Perceptions of the magnitude and diversity of social support

Three studies were conducted to test the hypotheses that subjects would overestimate the proportion of their peers who shared their opinion on an issue and that they would perceive their own opinion group as consisting of people with a wider and more diverse range of values and outlooks than those holding different opinions. The first study was conducted following a period of intense debate about sixism on a college campus. Subjects estimated student opinion on issues related to sexism and indicated how diverse or similar they perceived supporters and nonsupporters of the women's movement to be. In a second study subjects estimated the proportion of students who evaluated President Carter's performance as good, fair, or poor and then indicated how diverse or similar the three groups of students were who held these various opinions. A third study closely replicated the second, using the issue of divestiture of college-owned stock in South Africa. In all three studies, subjects were divided into groups on the basis of their own attitudes. Results consistently supported the hypotheses.     

Effects of instructions, biofeedback, reward, and cognitive mediation on the control of heart rate and the application of that control in a stressful situation

Subjects in Phase 1 of this experiment were (a) instructed to try to either increase or decrease their heart rate, (b) with or without the use of biofeedback, and (c) with or without the promise of money for successful performance, whereas no-treatment subjects were given no instructions, no biofeedback, and no promise of reward. Results indicated that (a) when simply instructed to do so, subjects could increase but not decrease their heart rates relative to no treatment controls, (b) the promise of money for good performance aided subjects in increasing but not decreasing heart rate, and (c) biofeedback did not aid subjects in either increasing or decreasing heart rate. Various cognitive strategies employed by subjects in controlling their heart rates are discussed.In Phase 2, subjects in a stress condition were told that they would receive a series of painful electric shocks, whereas subjects in a no stress condition were not told about shocks. All subjects were instructed to try to decrease their heart rates during the “shock” period. Heart rate and self report data revealed that (a) the manipulation was successful in increasing stress, and (b) previous training in decreasing heart rate, with or without biofeedback, did not aid subjects in decreasing their heart rates in the face of the stress.     

Subjective motion and acceleration induced by the movement of the observer’s entire visual field

Three experiments were carried out to trace the developmental time course of apparent subjective rotation induced by rotating a tall striped drum around an observer. In Experiment 1, rotation of the drum led to increasingly frequent reports of subjective rotation over the first 30 sec of stimulation by the optokinetic stimulus, after which subjects experienced mostly apparent subjective rotation and a small amount of drum rotation. In Experiment 2, using a magnitude estimation technique to assess the speed of drum and subjective rotation, subjects reported subjective acceleration and drum deceleration of about the same magnitude over the first 30 sec of the 1-rain trial, followed by a steady level of subjective rotation with some residual drum movement. In Experiment 3, using three different drum speeds, it was found that the speed of steady-state rotation, as well as subjective acceleration and drum deceleration, are linear functions of the speed of the inducing stimulus. Implications of these observations towards the explanation of how we perceive a stable environment during locomotion are discussed.     

Tactile localization of the direction and distance of sounds

In a previous paper, experiments were reported which demonstrated that human subjects can judge accurately the azimuthal direction of sounds using a tactile localization device. It was also demonstrated that a tactile analogue of selective auditory attention was possible with this system. Three additional experiments, reported here, indicate that subjects are also able to judge the distance of the sound source and can concurrently judge both the azimuthal direction and distance of a source. Comparisons were made between conditions where head movements were permitted lactive~ and conditions where the head was held still Ipassive, and between normal auditory judgments and tactile judgments. Active tactile performance was essentially similar to auditory performance. Active performance was superior to passive in both directional and distance judgment, but different components of the motor-sensory complex were found to contribute to active superiority in the two tasks. The implication of these experiments for the design of auditory prosthetic devices is discussed.     

Multiple sessions of systolic blood pressure biofeedback: Its effects on ability to control systolic pressure during training,after training,and its effects on pulse rate

Seventy-one normotensive subjects participated in four training sessions in which they were either (a) instructed to increase their blood pressure, (b) instructed to decrease their blood pressure, or (c) not instructed to change their blood pressure. The subjects either (a) were provided with biofeedback concerning systolic blood pressure or (b) were not provided with biofeedback concerning systolic blood pressure. After the last training session, subjects participated in a transfer session in which they were again instructed concerning changes in pressure but were not provided with biofeedback. Analyses conducted on data from the training and transfer sessions indicated that subjects who were instructed to increase pressure and given biofeedback to aid them showed higher pressure than subjects in other conditions and that there were no differences among those other conditions; that is, biofeedback was effective for teaching subjects to increase pressure but was not effective for teaching subjects to decrease pressure. Additional training sessions did not add to the effect achieved in the first training session. During training sessions, subjects who were instructed to increase pressure showed higher heart rates than subjects in other conditions. The results raise questions concerning the interpretation of earlier experiments that did not include no-treatment, instructions-only, and attention control conditions.     

