Book reviews

Private Practice Youngstown, Ohio 44512     

The last invasion of human privacy and its psychological consequences on survivors: A critique of the practice of embalming

In spite of the fact that it is required only occasionally for sanitary reasons and not legally mandatory, the practice of embalming is widespread in contemporary American society. This study explores the historical, cultural and psychological factors which gave rise to the practice of embalming and why the practice continues. Two case studies are presented in which delayed grief reactions were present; linkages with embalming are described. It is suggested that the frightening finitude of the self and a fear of death in modern society have led to practices in which the corpse is viewed as looking “natural,” thus denying the reality of death. Embalming is seen as the final assault on the self, which can also carry with it problematic psychological consequences for the survivors.     

Attention to adjacent and separate positions in space: An electrophysiological analysis

Some theories of visuospatial attention propose that attention can be divided between separated zones of space that exclude the intervening region, whereas other theories state that the focus of attention must encompass aunitary, continuous zone. These contrasting viewswere evaluated in an experiment 9n which subjects were required to monitor two of four stimulus locations for targets; the two relevant locations were adjacent in one condition and were separated by an intervening irrelevant location in a second condition . To assess the distribution of attention across the relevant and irrelevant locations, event-related brain potentials(ERPa)were recorded to taskirrelevant “probe” stimuli that were occasionally presented at the individual stimulus locations. When the relevant locations were adjacent, probes presented at irrelevant locations elicited smaller sensory-evoked electrophysiological responses than probes presented at relevant locations, consistent with an attentional suppression of inputs from the unattended locations. When the relevant locations were separated by an irrelevant location, however, the sensory responses evoked by probes presented at this intervening irrelevant location were not suppressed, and target detection performance became slower and less accurate. These results suggest that attentionforms a unitary zone that may expand to encompass multiple relevant locations but must also include the area between them; as a result, irrelevant information arising from intervening locations is not suppressed and perceptual processing is compromised.     

Complexity Theory: Predictions Based on the Confluence of Science-Wide and Behavioral Theories

Views of behavioral and science wide complexity theories are briefly summarized. Theory-based predictions for human cognition and behavior based on both theories are advanced.
Streufert (in this special issue) has discussed the confluence of science-wide and behavioral complexity theory. Even though the former attempts to find common processes in all the sciences and the latter theory has, to date, limited itself to human behavior, there are many similarities in approach and in explanations of observed phenomena. Differences between the two theories are minor in comparison to their commonalities. Considering the many similarities, it may be useful to confirm (and possibly extend) behavioral complexity theory. A number of theorems, many familiar, some slightly modified, some new, will be provided at the end of this paper.     

Graphic Representations of Processing Structure: The Time-Event Matrix

Science-wide complexity theory presents strange attractors as lawful outcomes of nonlinear functions. The time-event matrices used by Streufert and associates to depict human information processing in complex task environments have similar characteristics. The use and construction of these matrices is described. The technique may be useful across sciences to depict the consequences of complex phenomena.     

School-Wide Behavioral Support: Starting the Year Off Right

Two years of office referral data are presented in evaluation of a school-wide behavioral support program designed to define, teach, and reward appropriate student behavior in a rural middle school (grades 6, 7, and 8). During 1994-95, the school had 530 students and recorded 2,628 office referrals. The 1995-96 school year began with a full day in which students were taught five school expectations. Throughout the year, students also received rewards for appropriate behavior and office referrals for infractions. Results during 1995-96 document a 42% reduction in office referrals from the previous year. While the evaluation results do not document functional relationship, they suggest an efficient process for evaluating school-wide behavioral support, teaching appropriate behaviors, and changing the overall climate of the school. Implications for future research, and the use of schools as a unit of analysis, are discussed.     

Constructing Cantorian counterexamples

Cantors diagonal argument provides an indirect proof that there is no one-one function from the power set of a set A into A. This paper provides a somewhat more constructive proof of Cantors theorem, showing how, given a function f from the power set of A into A, one can explicitly define a counterexample to the thesis that f is one-one.