OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE PERFORMANCE AS INFLUENCED BY DRUG-INDUCED VARIATIONS IN ACTIVATION LEVEL

Performance was measured by seven sensorimotor and perceptual tests given to 30 students in six successive trials, spread over five hours, before and after the intake of either 15 mg dexamphetamine, zoo mg Pentobarbitone, or a placebo. Subjective performance, level of aspiration, wakefulness, and mood were measured by a scaling method. A close agreement was found between the amount of objective and subjective improvement following dexamphetamine, whereas the objective impairment induced by Pentobarbitone was not reflected in the subjective measures. These results were examined in relation to the other indices of activation.     

SCALES OF UNPLEASANTNESS OF ELECTRICAL STIMULATION

The subjective unpleasantness elicited by an A.C. current of 50 c/sec. applied to two fingers was scaled by 14 subjects using the methods of magnitude and of category estimation. Nine current intensities, ranging between 2 and 10 times the individual sensation thresholds, were used as stimuli. A power function yielded a good fit to the magnitude-estimation data; the exponent was 1.81. The difference between this value and a considerably higher exponent reported by previous investigators was interpreted in terms of the wider stimulus range used in the present study. The relation between the category scale and the magnitude scale had the same general form as that found in several previous investigations.     

Confidentiality Limits With Clients Who Have HIV: A Review of Ethical and Legal Guidelines and Professional Policies

The publication of the first counseling articles addressing confidentiality limits of clients who have HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and continue to be sexually active with an uninformed partner occurred 4 years ago. Since that time, dialogue about whether a helping professional may ethically and legally breach confidentiality has not resolved the dilemma but instead has created more questions and controversy for counselors. In this article the authors highlight the barrage of ethical issues regarding HIV and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AlDS), review ethical and legal guidelines pertaining to HIV and AIDS and confidentiality, summarize HIV and AIDS confidentiality policies of the major helping professional organizations, articulate questions that contribute to the confidentiality dilemmas, and challenge the American Counseling Association (ACA), formerly the American Association for Counseling and Development (AACD), to develop specific guidelines for counselors.     

Transfer effects as a function of sequential and quantitative schedule constraints

Schwartz (1982, 1988) found that a pretraining of contingent reinforcement interferes with subsequent rule discovery. The present study investigated the effects of schedule imposed sequential and quantitative constraints (Timberlake & Allison, 1974) on task performance in a subsequent test phase. Sixty-four Ss, students of the University of Duesseldorf, were assigned at random to one of four experimental conditions, differing according to the presence vs. absence of sequential and quantitative constraints, respectively. Discrimination-learning performance and variability during test phase were significantly better for Ss experiencing sequential constraint during treatment. In contrast, the introduction of a quantitative restriction during treatment had no statistically significant effects on test phase performance.     

Linguistic versus attentional influences on nonlinguistic categorization in 15-month-old infants

Why linguistic input facilitates nonlinguistic categorization is frequently explained in terms of children's attention to uniquely linguistic forms such as words. However, whether this facilitation is rooted in the children's attention to word forms very early in lexical learning has not been examined directly. A previous experiment (Roberts & Cuff, 1989) provided a set of conditions under which 15-month-olds did not successfully categorize in the absence of linguistic input. The two experiments reported here replicate Roberts and Cuff (1989) exactly, with the exception that either language (Experiment 1) or instrumental music (Experiment 2) was provided as accompanying input. Infants in both experiments successfully categorized and significantly increased attention during habituation. Although directly documenting the influence of language on categorization prior to the “vocabulary explosion,” this influence does not appear attributable to the presence of word forms. Instead, factors common to language and music (e.g., attention-getting properties or factors influencing attention) may facilitate nonlinguistic categorization at the beginnings of word learning.     

