Clinical judgment, clinical training, and professional experience

Reviews studies on training, experience, and clinical judgment. The results on the validity of judgments generally fail to support the value of on-the-job experience in mental health fields. The validity results do provide limited support for the value of training. Other results suggest that experienced clinicians are better than less experienced judges at knowing which of their judgments are likely to be correct and which are likely to be wrong. Reasons why clinicians have trouble learning from experience are given. Recommendations are made for improving training and clinical practice.     

Blocking Effects in Two-Choice Discrimination Tasks in Rhesus Monkeys Macaca Mulatta

The Psychological Record - The present experiments investigated blocking effects in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) in a discrimination learning paradigm using a single stimulus modality. Two...     

Counseling: A conversion experience

In this article, the experience of conversion, which is usually delegated to the realm of spiritual studies, is applied to the counseling experience. It is posited that a person who goes through a successful counseling process will experience a turning around, will cease leading life in a dysfunctional way, and will move forward in a manner by which the person experiences life in a new perspective. This new perspective brings the person wholeness and balance.     

Carl Rogers and Martin Luther—A “reformation” in the helping professions

The 16th century schism in Christian thought leading to the Reformation has an interesting analogy in Carl Rogers' attempt to reform the helping professions. An exploration of this analogy clarifies much of the theoretical tension in the contemporary arena of pastoral counseling.     

Extraretinal information about eye position during involuntary eye movement: optokinetic afternystagmus

Despite importance for theories of perception, controversy exists as to whether information is available to the perceptual system about involuntary as well as voluntary eye movements. We measured the perceived direction of targets flashed briefly in an otherwise dark field during the primary phase of optokinetic afternystagmus (OKAN), an involuntary eye movement that persists in darkness following optokinetic stimulation. Perceived direction was measured by unseen pointing in one experiment and by pointing made under visual control in a second experiment. Pointing was essentially veridical in both experiments, indicating that accurate extra-retinal information about eye position (presumably, as efference copy) exists for OKAN. Illusory motion of visual targets, which can occur during involuntary oculomotor responses, therefore cannot be attributed to a lack of efference-copy signals for such eye movements.     

Relationship between two nontraditional procedures for assessing speech-sound discrimination

Test of speech-sound discrimination are used by special educators, reading specialists and speech-language pathologists in assessing children's ability to differentiate between speech sounds occurring in standard English. Such tests are important in determining if speech-sound articulation errors are caused by difficulty in making such differentiations. However, during the past 10 years, these tests have been criticized on the basis of their reliability and validity. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of two alternative methods of assessing speech-sound discrimination with a school-aged population to determine if they elicited responses in a similar manner.     

H-reflexes during a motor skill acquisition task

H-reflex amplitudes were studied during the acquisition of a motor skill involving coordinated isometric plantarflexion at the ankle joints as subjects learned to trace a triangular pattern on an oscilloscope screen by controlling plantarflexion torque applied against load cells. Torque feedback was presented on a subject oscilloscope with the right foot controlling a vertical cursor and the left foot a horizontal cursor. Eleven subjects reached criterion performance. H-reflexes were recorded from the right soleus and timed to the initiation of soleus muscle activity to plantarflex the foot. Average time to complete one trial decreased from 9 sec. in the prelearning block to 4 sec. postlearning. No single learning strategy was evident as subjects varied widely in their levels of H-reflex amplitude, but during postlearning, H-reflex amplitude became consistent within subjects as tracing performance became faster and accurate.