Williams, Truth-Aimedness and the Voluntariness of Judgement

I contend that while at least one of the arguments advanced by Bernard Williams in his paper 'Deciding To Believe' does establish that beliefs, or more precisely, judgements cannot be decided upon 'at will', the notion of truth-aimedness presupposed by that argument also, ironically, provides the key to understanding why judgements are necessarily voluntary.     

The role of relative deprivation in majority-culture support for multiculturalism

In this paper, we investigate majority-culture attitudes to multicultural policy in Australia. Drawing on relative deprivation (RD) theory, we explore whether resistance to multicultural policies and initiatives is related to individual and/or group-based grievance claims of discrimination. To assess RD, we asked 517 Australian-born people who identified as White Australians to rate (a) levels of discrimination toward their own group, toward themselves personally as a consequence of their group membership, and toward immigrants to Australia, and (b) feelings of injustice and anger associated with such discrimination. Our findings show that, while perceptions of discrimination toward majority-culture Australians are commonplace, perceptions of discrimination toward immigrants are more so. We also found that higher ratings of group-based RD of Australians relative to immigrants, but not individual deprivation relative to immigrants, predicted opposition to multicultural policies and initiatives. Moreover, perceived group-based RD mediated the link between national identification and opposition to multicultural policies. The findings highlight, for the first time, the importance of group-based grievance claims by majority-culture members in opposing or supporting multicultural policy.     

Assessing psychologists' knowledge and attitudes toward near-death phenomena

Nina Thornburg's (1988) Near-Death Phenomena Knowledge and Attitudes Questionnaire was distributed to 326 randomly selected Illinois psychologists. Of 117 usable questionnaires received, the mean score for knowledge questions was 7.5 of a maximum score of 18. Respondents were most knowledgeable about near-death elements of peace, out-of-body transcendence, and tunnel/light phenomena. The mean score for the attitude portion of the instrument was 61.3 of a maximum score of 85 points for the most positive attitude. Seven percent of the respondents indicated having had a near-death experience, 19% indicated having counseling near-death experiencers, and 28% indicated having had personal contacts with an experiencer.     

Out of the laboratory and into the community. 26 years of applied behavior analysis at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project.

Application of Skinner's principles to socially significant human behavior had been well articulated by 1968 (Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968). Applications of these principles by Baer, Wolf, Risley, Hall, Hart, Christophersen, and their colleagues were in evidence as early as 1964 in the homes, schools, and clinics of inner-city Kansas City, Kansas, at the Juniper Gardens Housing Project. The work continues relatively uninterrupted, having contributed extensively to the literature of applied behavior analysis and the lives of community residents. This article describes the project and illustrates how applied behavioral research was initiated and extended, how the work addressed general concerns in psychology, and how it continues to address contemporary concerns within the community.     

Facial identity and facial speech processing: Familiar faces and voices in the McGurk effect

An experiment was conducted to investigate the claims made by Bruce and Young (1986) for the independence of facial identity and facial speech processing. A well-reported phenomenon in audiovisual speech perception—theMcGurk effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976), in which synchronous but conflicting auditory and visual phonetic information is presented to subjects—was utilized as a dynamic facial speech processing task. An element of facial identity processing was introduced into this task by manipulating the faces used for the creation of the McGurk-effect stimuli such that (1) they were familiar to some subjects and unfamiliar to others, and (2) the faces and voices used were either congruent (from the same person) or incongruent (from different people). A comparison was made between the different subject groups in their susceptibility to the McGurk illusion, and the results show that when the faces and voices are incongruent, subjects who are familiar with the faces are less susceptible to McGurk effects than those who are unfamiliar with the faces. The results suggest that facial identity and facial speech processing are not entirely independent, and these findings are discussed in relation to Bruce and Young’s (1986) functional model of face recognition.     

Neuromotor Functioning and Behavior Problems in Children at Risk for Psychopathology

Previous studies have found that early neuromotor deficits may be a precursor of later psychopathology. The present study examined the relationship between neuromotor dysfunction and behavioral deviance in children characterized by a variety of risk factors (parental schizophrenia, parental psychiatric disorder other than schizophrenia, and parental maltreatment). The sample consisted of 108 children (average age 9.75 years) who were assessed twice, approximately 1 year apart. It was found that maltreated children had poorer neuromotor functioning and more behavior problems than children who were not maltreated, regardless of parental psychiatric status. The results also indicated that the relationship between neuromotor functioning and problem behaviors varied as a function of parental psychiatric status. These findings suggest that, although the effects of maltreatment are generalized and pervasive, there are distinctive relationships between neuromotor functioning and behavioral deviance depending on the nature of the risk factors a child has been exposed to.     

Marriage guidance counselling: I. What clients think will help

Thirty-one first-time attenders for marriage guidance counselling were given a non-schedule standardised interview and a client questionnaire. The main aim was to identify the counselling and counsellor characteristics which clients considered would be most helpful in dealing with their problems. Traditional counselling skills such as the ability to be warm, supportive, understanding and a good listener were seen to be important by most clients. However, the vast majority of clients indicated that it would be helpful to receive the counsellor's opinion about their marriage, their personal problems and marriage in general: this is incompatible with a non-directive approach to counselling. Whilst clients may not know best how they should be helped, counsellors who fail to address their preconceptions risk mutual disappointment and premature termination of counselling.     

The near-death experience of a nonverbal person with congenital quadriplegia

This article describes the near-death experience (NDE) a 39-year-old man born with severe spastic quadriplegia had when he was two and one-half years old. Nonverbal because of cerebral palsy, the man was able to communicate about his experience after he heard a therapist talking to another person about NDEs. The man experienced a fairly typical NDE and has had seven subsequent out-of-body experiences, the latter hypothesized as temporary relief from his physical pain resulting from muscular spasticity.