A National Survey of AIDS Training in Counselor Education Programs

A review of the literature suggests that counseling professionals may not be receiving substantive training related to AIDS. In this article, all U.S. counselor education programs were surveyed to determine the extent of such training. The responding programs (N = 243) identified AIDS as a high priority for inclusion in curricular programming, yet nearly 40% of the responding programs did not include any AIDS training in their curricula. Implications for counselor education and the counseling profession are discussed, and suggestions are made for including AIDS-related training in programs.     

The Role of Language Skill in Child Psychopathology: Implications for Intervention in the Early Years

In this narrative review, we suggest that children’s language skill should be targeted in clinical interventions for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties in the preschool years. We propose that language skill predicts childhood emotional and behavioral problems and this relationship may be mediated by children’s self-regulation and emotion understanding skills. In the first sections, we review recent high-quality longitudinal studies which together demonstrate that that children’s early language skill predicts: (1) emotional and behavioral problems, and this relationship is stronger than the reverse pattern; (2) self-regulation skill; this pattern may be stronger than the reverse pattern but moderated by child age. Findings also suggest that self-regulation skill mediates the relation between early language skill and children’s emotional and behavioral problems. There is insufficient evidence regarding the mediating role of emotion understanding. In subsequent sections, we review evidence demonstrating that: (1) particular kinds of developmentally targeted parent–child conversations play a vital role in the development of language skill, and (2) some current clinical interventions, directly or indirectly, have a beneficial impact on children’s vocabulary and narrative skills, but most approaches are ad hoc. Targeting language via parent–child conversation has the potential to improve the outcomes of current clinical interventions in the preschool years.     

Immobility experiments with dogs of the Arkansas Line of Nervous Pointers

As demonstrated in four experiments, dogs and pups of the Arkansas Line of Nervous Pointers, in contrast to kennel-mate dogs of the normal line, respond to manual inversion and brief restraint in an open sling with prolonged, mainly hypertonic, immobility. This response is consistent and replicable. At least in 4-month-old pups, the duration of sling immobility is positively correlated with the degree of behavioral pathology as determined by the objective Human Interaction Test. We found no evidence of basic difference between upright freezing and supine immobility.     

Transfer of conditional reasoning: Effects explanations and initial problem types

Transfer of reasoning on Wason's (1966) selection task was explored in three experiments. Experiment 1 tested the effects of problem explanations and verbalization instructions on transfer from abstract or thematic problems to abstract problems. Explanations facilitated transfer only when the initial problems were abstract; verbalization did not produce transfer between problems. Experiment 2 explored the effects of problem similarity and explanations on transfer between problems. Although transfer occurred following explanations, no effect of similarity was found for thematic problems. In both of these experiments, the thematic effect (Wason & Shapiro, 1971) was observed. Experiment 3 examined the effects of explanations to abstract or thematic problems on transfer to subsequent abstract or thematic problems. Transfer of reasoning occurred from both initial problem types, particularly to problems of the same type; however, transfer occurred to a greater extent from abstract problems than from thematic problems. The results are discussed in terms of problem similarity and Cheng and Holyoak's (1985) pragmatic reasoning schema hypothesis.     

Evidence for acute effects of alcohol and marijuana on color discrimination

Significant dose-related impairments in hue discrimination on the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test were produced by acute doses of alcohol and marijuana. The impairment of color discrimination was predominantly located in the blue region of the color circle and resembles that seen in acquired color vision defects associated with retinal pathology. The transient nature of the reduced color discrimination raises practical problems in tasks which require stable color perception.