A device for the easy administration of volatile anesthetics to rats undergoing stereotaxic surgery

Conventional procedures do not provide a practical method for the administration of volatile anesthetics such as halothane to rats while they are undergoing stereotaxic surgery. This paper describes a device which meets this need and which is easy and inexpensive to construct. A two-piece cylinder cut from the mouth of a polyethylene bottle forms a closed system around the muzzle of a rat and does not interfere with the stereotaxic apparatus or with the operation itself. The cylinder is attached to any standard device for the dispension of volatile anesthetics. The immediate advantage is that behavioral assesaments can be made relatively soon after surgery.     

Detection of extraneous signals during sentence recognition

In two separate experiments, 40 Ss were presented with recorded sentences during each of which a click occurred. Ss had to depress a key as soon as they heard the click. RTs were f aster when the click was located at the major syntactic break of the sentence compared with RTs to clicks not at a break. This confirmed the hypothesis that processing load is a function of the surface structure of sentences, although the role of minor breaks was not clear. A second finding was that RTs were slower when the click was in the first rather than in the second half of the sentence. This can also be explained in terms of differential processing loads.     

Selective eye movements to simultaneously presented stimuli during discrimination

Human Ss, when given a discrimination task whose stimuli varied in dimension and relevance, always chose and ftxated more frequently the stimulus they had been reinforced for choosing. Decreasing the brightness reduced the choice and ftxation preference for form stimuli over line stimuli and raised total ftxation frequency. Ss decreased fixation frequency to discriminanda with practice.     

Signalled and unsignalled free-operant avoidance in the pigeon

Pigeons were trained to depress a lever to avoid electric shock under free-operant avoidance schedules without a warning signal, or with a warning signal that could be terminated only by a response. Most birds in the signalled avoidance procedure terminated more than 50% of the warning signals before shock. In the unsignalled avoidance procedure, several birds formed a temporal discrimination and received relatively few shocks; other birds responded only in post-shock bursts, and received many more shocks.     

Management skill in student organizations

Seventy-two social fraternities were studied to discover some reasons for the variation in the degree of success attained by these student organizations on a college campus. The specific factors studied were management practices that could be employed by the groups. Analysis revealed a significant positive relationship between success as a fraternity and the use of certain management practices, and it identified several individual practices or characteristics highly associated with more successful groups. This article proposes that student organizations would find such practices influential in their future survival and success.     

Ethics and Counseling Decisions

Although some behavioral scientists and practitioners contend that man has no genuine moral choices to make, common sense and philosophical reflection ineluctably affirm the moral nature of man. When young people are faced with moral decisions, they often seek the assistance of a counselor. Although such counselors are routinely expected to aid clients in making decisions about their education and their careers, there is considerably less agreement about their responsibility for helping students to make moral choices. The central thesis of this article is that a knowledge of ethical theories, the practical principles which flow from them, and the method of decision-making which they indicate will enable the counselor to assist his clients with their moral problems.     

Need for approval and counseling outcomes

The intent of this study was to determine the effects of a clients' need for approval on the outcomes of counseling. The expectation was that clients who have a high need for approval by others would cooperate more with the counseling process and would more often be successful in the sense of being rehabilitated. The Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale was administered to 167 applicants at a state rehabilitation agency immediately after the initial interview. It was hypothesized that successfully rehabilitated clients would obtain significantly higher social desirability scores than those clients who were not successful. The results confirmed the hypothesis at the .01 level of significance.