Child custody disputes: A review of legal and clinical resolution methods

This paper reviews existing practices from the mental health, marriage and family therapy, and legal professions which offer alternatives to traditional adversarial custody resolution methods. Based upon suggestions from legal and mental health professionals, the authors advocate allocating state resources for interprofessional family courts which would provide custody counseling, mediation, evaluation, and consultation as alternatives to adversarial methods.     

Ambulatory characteristics of the visually disabled

Ground-reaction force patterns were examined in three groups: sighted, blindfolded, and blind. Fifteen subjects, aged 19 to 41, participated in the study. Ten walking trials were collected over a 5-meter distance. The data were analyzed by normalization for body weight, extraction of specific ground-reaction force parameters through force-time curve analysis routines, and averaging across the ten trials for each subject. Results of a one-way analysis of variance indicated that there were no significant differences when force patterns were analyzed in terms of mediolateral and vertical ground-reaction force components. Blind subjects were shown to have significantly greater (p < 0.05) maximum braking and propelling forces.     

The development of spatial and class relations in four young children with right-cerebral-hemisphere damage: Evidence for an early spatial constructive deficit

This study followed the development of four children with right-hemisphere injury on a series of manipulative classification tasks to determine whether and how early brain injury affects the development of spatial and class relations. The children were first tested at about 2 years of age. Their data were compared with previously collected data from 18- to 42-month-old normal children, and with data from four young children with left-hemisphere injury. The results showed the children with right-hemisphere injury do not generate a particular spatial relation (next to) in their spatial groupings with the same frequency as normal or left-hemisphere damaged children, although they do generate in and on relations with normal frequency. An apparent deficit in the development of class relations is shown to be secondary to the spatial deficit, in that it is evident only in tasks that require spatial grouping.     

Spiritual well-being in older adults: Harmonious interconnectedness

The current study was designed to identify indicators of spiritual well-being in persons 65 years of age and over, using a grounded theory approach through the constant comparative method of data analysis. The basic social process of harmonious interconnectedness was discovered. This process was the unifying force between categories and within each identified category. The study has implications for health care personnel in that it provides a basis for assessing spiritual well-being in patients.This study was partially funded by a special project grant from Marquette University.     

Using Cognitive Dissonance to Encourage Water Conservation1

In a field experiment on water conservation, we aroused dissonance in patrons of the campus recreation facility by making them feel hypocritical about their showering habits. Using a 2 × 2 factorial design, we manipulated subjects “‘mindfulness” that they had sometimes wasted water while showering, and then varied whether they made a “public commitment” urging other people to take shorter showers. The “hypocrisy” condition-in which subjects made the public commitment after being reminded of their past behavior-was expected to be dissonance-arousing, thereby motivating subjects to increase their efforts to conserve water. The results were consistent with this reasoning. Compared to controls, subjects in the hypocrisy condition took significantly shorter showers. Subjects who were merely reminded that they had wasted water, or who only made the public commitment, did not take shorter showers than control subjects. The findings have implications for using cognitive dissonance as means of changing behavior in applied settings, especially those in which people already support the desired goal, but their behavior is not consistent with those beliefs.     

Predicting performance on text: Delayed versus immediate predictions and tests

North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota Delayed judgments of learning for word pairs are more accurate than immediate judgments of learning when the memory test is delayed. In the present experiment, I investigated a similar paradigm with text. Participants predicted performance on texts either immediately after reading the texts or after a delay following the reading of other texts, and tests were given either immediately or after a delay. Immediate ratings with an immediate test produced the most accurate predictions, and immediate ratings with a delayed test produced less accurate predictions. Delaying both the ratings and the test did not produce more accurate predictions than immediate predictions and a delayed test. The results for delayed judgments of learning with text were different from those with word pairs.     

Item-specific effects in recognition failure: Reasons for rejection of the Tulving-Wiseman function

The present paper addresses the problems of whether recognition failure of recallable words is a function of both recognition and recall, and whether recognition failure is restricted to a small and specifiable subset of study items. A meta-analysis of the Nilsson—Gardiner database (Nilsson & Gardiner, 1993) showed that recognition given recall was positively correlated with recognition and negatively correlated with recall. Two new experiments are reported, the first one using 48 word pairs for which recognition failure was found in previous studies. An item analysis of the data demonstrated that recognition failure occurred primarily with noun—adjective pairs. The second experiment compared Norwegian—American and American—Norwegian name pairs. Wide deviation from the Tulving—Wiseman function (Tulving & Wiseman, 1975) was observed for the latter condition. In both conditions, recognition failure occurred with only the items for which the beginnings of names shared three or more letters. It is concluded that recognition failure occurs when there exists a relationship between the members of an A—B pair that is independent of their pairing in the study context. The Tulving—Wiseman function is the result of collapsing across items in the analysis of previous studies.