Threats of suicide

For patients in treatment, how do suicidal feelings emerge, how do we judge the seriousness of suicide threats and what do we do? The literature on suicidal thinking, suicidal threats and suicidal acts is reviewed as well as some of the accumulated statistics for adults, adolescents and children. Some treatment principles and countertransference reactions are presented. The values of the therapist and the therapist's feelings toward death are seen as coloring the therapist's reaction to suicidal patients.     

Women and Therapy: A Survey on Internship Programs

Two hundred and ninety-nine internship programs and selected psychology graduate schools were surveyed by mail regarding their opinions and practices relevant to training in psychotherapy for women. The 94 usable replies included 55% of all APA approved programs. The results indicated that only a minority of training facilities deal in a systematic way with issues of sex bias and sex-role stereotyping in psychological practice. About 20% of the respondents expressed a need to improve their programs. Respondents' answers are detailed and the suggestion is made that egalitarian group supervisory meetings afford more opportunity than individual sessions to deal effectively with issues of sex bias and stereotyping.     

An investigation of the influence of student behavior on teacher behavior

The relationship between student behavior change and teacher reactions to the change was investigated. One fifth-grade teacher served as the subject and two students in her class were employed as teacher change agents. In a multiple baseline design, the students' disruptive behavior (the independent variable) was modified without the teacher's knowledge. The teacher's reactions toward the students (the dependent variable) was monitored on several dimensions including: teacher behavior, teacher attitude toward students, and the quality of teacher verbal statements. Results indicated that student behavior change influenced the teacher's behavior. Implications are that students possess potent reinforcing properties for teachers and that students should be trained to be effective students.     

Effects of peer tutoring and consequences on the math performance of elementary classroom students

The effects of unstructured peer-tutoring procedures on the math performance of fourth- and fifth-grade students were investigated. Students' performances in two daily math sessions, during which they worked problems of the same type and difficulty, were compared. When students tutored each other over the same math problems as they subsequently worked, higher accuracies and rates of performance were associated with the tutored math sessions. The use of consequences for accurate performance seemed to enhance the effects of tutoring on accuracy. The results from an independent-study control condition, which was the same peer-tutoring except that students did not interact with each other, suggested that interactions between students during the tutoring procedure were, in part, responsible for improved accuracy and rate of performance. When students tutored each other over different but related problems to those that they were subsequently asked to solve, accuracies and rates during tutored math sessions were also higher, suggesting the development of generalized skills in solving particular types of math problems.     

The Sander illusion as a function of relative space and component lines

Magnitude of the Sander illusion was measured as a function of two variables: (1) the orientation of the line normally separating the two smaller parallelograms and (2) the presence or absence of the horizontal lines and of the diagonal test lines. The results showed that, as the angle of the dividing line varied so as to shift the relative sizes of the two parts of the figure toward equality, the illusion effect decreased, approaching zero when the two areas were equal. The illusory effect was enhanced by the removal of the two test lines. Results were discussed in relation to the problem of assimilation vs contrast effects.     

A comparison of parents' models and expansions in promoting children's acquisition of adjectives

This study investigated the effects of parental models plus nondifferential praise and expansions plus nondifferential praise on 2-year-old children's spontaneous use of color and size adjective-noun combinations. Mothers modeled either a color or size adjective-noun combination and expanded the other. Both parental models and expansions increased the children's spontaneous use of the target adjective-noun combinations, but expansions produced a stronger effect than models. These results, and naturalistic data indicating that parents often provide a large number of expansions for their children, suggest that expansions may play an important role in normal language development.     

Contrast effects and their relationship to subsequent behavior

The present study attempted to apply social judgment theories to the effects of context on judgments of the importance of a social issue and on subsequent issue-related behavior. Subjects judged the importance of a target issue (recycling) in the context of either important or unimportant social issues and were subsequently asked in a separate setting for help on a local recycling project. Context produced contrast effects on rating scale judgments of the importance of recycling. These judgments, if salient, were then used as a basis for subsequent support of the recycling project. When either the initial judgment was not salient or no prior judgment of recycling was made, the importance of the context had a positive effect on amount of support for recycling, such that more help was given in the important context conditions. Results indicate that contrast effects on the ratings are response base rather than perceptual in nature, but that the rating, if salient, can serve as subsequent behavior and attitudes.     

ONGOING CONSULTATION AS A METHOD OF IMPROVING PERFORMANCE OF STAFF MEMBERS IN A GROUP HOME

A model of ongoing consultation was implemented in a community group home for 8 adults with severe and profound mental retardation. Two consultants, highly experienced in working with people with mental retardation and in the procedures used in group homes, taught staff members to use a token reinforcement system, to engage the adults in a variety of activities, and to improve the content and style of the staff members' interactions with the adults. The consultants taught skills to 9 staff members through brief mini-workshops, direct observation of the staff members' use of the skills during regular activities in the group home, and individual verbal feedback regarding a staff member's performance of the skills. Evaluation of the ongoing consultation process by the 2 consultants showed it to be effective in improving the performance of the staff members and in changing the behaviors of the adults who lived in the home. Continued implementation of the process, however, appeared to be necessary for the behavior changes of staff members to be maintained at high levels.     

Auditory discrimination: a three-variable analysis of intensity effects

The acquisition of auditory intensity discriminations in rats trained on multiple variable-interval extinction schedules was studied as a function of some of the variables that contribute to the speed of development of differential responding and the final level attained. The effects of three variables were isolated and studied in detail: (1) the decibel difference between the discriminative stimuli (intensity difference); (2) the intensity relationship between the stimuli (relative intensity); and (3) the position of the stimuli on the intensity continuum (absolute intensity). Each of the three variables generated orderly relationships and interacted with one another to produce complex effects upon differential responding.     

Type-based bigram frequencies for five-letter words.

Researchers often require subjects to make judgments that call upon their knowledge of the orthographic structure of English words. Such knowledge is relevant in experiments on, for example, reading, lexical decision, and anagram solution. One common measure of orthographic structure is the sum of the frequencies of consecutive bigrams in the word. Traditionally, researchers have relied on token-based norms of bigram frequencies. These norms confound bigram frequency with word frequency because each instance (i.e., token) of a particular word in a corpus of running text increments the frequencies of the bigrams that it contains. In this article, the authors report a set of type-based bigram frequencies in which each word (i.e., type) contributes only once, thereby unconfounding bigram frequency from word frequency. The authors show that type-based bigram frequency is a better predictor of the difficulty of anagram solution than is token-based frequency. These norms can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.