaf and hearing children

Deaf and hearing children were given two tasks: (a) sorting faces portraying nine emotions and (b) matching those faces with drawings of appropriate emotion-arousing situations. The deaf children performed as the hearing children did on the first task but did not match the faces to the situations as well as the hearing children. It appeared that the deaf children were unable to analyze and interpret emotion-arousing events adequately. Possible reasons for this finding are presented and discussed in detail.This research was supported, in part, by Social Rehabilitation Services Grant No. RD-2552.The authors are indebted to Dr. Lloyd Graunke, Delmas Young, and Warren Flower of the Tennessee School for the Deaf, Elizabeth Stallings of the Monroe Harding Children's Home, Rev. Lucius Hart and Rev. Hudlow of the Baptist Children's Home, Dr. Lloyd Funchess and Jerome Freeman of the Louisiana State School for the Deaf, W. W. Wallace, Milton Lillard, and Wilburn Kelley of the Williamson County Tennessee School System, and Charles Barham of Tennessee Preparatory School.