The timing of major life events: Effects of departing from the social clock

It is widely believed that social norms govern the timing of major life events, such that events experienced off time are considerably more stressful than events experienced on time. Experiencing life events either earlier or later than one's peers presumably reduces opportunities for social support and may also invite social disapproval. Relatively few empirical studies have investigated these ideas, however, and those that have suffer from several limitations. The present study made use of a general population survey to investigate the effects of normative versus nonnormative timing of major life events on psychological functioning, interpersonal resources, and interpersonal tensions. Desirable and undesirable events were examined separately, as were the effects of departures from perceived versus statistical age norms. The results of the study offered only limited support for social clock theory. Implications for further research and for the relevance of the theory in a less age-differentiated society are discussed.     

PLEASURE AND REASON AS ADAPTATIONS TO NATURE'S REQUIREMENTS

The values which guide mental and physical behavior seem to be derived from evolutionary facts. In our brains, selection of genes has tied the experience of pleasure to motivating what nature requires us to do for the good of ourselves, our kinsmen, and our ecosystem. When our brains evolved to house also a cultural heritage (including religion, the motivation of sociocultural goals, and rational discourse), hellish tensions could arise to split brain function (minds) and societies. Salvation could and did come from natural selection's replacement of discordant elements in our heritages by better coadapted ones. In this replacement, human rational decisions participated. Selection also continued to adapt these symbiotic heritages to their common environment.     

Personal and professional integrity in relation to pastoral assessment

Though concerns about personal integrity have led some to de-emphasize the role of assessment and the pastor's professional viewpoint in pastoral care, as re-examined here these same concerns call for a recognition of the vital connection between professional and personal integrity. The relationship between personal and professional integrity as they shape pastoral assessment is analyzed in terms of respect, encounter, and anticipation. The relationship of a theology of hope or anticipation to the predictive validity of pastoral assessment presents a challenging agenda for pastoral ministry today.Dr. Underwood is Associate Professor of Pastoral Care at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary     

Reminder-induced recovery of associations to an overshadowed stimulus

The possibility of reversing the deficit produced by overshadowing through the use of memory reactivation was investigated. Using lick suppression as a measure of associative strength, water-deprived rats were conditioned in a Pavlovian paradigm which produced reliable overshadowing of a flashing light by a tone. It was found, however, that exposure to the overshadowed stimulus outside of the conditioning context during the retention interval (reminder treatment) caused an increase in lick suppression during testing in animals that had undergone overshadowing, relative to nonreminded overshadowed animals. Subjects that received the reminder treatment but were conditioned without overshadowing showed no increase in lick suppression. Additional control groups ensured that the increase in suppression observed in the overshadowed subjects following reminder treatment was not due to nonspecific fear. The results suggest that the performance deficit produced by overshadowing is due at least in part to a reversible failure to efficiently retrieve associations to the overshadowed stimulus at the time of testing, rather than a failure to form those associations during conditioning.     

Reaction time to letter name or letter case

Subjects were shown two letters from the set BDGbdg. In one condition, subjects were required to decide whether or not the letters had the same name. In the other condition, subjects decided whether or not the two letters were presented in the same case. Reaction times were always faster when the two letters on a given trial were physically identical. However, there was no difference in the speed of a name match or a case match when the two letters were not physically identical. Since subjects could have based a case match on the presence or absence of a single feature — a protruding vertical line — it was concluded that subjects are not able to selectively attend to a single visual feature in order to identify a letter. Rather, a subject analyzes several features in parallel in order to arrive at a simultaneous decision about a letter's name or case.     

The initial standardization of the adolescent behavioral classification project instrument

An instrument has been developed through the Adolescent Behavioral Classification Project for assessing an adolescent's problems and for establishing a taxonomy of behaviors and of persons. Standardization has initially consisted of collecting from many sources 482 statements of problem behaviors and 30 positive behaviors, which can be observed by nonprofessional as well as professional persons; administering these behavior statements to 156 institutional and 94 noninstitutional mental health center adolescents and 376 of their parents; carrying out principal components analyses on the behavioral items and 3 demographic items, followed by Varimax and Promax rotations. Twentyfive factors scored on 410 items resulted from these procedures. Internal consistency coefficients for the factors range from .47 to .86. Test-retest reliabilities on a sample of 10 youths ranged from .24 to .94, with an average r_tt of .71. Factor scores for different classes of respondents were fairly well correlated from one set to another. The different classes of respondents did not differ significantly from one another on caution items. Similarities are noted, by inspection, between these factors and those derived from the Children's Behavioral Classification Project and between those other authorities have set forth and the ABCPAcknowledgements are gratefully extended to the ABCP team: Dr. Robert P. Baker, Greg Bennett, Dr. Millard J. Bienvenu, Sr., Dr. Ronald F. Boudreaux, Robert L. Compton, MSW, Dr. Thomas E. Deiker, Dr. M. K. Distefano, Dr. James R. Gay, Charles Granger, Dr. Wayne A. Greenleaf, Allison Hulse, Cathy Knighton, James Moss, Dr. Ronald S. Pryer, Dr. Felicia Pryor, Dr. Edith Schulhofer, Mrs. Annie A. Smart, Dr. T. T. Stigall. Special thanks go to Doctors Boudreaux, Greenleaf, and Pryer for permission to employ their patients from the Adolescent Unit of Central Louisiana State Hospital, and to Dr. Deiker for his provision of the listing of abnormal subjective perceptual experiences. Above all, many thanks are given to the necessarily unnamed adolescents and their parents who took part in the project at considerable inconvenience to themselves, and to the numerous personnel in the mental health centers who cooperated in the project.     

Mechanisms of aural encoding: VIII. Phonetic interference and context-sensitive coding in short-term memory

In previous experiments Ss were presented for ordered recall with sequences of five consonant phonemes paired with /a/ in which the middle three consonant phonemes shared the same manner of articulation (voiced, unvoiced, nasal), the same place of articulation (front, middle, back), or neither the same manner nor place of articulation (control sequences). Compared to performance in control sequences, the middle consonant phoneme was always more difficult to recall in manner of articulation sequences but not in place of articulation sequences. The results suggested that for these sequences consonant phonemes were not remembered in terms of their place of articulation. In the present experiment, sequences of consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-consonant (VC) syllables were presented for recall in which each consonant phoneme was paired with a different vowel. When consonant phonemes in the different sequence types were presented for recall with different vowels, phonetic interference was observed for the middle consonant in place of articulation sequences as well as manner of articulation sequences, and the effect was observed in both CV and VC groups. It was suggested that vowels are encoded in short-term memory in terms of their place of articulation and that presenting consonant phonemes for recall with different vowels caused Ss to use this dimension to code consonant phonemes in short-term memory.     

Sequential letter and word recognition in deaf and hearing subjects

To examine the processing of sequentially presented letters of familiar and nonsense words, especially among Ss of vastly differing experience on sequential tasks, three groups of Ss were tested on letters of words spelled sequentially on an alphanumeric display and on letters of words fingerspelled. These were a deaf group (N=33) with little or no hearing and who varied in their fingerspelling ability; a staff group (N=12) who taught fingerspelling and were highly proficient; and a hearing group (N=19). Of principal interest was the finding that the hearing Ss did better on nonsense letter recognition, while the deaf group did better on word recognition. Word length was important except to the staff Ss on fingerspelled words, which also suggests that concentration on fingerspelling proficiency forces attention to the whole word and not its component letters. Hearing Ss, who are the group faced with an unfamiliar task, seemed to attend to each letter and hence had more difficulty with recognition of the longer unit.