Empathy: Its effect on how counsellors are perceived

The importance of sex of counsellor, ethnicity, empathy and client-counsellor sex-pairings on clients' perceptions of the counsellor was investigated. 96 students were asked to rate black or white, male or female, and empathic or non-empathic counsellors, on attractiveness, expertness and trustworthiness. Contrary to previous research, sex of the counsellor, and sex of student-counsellor pairings, had no significant effect on counsellor ratings. Ethnicity of counsellor - which has been largely ignored in research until recently - was found to be a highly signifcant factor in students' ratings of the counsellor: black counsellors were rated significantly higher than white counsellors on attractiveness, expertness and trustworthiness. The importance of empathy as a requisite for the counselling process was supported: counsellors were rated higher on all three variables if they used an empathic approach. There were no interaction effects between the variables.     

Changes in Fear of AIDS and Homophobia in a University Population

A survey measuring attitudes toward fear of AIDS and homophobia, taken in the fall of 1985, was repeated in the fall of 1989 on the same university population. The results indicated that whereas fear of AIDS decreased, the degree of homophobia remained essentially unchanged. In addition, although respondents were much more knowledgeable about AIDS in 1989 than in 1985, there was no evidence of any change in the relatively high correlation between the fear of AIDS and homophobia.     

Lexical decision and aphasia: Evidence for semantic processing

Wernicke's and Broca's-Conduction aphasics and a Global aphasic were presented with a lexical-decision task in which English words and pronounceable nonwords were preceded by semantically related, unrelated, or nonword primes. The patients were also given a simple semantic-judgment task using the word pairs from the lexical-decision task. Wernicke's aphasics performed similar to normals and Broca's-Conduction aphasics showing significantly shorter latencies in making real-word identifications when preceded by a semantically related word. In addition, both superordinate and coordinate associates showed semantic-priming effects. Performance on the semantic-judgment task showed significantly more impairment in the aphasic group than in the normal controls. These results suggest that aphasics with even severe language impairments retain stored semantic information that may be automatically activated, yet is inaccessible to conscious semantic decision during metalinguistic tasks.     

Phonetic disintegration in aphasia: Acoustic analysis of spectral characteristics for place of articulation

In this study, we attempted to determine whether phonetic disintegration of speech in Broca's aphasia affects the spectral characteristics of speech sounds as has been shown for the temporal characteristics of speech. To this end, we investigated the production of place of articulation in Broca's aphasics. Acoustic analysis of the spectral characteristics for stop consonants were conducted. Results indicated that the static aspects of speech production were preserved, as Broca's aphasics seemed to be able to reach the articulatory configuration for the appropriate place of articulation. However, the dynamic aspects of speech production seemed to be impaired, as their productions reflected problems with the source characteristics of speech sounds and with the integration of articulatory movements in the vocal tract. Listener perceptions of the aphasics' productions were compared with acoustic analyses for these same productions. The two measures were related; that is, the spectral characteristics of the utterances provided salient cues for place of articulation perception. An analysis of the occurrences of errors along the dimensions of voicing and place showed that aphasics rarely produce utterances containing both voice and place substitutions.     

Attitude toward motherhood: Gender,generational, and religious comparisons

Attitudes toward mothering and motherhood are examined within a sample representative of college-educated young adults and their mothers. Factor structures are compared based upon response to the 40-item Motherhood Inventory. Two factors are indicated for males: a “chauvinism” factor describing women as appropriately serving and providing for men and children, and a factor that represents acceptance of contraceptive choice for women. For younger women, the theme of reproductive freedom includes autonomy in choice of motherhood as well as personal fulfillment; a second factor describes traditional rewards and responsibilities of motherhood. For older women, a single dominant factor represents a highly conventionalized definition of women's familial roles. On a scale of acceptance of reproductive freedom (the single common dimension observed for all groups), men score lower than women and Catholics score lower than non-Catholics.     

Experimental analysis of coding processes

The first part of the paper reports an investigation of the effects of the concreteness-imagery (C-I) value of stimuli and responses on the long-term retention of paired-associate lists. With degree of learning equated, the measures of retention after a 1-week interval showed a significant interaction of Stimulus by Response C-I: When the responses had a high value, recall was substantially better with low than with high stimuli; when the responses were low, there was no reliable difference as a function of stimulus value. Recall was best when abstract stimuli were paired with concrete responses. The second part of the paper is addressed to some current issues in the analysis of coding processes. Major emphasis is placed on the experimental and theoretical differentiation of encoding and decoding processes.     

The total time hypothesis,recall strategies,and memory for rapidly presented word strings

In three experiments the free recall of rapidly presented word strings was studied. The word strings were shown either in grammatical order or a scrambled order. It was found that the invariance of recall with various presentation times for grammatical sequences breaks down at presentation times between 175 and 250 msec. The order of recall, however, remains consistent with the type of sequence presented irrespective of presentation time. The amount of time requked to utilize syntactic information fully in free recall is of approximately the same order of magnitude as that required to read the words.     

A “labial” feature analyzer in speech perception

A selective adaptation experiment was conducted to determine the ability of various adapting stimuli to alter the perception of a series of 13 synthetic speech syllables. The synthetic test syllables, which varied acoustically in the starting frequency and direction of second- and third-formant transitions, included stop consonant distinctions ofplace of articulation for the syllable types [bae], [dae], and [gae]. A systematic adaptation effect was produced in the locus of the bae-bae phonetic boundary for these stimuli after repetitive listening to each of the following adapting syllables: [bae], [p^hae], [mae], and [vae], indicating that perception ofplace distinctions among the stop consonants can be altered even by repetitive listening to certain speech sounds not belonging to the stop-consonant class.