Assessing the acceptability of staff management procedures to direct care and supervisory staff

Direct care and supervisory staff in five residential training programs for persons with mental retardation in North Dakota rated the acceptability of six staff management procedures. Overall, staff rated “Instructions”, “Instructions and Modeling”, “Feedback and Praise”, and “Instructions, Feedback, and Praise”, as significantly more acceptable than “Self-Management” and “Self-Management, Feedback and Praise”. There was a significant group by treatment interaction in which supervisors and direct care staff had significantly different acceptability rating for four of the six procedures. The results were further analyzed by group and implications and future research are discuessed.     

Multilevel models in developmental psychological research: Rationales and applications

The armoury of statistical techniques has recently been enhanced with the multilevel model for longitudinal data. The present article explains the multilevel model for longitudinal data to the statistically non-sophisticated reader. It shows how the model relates to the five rationales of longitudinal research, as they were put forward by Baltes and Nesselroade (1979). In addition, it shows how the model matches Wohlwill's methodology of developmental functions. To elucidate the model further, three applications are given. The applications pertain to the development of children's sleeping duration during the first 18 months of life, the effects of early hospitalization on the daily frequency of crying, and the developmental relationship between social and solitary play.     

Three-space inference from two-space stimulation

Oblique contours sloping at 30° with respect to the horizontal were presented alone, in combination to form chevrons, or with a vertical line to form arrowhead or Y patterns; they were projected onto a screen in the frontal parallel plane and viewed from positions that gave viewing angles of 90° (normal to the screen’s surface), 53°, or 34°. The perceived orientation of the contours, as assessed by a movable arm that the subjects set to be parallel to the obliques, changed monotonically as a function of viewing angle. The change was as great for single obliques as for combinations of obliques within the chevron, arrowhead, and Y patterns. The results of Experiment 1 were extended in Experiment 2, in which obliques at 30° and 50° with respect to the horizontal were presented singly or in combination as chevron patterns. It is argued that the results of both experiments indicate that single two-space oblique lines are immediately interpreted as lying in three-space and that the changes in perceived orientation are a consequence of this perceptual inference.     

Motion coherence and conjunction search: Implications for guided search theory

Feature integration theory has recently been revised with two proposals that visual conjunction search can be parallel under some circumstances—either because items with nontarget features are inhibited, or because items with target features are excited. We examined whether excitatory or inhibitory guidance controlled conjunction search for an X oscillating in one direction among Os oscillating in that direction and Xs oscillating in another. Search was affected by whether items oscillated in phase with each other, and it was exceptionally difficult when items with target motion moved out of phase with each otherand items with nontarget motion moved out of phase. The results suggest that conjunction search can be guided both by excitation of target features and by inhibition of nontarget features.     

Perceptual selectivity for color and form

Three visual-search experiments tested whether the preattentive parallel stage can-selectively guide the attentive stage to a particular known-to-be-relevant target feature. Subjects searched multielement displays for a salient green circle that had a unique form when surrounded by green nontarget squares or had a unique color when surrounded by red nontarget circles. In the distractor conditions, a salient item in the other dimension was present as well. As an extension of earlier findings (Theeuwes, 1991), the results showed that complete top-down selectivity toward a particular feature was not possible, not even after extended and consistent practice. The results reveal that selectivity depends on the relative discriminability of the stimulus dimensions: the presence of an irrelevant item with a unique color interferes with parallel search for a unique form, and vice versa.     

Initial experiences with cognitive therapy of schizophrenic patients

Based on earlier experiences of various groups of authors, we developed and modified a programme of cognitive therapy for schizophrenic patients. The aim of the application of the therapeutic programme to subacute patients was to decrease subjectively perceptible basic disorders and to improve the functions of performance. The present results and experiences with 4 groups consisting of a total of 31 patients encourage us to continue applying cognitive procedures of therapy. Problems of the ascertainment of measuring values and fundamental questions of therapeutic efficacy are discussed.     

TREATING WOMEN AS SEX-OBJECTS

In this paper we have two related aims. First, we aim to present an account of what it is to treat women as sex-objects.¹ Like other philosophical writers in the field, we hold that the central idea in an account of such treatment is the failure to treat women with proper respect in sexual behavior. This idea has been cashed out in terms of using,² and in terms of dehumanization or failure to accord equal rights to freedom and welfare.³ However, we believe that there is a central deficiency in most such philosophical accounts of treating women as sex-objects, namely, a failure to outline in any detail a theory of interpersonal norms so that one can grasp in more concrete terms what it is to avoid treating a woman as a sex-object. We aim to rectify this deficiency by presenting a model of interpersonal norms based on the work of the social psychologist Chris Argyris.⁴     

The architecture of complexity: A new blueprint

The logic of scientific discovery is now a concern of computer scientists, as well as philosophers. In the computational approach to inductive inference, theories are treated as algorithms (computer programs), and the goal is to find the simplest algorithm that can generate the given data. Both computer scientists and philosophers want a measure of simplicity, such that simple theories are more likely to be true than complex theories. I attempt to provide such a measure here. I define a measure of simplicity for directed graphs, inspired by Herbert Simon's work. Many structures, including algorithms, can be naturally modelled by directed graphs. Furthermore, I adapt an argument of Simon's to show that simple directed graphs are more stable and more resistant to damage than complex directed graphs. Thus we have a reason for pursuing simplicity, other than purely economical reasons.This paper is based on part of my doctoral dissertation. Thanks to my thesis supervisor Professor Alasdair Urquhart for his encouragement, constructive criticism, and for directing me to several relevant articles; to my advisor, Professor Ian Hacking, for reminding me to concentrate on results that might have some application in the real world; to Professor Eric Mendelsohn for checking my use of graph theory; and to my friend Wendy Brandts for sharing her ideas on a closely related problem.Thanks to my friends and family (the latter being a (proper) subset of the former, and both including Dr. Louise Linney, of course) for ongoing support in my scholastic endeavors.Thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for financial assistance. (Awards 452-86-5885 and 453-87-0513.) Thanks to the University of Toronto for financial assistance.     

Cognitive guidelines for simplifying medical information: Data framing and perception

In this paper, 1 describe psychological guidelines for simplifying medical information — methods to aid the perception and recognition of abnormalities in medical test reports. These techniques resemble natural human editing strategies outlined in prospect theory. The methods pre-edit data as humans do but to reduce human effort. I review empirical studies assessing these techniques and discuss needs for further research.