The Lessons of the Development of the First APA Ethics Code: Blending Science,Practice, and Politics

The Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association (APA) is a bedrock of the profession. The contextual factors of society affect the Ethics Code of the APA, resulting in an ever-changing document. The context of the reorganization of the APA after World War II created an initial impetus toward a formalized code. A key contextual feature of the Code's development was the use of the Critical Incident Technique, which was based in the empirical aspirations of the psychological field. This article explores the historical context around the APA's decision to draft an ethics code, reviews its development, and discusses its role for psychologists today.     

Cue exposure and response prevention with alcoholics: a controlled trial

Ten severely alcohol-dependent subjects were divided into two groups, one of which received only 6 sessions of in-vivo cue exposure and response prevention and the other of which received 6 sessions of imaginal cue exposure, followed by 6 sessions of in-vivo cue exposure and response prevention. The in-vivo cue exposure produced significant decrements on behavioural and subjective measures for both experimental groups on Desire to Drink and Difficulty to Resist Alcohol. Imaginal cue exposure produced trivial changes on these measures. The implications for both theory and practice are discussed.     

Sex differences in information processing

Sex differences in cognitive activity were investigated. Using a list containing words with masculine, feminine, and neutral connotations, Experiment 1 revealed that masculine words were better recalled by male college students (n=16) while feminine words were better recalled by female college students (n=16). This difference was reduced on a recognition test. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the phenomenon was not due to a difference in the way males (n=20) and females (n=20) interpreted the meaning of the words. Finally, in Experiment 3, the memorial selectivity was shown to exist in the same manner for White middle-class elementary school (n=32) and high school (n=32) students. Learning and repression interpretations of the effect were proposed. Some practical implications of the data were suggested.These investigations were supported by a seed grant to the first author. This grant was jointly funded by Southern Methodist University and the National Science Foundation's Institutional Grants for Science Program (GU-3752). The authors would like to express their appreciation to the pupils and teachers on Fain Elementary School and Rider High School, both in Wichita Falls, Texas.     

Impact of Behavioral Inhibition and Parenting Style on Internalizing and Externalizing Problems from Early Childhood through Adolescence

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is characterized by a pattern of extreme social reticence, risk for internalizing behavior problems, and possible protection against externalizing behavior problems. Parenting style may also contribute to these associations between BI and behavior problems (BP). A sample of 113 children was assessed for BI in the laboratory at 14 and 24 months of age, self-report of maternal parenting style at 7 years of age, and maternal report of child internalizing and externalizing BP at 4, 7, and 15 years. Internalizing problems at age 4 were greatest among behaviorally inhibited children who also were exposed to permissive parenting. Furthermore, greater authoritative parenting was associated with less of an increase in internalizing behavior problems over time and greater authoritarian parenting was associated with a steeper decline in externalizing problems. Results highlight the importance of considering child and environmental factors in longitudinal patterns of BP across childhood and adolescence.     

Age/Cohort Differences in Judgments About Criminal Transgressions

To examine possible age/cohort differences in social judgment processes, young and older adults were asked to evaluate criminal offenders described in case files that manipulated both race of offender and the extenuating circumstances preceding the crime. Direct mail was used to reach a wider sample; 218 young (M = 30.21 years) and 167 older (M = 68.57 years) adults provided usable responses. Older adults more strongly recommended parole and estimated less future crime than young adults. There were no age differences in attributions to the criminal's basic nature, but respondents from older age groups and earlier born cohorts more frequently attributed crimes to circumstances. Respondents' judgments of White and Black criminals were generally equitable. Findings suggest that older adults may attach greater importance to contextual factors in their judgments of criminals' actions and make more circumstantial attributions than young adults when there is sufficient context to offer a nondispositional account for behavior.     

Pythagorean distance and the judged similarity of schematic stimuli

Independent groups of Ss rated the similarity of pairs of patterns belonging to the same class, either bef ore or af ter a discrimination task of schematic concept formation (SCF). Mean similarity increased as a function of SCF pretraining. A linear relationship was found between a Pythagorean distance measure on the patterns and subjective similarity of pairs of stimuli (r=.88). No such relationship was obtained from an analysis of judgments from a group that viewed random, nonschematic stimuli. A secondary analysis of the discrimination judgments in the SCF task showed that the Pythagorean distance measure was predictive of judgments on pairs of stimuli from the same schema family, but the relationship did not hold for pairs representing two different schemata. Multidimensional scaling analyses indicated that mildly deviant schematic stimuli were perceived to be instances of a single family. The dimensions describing a schema cluster appeared to be specific to the sample of stimuli. A tendency for the Kruskal procedures to collapse certain types of stimulus clusters was observed and discussed.