Air-puff-elicited startle: Habituation over trials and measurement of a hypothetical emotional response

In the first of two experiments, it was demonstrated that an air puff elicited a reliable startle reflex in rats which showed no habituation over 50 trials. In the second study an attempt was made to measure an emotional response by recording startle reactions to the air puff during presentation of a presumed fear-eliciting CS. It was concluded that the air-puff-elicited startle reflex can be employed as an indirect measure of a hypothetical emotional response.     

Signalled and unsignalled free-operant avoidance in the pigeon

Pigeons were trained to depress a lever to avoid electric shock under free-operant avoidance schedules without a warning signal, or with a warning signal that could be terminated only by a response. Most birds in the signalled avoidance procedure terminated more than 50% of the warning signals before shock. In the unsignalled avoidance procedure, several birds formed a temporal discrimination and received relatively few shocks; other birds responded only in post-shock bursts, and received many more shocks.     

Management skill in student organizations

Seventy-two social fraternities were studied to discover some reasons for the variation in the degree of success attained by these student organizations on a college campus. The specific factors studied were management practices that could be employed by the groups. Analysis revealed a significant positive relationship between success as a fraternity and the use of certain management practices, and it identified several individual practices or characteristics highly associated with more successful groups. This article proposes that student organizations would find such practices influential in their future survival and success.     

Ethics and Counseling Decisions

Although some behavioral scientists and practitioners contend that man has no genuine moral choices to make, common sense and philosophical reflection ineluctably affirm the moral nature of man. When young people are faced with moral decisions, they often seek the assistance of a counselor. Although such counselors are routinely expected to aid clients in making decisions about their education and their careers, there is considerably less agreement about their responsibility for helping students to make moral choices. The central thesis of this article is that a knowledge of ethical theories, the practical principles which flow from them, and the method of decision-making which they indicate will enable the counselor to assist his clients with their moral problems.     

Need for approval and counseling outcomes

The intent of this study was to determine the effects of a clients' need for approval on the outcomes of counseling. The expectation was that clients who have a high need for approval by others would cooperate more with the counseling process and would more often be successful in the sense of being rehabilitated. The Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale was administered to 167 applicants at a state rehabilitation agency immediately after the initial interview. It was hypothesized that successfully rehabilitated clients would obtain significantly higher social desirability scores than those clients who were not successful. The results confirmed the hypothesis at the .01 level of significance.     

Technology and guidance: a balance

The following symposium discusses the place of technology in guidance and some of the concerns involved. Tiedeman, a leading authority on technological applications in guidance, takes the position that guidance technology is an important new development. Schmidt, who has written widely in the areas of psychology and counseling, questions the place of technology in guidance and society and underlines some of the concerns related to the adoption of technology. The authors' discussions of “one-way” versus “two-way” thinking and the problem of control over the technology should be of interest to readers concerned with applying technology in guidance.     

Some experiments with computer synthesized speech

The generation of satisfactory artificial speech involves a great variety of semantic, linguistic, and articulatory factors. Many of these complex elements are as yet unknown, and computers are used extensively for their investigation. An account of an on-line, interactive computer facility used for such research at Bell Laboratories is given. The use of this facility for exploring the duration and pitch correlates of stress in English sentences is described.