Eco on Dewey

This study seeks to examine Umberto Eco's views of the key ideas in John Dewey's Art as Experience. Eco's proferred suggestion of transactional psychology as a corrective to Dewey's views is criticized as a misreading of Dewey's position.     

Comparison of two integrity tests based upon youthful or adult attitudes and experiences

To assess the effects on selection of two different approaches to the measurement of employment applicants' integrity, score data from two integrity tests were compared. A sample of 225 applicants to a drug supply company were administered both the Life Experience Inventory-Revised (LEI-R) and the Personnel Selection Inventory (PSI-3). The LEI-R items were largely derived from Freudian theory about the effects of childhood and youthful experiences on adult attitudes and behavior; the PSI-3 items were based upon the hypothesis that direct questions about deviant criminal and delinquent behavior and attitudes will yield responses predictive of employee integrity. Both the subscale scores and the total scores of the two inventories exhibited positive and moderately high intercorrelations. A principal (or common) factors analysis yielded two factors: one apparently a general deviance factor and the other a two-cluster LEI/PSI factor. Similar selection strategies (same cut-off score rules) yielded hit (agreement) rates from 71 to 82 percent. Implications for applicant integrity testing are discussed.     

Power and influence in the environment of family therapy*

This paper explores some of the ways in which family therapy theory and practice limits an appreciation of the contexts of families and family therapists. It focuses particularly upon how the rules which underlie patterns of relationships in social systems are made and maintained more by one part of a system than by another, and considers this (a) within families, (b) within various aspects of the social environment of families, and (c) within the organizational contexts of family therapists. It then proposes that the systemic thinking which family therapists apply to families is potentially applicable to wider contexts including international relationships.     

Holland's theory: Stability of avocational interests

The generality and stability of Holland's vocational choice model was tested by examining preference for avocational (leisure) activity. Based on their responses to the Strong Vocational Interest Blank, college students were placed into one of the six Holland groups. They also indicated preferred leisure activities on questionnaires that were administered at a 9-year interval. Six hypotheses were developed relating Holland groups to particular types of avocational behavior. For example, it was predicted that the Artistic group would be more active in cultural affairs and that the Enterprising group would prefer reading political and economic magazines. The initial test of these hypotheses during late adolescence confirmed five of the six predictions. A follow-up 9 years later confirmed all six hypotheses. These results provide some support for the notion that individuals self-select a variety of situations. Also, the relationships between Holland scales and leisure activity and possible implications for the vocational choice model are discussed.     

The debilitating effect of exposure to noncontingent escape: A test of the learned helplessness model

Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that exposure to non-contingent escape leads to performance deficits similar to those observed when subjects are exposed to noncontingent aversive outcomes from which there is no escape, and that causal attributions mediate these deficits. Previous attempts to produce “appetitive helplessness” (deficits resulting from exposure to noncontingent positive events) have been plagued by subjects' tendency to believe that they are responsible for positive events. In Experiment 1, 40 subjects were exposed to contingent or noncontingent noise escape trials. As predicted by the learned helplessness model, subjects who received inescapable noise performed less well on a subsequent anagram task than subjects exposed to escapable noise. Similarly, subjects who escaped from the noise owing to the benevolence of a powerful other rather than because of their own efforts, showed performance deficits paralleling those of the inescapable noise subjects. In Experiment 2, subjects who escaped an aversive tone through no effort of their own showed subsequent performance deficits, but globality of their self-reported attributions did not predict subsequent anagram performance. The results of these studies provide support for the hypothesis that uncontrollability, independent of the valence of a particular outcome, is responsible for helplessness deficits, but do not support the mediational role of attributions, at least in the laboratory.     

Aparametric investigation of multiletter matches

Proctor (1981) presented a theoretical framework that distinguishes factors contributing to disparities in time to classify physical-same, name-same, and different letter pairs as a function of three variables: method of presentation (simultaneous vs. successive), case relationship (samecase vs. opposite-case pairs), and blocking (blocked vs. mixed presentation of same-case and opposite-case pairs). He also argued that these variables were critical in multIletter matches, and performed a between-study comparison of existing data to support his contention. Because comparison across studies is always a tenuous process and because the absence of several relevant conditions precluded a complete analysis of predictions, a within-experiment manipulation of the three relevant variables was desirable. The present study reports such an experiment. In general, the factorial manipulation of variables supported predictions of Proctor’s framework and indicated that many phenomena of multiletter matching, including the widely studied fast-“same” phenomenon, are attributable primarily to differences in the rate at which component letter pairs are matched.     

Cognitive styles in the development of medical careers

Recent research has shown that academic choice and achievement may be partly a function of the student's standing on the field-dependence-independence cognitive-style dimension. The results of two longitudinal studies suggest that information about field dependence-independence may be of value for student guidance in the medical setting. The first, a study of college undergraduates who early expressed an interest in medicine, showed that these cognitive styles play a discernible role in determining who will eventually enter medical school. The second, a study of medical students, showed that field-dependent and field-independent students subsequently tend to choose different medical specialties. These results are consistent with cognitive-style theory, which proposes that field-independent people will choose vocations that require cognitive restructuring skills, whereas field-dependent people will choose vocations that require greater social-interpersonal involvement.