Extinction of a phobia of physical examination in a seven-year-old mentally retarded boy—A case study

Counterconditioning is a process in which aversive stimuli that ordinarily evoke emotional or avoidance responses are paired with positive stimuli which evoke incompatible activities. Several sets of operations have been employed to induce these incompatible activities (e.g. food, Jones, 1924; relaxation. Grossberg, 1964; positive imagery, Lazarus and Abramowitz, 1962; pharmacological agents, Friedman, 1966; laughter, Ventis, 1973).Although the Counterconditioning process has been successfully applied to a wide variety of emotional disorders, special problems arise when the procedure is applied to the mentally retarded. First, because of the limitations in cognitive abilities, it is generally impossible to train the subject in either relaxation or positive imagery processes. Consequently, it is necessary to place the child in direct contact with the anxiety-inducing situation. Secondly, it is often difficult to find an anxiety-free situation which is incompatible with the anxiety-arousing situation and which can be practically implemented, particularly when the phobia involved is complex.The purpose of this paper is to describe a case whereby a phobic response of physical examination by male doctors in a 7–yr-old mentally retarded boy was extinguished by pairing the examination with an anxiety-free situation, i.e. an extremely comfortable relationship between the patient and a nurse on the ward. Previous research had indicated that parents and people who have positive relationships with a person might possibly serve as effective anxiety reducers in fear-provoking situations (Jersild and Holmes, 1935).     

Role and justice considerations in the attribution of responsibility to a rape victim

This study was designed to assess the extent to which social role and “just world” considerations would affect perceptions and attributions of responsibility to a rape victim. The rape victim was either a topless-bottomless dancer, a social worker, or a Catholic nun, and she was either acquainted or unacquainted with her assailant. In the acquainted condition, the dancer was attributed the greatest and the nun the least amount of responsibility, indicating that social role factors can govern the range of attributional judgments which might be made in any given instance. However, unacquainted victims were ascribed more responsibility for the rape than were acquainted victims, a difference which was significant when the victim was the nun. The latter findings are discussed in terms of Lerner's just world hypothesis. Significant sex differences were found in subjects' perceptions of and responses to the rape incident and, contrary to earlier findings, no relationship was found between victim attractiveness and punitiveness toward the wrongdoer.     

Technical standards and performance standards in the pursuit of quality

The concept of standards lacks clarity because it is applied both to concrete specifications and to the assessment of quality. Confusion is reduced by introducing the notion of interchange expectancy. distinguishing transfer, coupling, and market success as components. Transfer expectancy depends upon the products to be transported or exchanged, but when there is a need to estimate transfer expectancy, a combination of technical standards and performance standards must be applied. Though performance standards are intended to produce quality, the quality of the instrumentation to measure performance standards is often neglected. The development of high-quality performance standards first requires the delineation of the relevant dimensions of performance quality. The process of giving precision to performance standards may lead to the emergence of more acceptable technical standards. To illustrate some of these points, data is presented from the CONDUIT system for quality evaluation of computer-based curriculum materials. The performance quality of these products includes the dimension of transfer expectancy, as well as educational and scientific merit. Increased specification and impact of technical standards may provide greater incentives to authors and hence lead to the invention of products which have higher educational and scientific quality.     

Letter familiarity does not aid feature extraction

Summary Familiarity effects in visual letter processing were examined by means of a mutilation detection task. The uppercase E was used as the non-mutilated letter. One or two horizontal bars of the E were delected, to produce an upright or inverted F or L. These four mutilations of the E were assigned to the same response. In Experiment 1, brief exposure of the stimuli was followed by a backward mask. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that the display duration of the stimulus was increased and the backward mask was omitted. In Experiment 3, the overall luminance of the stimuli (luminance per point times length of the constituent line segments) was held constant. In Experiment 4, the upright and inverted non-E letter occurred in different blocks to encourage a normal (upright) letter processing strategy in the upright letter blocks. Accuracy (Experiment 1) and mean correct response times (all experiments) were not different for the upright and inverted F or for the upright and inverted L. These findings and converging results from other studies indicate that the higher familiarity of the upright letters did not aid feature extraction.