Girls and Engineering: Perceived Influences on Career Choice amongst Female Craft and Technician Engineers and Non-Engineers

There are very few women who take up careers as engineers - especially at the non-professional level. The present research attempts to throw some light on this issue, examining by means of a postal questionnaire the educational experiences of 22 young women craft and technician apprentices in a variety of engineering jobs. Comparisons are made with 33 similar young women who have chosen more traditional 'female' occupations. The results show significant differences between engineers and non-engineers in terms of their subject choices and curriculum opportunities at school and their perceptions of the attitudes of parents to wards their careers. Possible implications of the findings for developments in curriculum planning and careers guidance are explored.     

Personality characteristics of Divorce-Prone individuals: A preliminary clinical study

This study focuses on Divorce-Prone individuals and the question of why some persons fail in one marriage after another. The authors studied 12 individuals who had each been divorced two or more times. They found that the cases fell into one of three broad and overlapping groups. The groups have been called the Self-Involved Narcissists, the Compliant Depressed, and the Casualties of Life's Vicissitudes. The individuals and the groups demonstrate a different etiology, different treatment problems, and a very different prognosis.     

The use of a resident daily scheduling procedure to increase appropriate social,ward, and scheduling behavior in adult psychiatric residents (patients)

The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate the efficacy of a goal orientation procedure in their treatment of apathy, isolation, and insufficient goal setting skills in chronic psychiatric residents. The experiment was conducted in a behaviorally-oriented deinstitutionalization program in a state psychiatric hospital. Three male and four female chronic psychiatric residents served as research participants. A group repeated measures design with four within-participant phases (ABA‘B’) was utilized. The goal orientation procedure included a written schedule that was completed by each research participant daily. This Daily Living Schedule required that a behavior be specified by the participant for every half-hour period during the day (8:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.). During all four phases of the experiment, research participants were observed on the ward from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon and 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. for engagement in scheduled target behaviors. The daily scheduling procedure produced substantial increases in appropriate behavior such as social activities, ward jobs, and participation in treatment programs, whereas decrease were produced in inappropriate behavior such as isolation and day time sleeping.     

Duration of negative practice and the reduction of leg pounding of a traumatically brain-injured adult

This study evaluated the relative efficacy of long (1 minute) and short (15 seconds) durations of negative practice for reducing self-stimulatory leg pounding of a traumatically brain-injured adult. In individual social skill training classes, long negative practice and short negative practice were administered concurrently in an alternating treatments design. Generalization of treatment effects outside of training sessions was assessed during the client's lunch period. The results revealed that both durations of negative practice were equally effective in reducing leg pounding during training sessions. However, the effects of training did not generalize to settings in which the practice contingency was not enforced. Pounding was more frequent and negative practice somewhat less effective during periods of high social stimulation.     

Combining the judgments of experts: How many and which ones?

R. M. Hogarth (1978, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 21, 40–46) presents an analytical model which, under certain conditions, may be useful for estimating both the number of experts to include in a staticized group and which experts. This paper reports a study of an important real-world judgment task used to evaluate (1) the extent to which the specified conditions hold and (2) the effect of violations of the conditions on the ability of the model to approximate the actual empirical validities that result from forming such groups. The results indicate that, although the specified conditions hold only moderately well, the model suggested by Hogarth provides a remarkably good approximation to the actual empirical validities of the staticized groups.     

“Extinction” of the McCollough effect does not transfer interocularly

A McCollough effect was induced in subjects by having them view typical adapting stimuli binocularly for 5 min. In the control condition, the strength of the McCollough effect was measured 20 min after the end of the adaptation. The strength was measured during monocular and binocular viewing of a test pattern via a color cancellation technique. Monocular strengths for the two eyes of a given subject were equal to each other and slightly weaker than the binocular strength. In the test condition, 15 min of the 20 min between adaptation and testing were spent monocularly viewing black and white gratings of the same orientation and spatial frequency as the adapting gratings. The strength of the effect as measured ipsilaterally was markedly decreased from that in the control condition. The strength of the effect as measured with the contralateral eye showed only a small decrease from that of the control condition. This finding is relevant to various models of the McCollough effect and related color aftereffects, especially those that posit a “learning” type of mechanism between achromatic spatial channels (which exhibit clear interocular transfer of various achromatic effects) and monocular color channels.     

An electronic device for detecting activity in caged rodents

An electronic device for detecting movement in small animals is described. The principle involves assessing changes in resistance between pairs of grid bars in a cage. The device is inexpensive, sensitive to movement, easy to calibrate and install, reliable across different activity arenas, and indifferent to animal size.     

Automatic monitoring of temperature and/or location: A computer-controlled radiotelemetry system

A radiotelemetry system for continuous monitoring of the temperature and/or location of small animals is described. All the functions of system control are carried out by an on-line microcomputer (TRS-80 Model III), resulting in a versatile system capable of alternating recording the temperature/location of multiple subjects with other behavioral or physiological events, such as activity level. We describe the use of this system in monitoring body temperature in hamsters and in recording the incubation pattern of breeding ring doves.