Transpersonal approaches to counseling

The transpersonal movement is concerned with expanding the personal boundaries of individuals to facilitate mind and body self-control through various unusual modes, such as autogenic feedback, hypnosis, yoga, and meditation. This article discusses transpersonal approaches to counseling with emphasis on the possibilities of using suggestion, relaxation, hypnosis, imagery, and dreams. The author offers a concept of transpersonal counseling in which children would be trained to control their own mental, emotional, and physiological processes.     

Intervention packages: an approach to self-management

Intervention packages—planned units of instruction and practice designed to deal with specific student problems—offer a systematic, economical strategy for counseling. Not only do the packages allow the counselor more time for counseling individuals and small groups but they also give students a feeling of greater control over their behavior and environment. This article suggests guidelines for developing and administering intervention packages.     

Visual and tactual form discrimination: Psychophysical comparison within and between modalities

Intermodal perceptual equivaience was investigated, using visual and tactual oddity discrimination and cross-modal matching-to-sample tasks. Four groups of Ss were presented with 100 problems made up of randomly derived forms from five levels of sidedness. The same quadratic relationship was observed for all tasks as a function of complexity, with optimal performance at eight sides. Comman information utilization, as indicated by intercorrelations of performance variables and by correlational analyses with differences in form measures, was not as pronounced within side classes. Evidence concerning the nature of pattern-feature usage in discrimination was obtained from graphical analyses.     

Visual information processing of sequentially presented inputs: III. Further effects of list length and interstimulus interval values on sub-span storage and retrieval mechanisms

Two experiments were carried out, employing a computer-based cathode-ray tube display system, to study further the effects of sub-span Hst length, i.e., two, three, four, and five decimal digits, and relatively small interstimulus interval (ISI) values, i.e., 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 msec, on visual information processing, storage, and retrieval mechanisms. The results of the first experiment confirmed the compttcated intenctions found in two earlier studies between Hst length and ISI values, but with much smaller ISI values than employed preriousfy. The results of the second experiment, in which unequal ISI values were employed within the same length input string, showed little effect resulting from this parameter, but it was suggested that a wider distribution of different ISI values within the same length input string would produce very strong effects.     

Attention in bisensory simultaneous short-term memory

Subjects were presented with simultaneously visual and auditory material. They were instructed to attend to only one modality but were required to recall materials from both modalities, one before the other. Results supported a previous suggestion that visual recall is minimum under conditions of simultaneous presentation. That is, in situations where S is allowed to divide his attention between both inputs, visual recall was no greater than when his attention was directed away from visual input and to auditory input. It was noted that this difference in recall between the two modalities was limited to verbal material, as other data indicate the opposite effect for nonverbal material.     

Training the absolute identification of pitch

Two methods for training the absolute judgment of pitch, reference training and series training, were studied. Reference training concentrated during training on the identification of three reference tones in a set of nine pure tones, while series training gave equal weight during training to the identification of all nine tones. Results of pre- and posttraining tests, scored for the number of correct judgments, showed that reference training was more effective than series training for listeners with musical experience. In addition, discriminability (d′) scaling of pre- and posttest performance indicated that reference training was particularly effective for training listeners with musical experience when the nine tones of a set were grouped into three pitch classes—high, medium, and low pitch. Listeners without musical experience benefited from both training methods, but their overall improvement was less than that for musical listeners.