Automatic identification of storytelling responses to past-behavior interview questions via machine learning

Structured interviews often feature past-behavior questions, where applicants are asked to tell a story about past work experience. Applicants often experience difficulties producing such stories. Automatic analyses of applicant behavior in responding to past-behavior questions may constitute a basis for delivering feedback and thus helping them improve their performance. We used machine learning algorithms to predict storytelling in transcribed speech of participants responding to past-behavior questions in a simulated selection interview. Responses were coded as to whether they featured a story or not. For each story, utterances were also manually coded as to whether they described the situation, the task/action performed, or results obtained. The algorithms predicted whether a response features a story or not (best accuracy: 78%), as well as the count of situation, task/action, and response utterances. These findings contribute to better automatic identification of verbal responses to past-behavior questions and may support automatic provision of feedback to applicants about their interview performance.     

Biological Sex and Psychological Gender as Predictors of Routine and Strategic Relational Maintenance

The current study contributes to 2 growing areas of research: one distinguishes between routine and strategic relational maintenance behaviors, and the other concerns the relative utility of biological sex and psychological gender as predictors of communication behaviors. Specifically, we sought to uncover sex and gender differences in routine and strategic maintenance and to test the relative strength of each as predictors of routine and strategic maintenance. Survey data were collected from 189 individuals in romantic relationships. Results indicated only one sex difference; women use routine openness more than men do. However, femininity was positively associated with the routine use of advice, conflict management, and openness. Masculinity was positively associated with the strategic use of openness and tasks. Femininity was not associated with strategic maintenance, and masculinity was not associated with routine maintenance. The value of distinguishing between sex and gender to explain how individuals function in relationships is discussed.     

An Approach to Teaching Ethics Courses in Human Services and Counseling

This article presents multiple facets of a team approach to teaching and facilitating an ethics course for undergraduate human services students and a graduate ethics course for students majoring in counseling. Starting with general points, this article describes a specific, week‐to‐week approach to a 1‐semester course, concluding with sample student evaluative comments and an experienced professor/author's processing of the experience of preparing and teaching this course for many years.     

The World According to Men: It Is Hierarchical and Stereotypical

The present research was designed to test whether people who expect social relationships to be structured like pecking orders (interpersonal hierarchy expectation, IHE) are also prone to stereotyping and whether this relation is moderated by gender. In two studies, a total of 203 participants completed a self-report questionnaire on IHE (Interpersonal Hierarchy Expectation Scale, IHES) and either a questionnaire that measures a general tendency to stereotype (Acceptance of Stereotyping Questionnaire, ASQ, Study 1) or a projective measure that assesses the specific gender stereotype that low dominance positions are occupied by women and high dominance positions by men (Study 2). Results showed that both stereotyping measures were related to IHE, but only for men. Moreover, trait dominance did not mediate the relation between IHE and stereotyping.     

Using a multi‐feature paradigm to measure mismatch responses to minimal sound contrasts in children with cochlear implants and hearing aids

Our aim was to explore whether a multi‐feature paradigm (Optimum‐1) for eliciting mismatch negativity (MMN) would objectively capture difficulties in perceiving small sound contrasts in children with hearing impairment (HI) listening through their hearing aids (HAs) and/or cochlear implants (CIs). Children aged 5–7 years with HAs, CIs and children with normal hearing (NH) were tested in a free‐field setting using a multi‐feature paradigm with deviations in pitch, intensity, gap, duration, and location. There were significant mismatch responses across all subjects that were positive (p‐MMR) for the gap and pitch deviants (F(1,43) = 5.17, p = 0.028 and F(1,43) = 6.56, p = 0.014, respectively) and negative (MMN) for the duration deviant (F(1,43) = 4.74, p = 0.035). Only the intensity deviant showed a significant group interaction with MMN in the HA group and p‐MMR in the CI group (F(2,43) = 3.40, p = 0.043). The p‐MMR correlated negatively with age, with the strongest correlation in the NH subjects. In the CI group, the late discriminative negativity (LDN) was replaced by a late positivity with a significant group interaction for the location deviant. Children with severe HI can be assessed through their hearing device with a fast multi‐feature paradigm. For further studies a multi‐feature paradigm including more complex speech sounds may better capture variation in auditory processing in these children.