Behavioral and Attitudinal Correlates of Masculinity: A National Survey of Male Counselors

In this study the authors investigated the relationship between the Male Role Norm Scales (MRNS; Thompson & Pleck, 1987) and gender-related attitudes and behaviors in a sample of 367 male counselors drawn from American Counseling Association (ACA), formerly the American Association for Counseling and Development (AACD), members. Results indicated that this group of men did not, in general, endorse traditional male roles as measured by the MRNS. When a degree of affiliation with these roles was found, however, it was predictive of violence proneness, intimacy style, and degree of perceived similarity to father. Implications for training and counseling are discussed.     

Track-draw: A graphical interface for controlling the parameters of a speech synthesizer

In this report we describe a graphical interface for generating voiced speech using a frequency-domain implementation of the Klatt (1980) cascade formant synthesizer. The input to the synthesizer is a set of parameter vectors, calledtracks, which specify the overall amplitude, fundamental frequency, formant frequencies, and formant bandwidths at specified time intervals. Tracks are drawn with the aid of a computer mouse that can be used either inpoint-draw mode, which selects a parameter value for a single time frame, or inline-draw mode, which uses piecewise linear interpolation to connect two user-selected endpoints. Three versions of the program are described: (1) SYNTH draws tracks on an empty time-frequency grid, (2) SPECSYNTH creates a spectrogram of a recorded signal upon which tracks can be superimposed, and (3) SWSYNTH is similar to SPECSYNTH, except that it generatessine-wave speech (Remez, Rubin, Pisoni, & Carrell, 1981) using a set of time-varying sinusoids rather than cascaded formants. The program is written for MATLAB, an interactive computing environment for matrix computation. Track-Draw provides a useful tool for investigating the perceptually salient properties of voiced speech and other sounds.     

The mechanics of reinforcement

Mathematical principles of reinforcement were developed in order to (1) account for the interaction of target responding and other behavior; (2) provide a simple graphical representation; (3) deal with measurement artifacts; and (4) permit a coherent transition from a statics to a dynamics of behavior. Rats and pigeons were trained to make a target response while general activity was measured with a stabilimeter. The course of behavioral change was represented as a trajectory through a two-dimensional behavior space. The trajectories rotated toward or away from the target dimension as the coupling between the target response and the incentive was varied. Higher rates of reinforcement expanded the trajectories; satiation and extinction contracted them. Concavity in some trajectories provided data for a dynamic generalization of the model.     

‘Give Me a Reason to Live!’ Examining Reasons for Living Across Levels of Suicidality

Scholarly research focusing on social psychological factors (e.g. mental health) and social environmental factors (e.g. childhood trauma) has found these measures to be correlated with suicidality. However, such literature has tended to overlook what may impact one’s reasons for living. Using a sample of over 1,200 students from a Canadian university, the goal of the current study is to empirically test, by employing multivariate nested regression models (by levels of suicidal behaviour), known and relative unknown correlates with reasons for living, with a particular focus on strength of religious faith, which is a well-known predictor for suicidality, but less studied as a reason for living. Results show that, among students with serious suicidal ideation and/or a previous suicide attempt, the strongest predictor for student’s reasons for living was strength of religious faith. Strength of religious faith has seldom been acknowledged or identified as an important measure in assessing one’s reasons to live. These findings have implications for the role of religiosity among suicidality research, especially studies that focus on reasons for living.