Counseling the emotionally troubled: a neglected group

The fact that 15 percent of our child and adolescent population suffers from serious mental health problems requires that we reexamine our traditional system for delivering services. Since the majority of troubled young people are not receiving help from specialists, the counselor should be considered as a primary mental health resource. If this role is to be undertaken, however, counselors will require more adequate training than that which is now being provided. The author examines existing patterns of counseling service in the light of those functions mental health workers should be able to perform.     

Encoding of Facial Expressions of Emotion and Knowledge of American Sign Language

The relationship between knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) and the ability to encode facial expressions of emotion was explored. Participants were 55 college students, half of whom were intermediate-level students of ASL and half of whom had no experience with a signed language. In front of a video camera, participants posed the affective facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust. These facial expressions were randomized onto stimulus tapes that were then shown to 60 untrained judges who tried to identify the expressed emotions. Results indicated that hearing subjects knowledgeable in ASL were generally more adept than were hearing nonsigners at conveying emotions through facial expression. Results have implications for better understanding the nature of nonverbal communication in hearing and deaf individuals.     

APPLICATION OF CONTENT VALIDITY METHODS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF A JOB-RELATED PERFORMANCE RATING CRITERION

This study demonstrated the use of quantitative content validity procedures in the development of a job-related behavioral rating scale criterion for entry-level psychiatric aides. Work behavior items were developed by staff from 6 state psychiatric hospitals, placed in a content validity questionnaire using the Lawshe format, and given to a representative sample of 38 aides and supervisors. Seventy-eight of 83 items were found to be significantly job-relevant using the computation procedures of both Lawshe and Aiken. After the significant items were grouped into 4 categories with high interjudge agreement and placed in a rating scale format, ratings were obtained on 72 psychiatric aides from 4 hospitals. Items in the 4 categories were found to be internally consistent using coefficient alpha. Significant but low concurrent validities were established for 2 verbal ability selection tests using the rating criterion. The validities found were interpreted to be especially significant when the factors of low selection ratio, restriction in range, and limited rater training were considered.     

Coherence as a Test for Truth

This paper sets out to demonstrate that a contrast can be drawn between coherentism as an account of the structure of justification, and coherentism as a method of inquiry. Whereas the former position aims to offer an answer to the 'regress of justification' problem, the latter position claims that coherence plays a vital and indispensable role as a criterion of truth, given the fallibility of cognitive methods such as perception and memory. It is argued that 'early' coherentists like Bradley and Blanshard were coherentists of the latter kind, and that this sort of coherentism is not open to certain sorts of standard objection that can be raised against justificatory coherentism.     

PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTINUITY, FISSION, AND THE NON-BRANCHING CONSTRAINT

Abstract: Those who endorse the Psychological Continuity Approach (PCA) to analyzing personal identity need to impose a non-branching constraint to get the intuitively correct result that in the case of fission , one person becomes two. With the help of Brueckner's (2005 ) discussion, it is shown here that the sort of non-branching clause that allows proponents of PCA to provide sufficient conditions for being the same person actually runs contrary to the very spirit of their theory. The problem is first presented in connection with perdurantist versions of PCA. The difficulty is then shown to apply to endurantist versions as well.