Brief report: On becoming a group therapist

Clinicians have become group therapists via many routes, either voluntarily or not. Group psychotherapy itself has had a checkered history, in that it has often been seen as an ancillary or a second choice form of treatment. Indeed, we know that there is a growing number of well-respected clinicians who are not only not ambivalent about being seen as group clinicians, but embrace this reality as a primary clinical identity. It has occurred to us that no one has looked deeply at this developmental path or what facilitates or inhibits movement along this path. This article is a preliminary attempt to initiate this line of study.     

Validity of self-efficacy scale scores for a Spanish sample

This study analyzed the validity of the Sherer, et al. Self-efficacy Scale for a Spanish sample of 555 subjects, 257 men and 298 women. 415 were from the general population; 34 schizophrenics and 45 with eating disorders were from a clinic, plus 61 drug addicts from two centers. All met DSM-IV-R criteria. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Assertiveness Inventory, and the Self-control Questionnaire were administered. The reliability for total scores, general factor were high even when social self-efficacy was low. A bidimensional factor structure seemed more acceptable. The Self-efficacy scale scores correlated with those on the Self-control Questionnaire and the Assertiveness Inventory. Extraversion scores on the Sincerity dimension of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire correlated with scores on the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and Eysenck's Neuroticism and Psychoticism scales. Significant mean differences appeared between the general population group and the three clinical groups. These analyses support the usefulness of the scale for clinical practice and research with Spanish samples.     

Effect of incentives on retention in an outpatient treatment for cocaine addicts

The high drop-out rate in treatment programs is one of the most important problems in the area of drug addictions. This study evaluated the effect of the use of incentives on retention in an outpatient program for cocaine addicts. The effect of individual variables on program drop-out was also analysed. Participants were 66 subjects who were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: standard treatment, treatment with incentives I, and treatment with incentives II. The patients of these two groups received incentives contingent on cocaine abstinence with two different magnitudes. Retention rate at six months was 35% in the standard treatment, 78.6% in the treatment with incentives I, and 53.3% in the treatment with incentives II. The global prognostic capacity of the individual variables (sociodemographic, history and consumption pattern, psychopathological variables, and EuropASI scores) was 85.7%, with the psychopathological variables being more closely related to retention. These results suggest that the use of incentives may be an effective strategy to improve retention in outpatient treatments for cocaine addiction.     

Between ideology and pragmatism: polemic on the civil rights of Christians in the socialist Slovenia of the 1970s

In this article I discuss the controversy concerning the rights of believers which developed among younger theologians, some laymen and some representatives of the faithful on the one hand, and communist politicians and Marxist theorists on the other, in Slovenia in the 1970s. In comparison with other socialist countries, the level of religious freedoms in multireligious Yugoslavia was relatively high; the same can be said about the country’s relations with the Holy See, with which diplomatic relations at the highest level were restored in 1970. The controversy opened key questions about the relationship between Marxism and atheism under Yugoslav self-management socialism and touched some of the basic ideological postulates on which the League of Communists (LC) built its social engagement. Demands for greater equality for believers were rejected as unfounded in the vast majority of cases and did not trigger a change in the established understanding of religion by the ruling communist party. However, the awareness of everyday discrimination against believers in their public life spread amongst the younger generation of more liberal-oriented communist leaders. At a time when the Yugoslav party was preparing for the difficult period following the imminent death of President Tito and in this period was counting on the loyalty of believers, communist leaders were willing to condemn the most outstanding examples of ‘sectarianism’, of which there was no scarcity in the ranks of the LC, while at the same time a change in programming principles in regard to religion remained out of the question. The prevailing conviction remained that religion would die out of its own accord, but that in the meantime it was necessary to ensure full equality for nonbelievers and believers alike.