Commentary on reviews of “outcome” studies of family and marital psychotherapy

Reviews of the outcome literature in family and marital therapy are critically evaluated. The literature is equivocal in regard to the effectiveness of family therapy, particularly in comparison to alternative forms of treatment, so that statements to the effect that family therapy has demonstrated its general efficacy would not appear to be justified. Problems are identified which require solution before the efficacy of family therapy can be demonstrated.Paper presented at the 45th annual conference of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, Chicago, Illinois, October 31, 1987.     

Equal Opportunity Programs: A Case for Counseling

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, under Title VI, requires that institutions of higher education submit enrollment figures according to ethnic breakdown for federal monies to be allocated. Such requirements are indicative of efforts to diversify student populations. The Higher Education Act of 1965 also incorporates a number of related programs—Supplemental Opportunity Grants, College Work Study, Talent Search, Upward-Bound—which are designed to provide direct or indirect assistance to disadvantaged students. (Gordon, 1975)     

Bilingualism and the perception of professional concepts

A selected set of professional concepts was subjected to analysis through two separate multidimensional scaling techniques, the INDSCAL and TORSCA models, to evaluate the intergroup perceptual differences of four experimental groups, made up of unilingual French, unilingual English and bilingual students. The linguistic relativism thesis provided the research hypotheses on the relationship between language access and usage and concept perception. The multidimensional scaling techniques were applied to the matrix of subjects' similarity judgments on pairs of concepts, thus enabling the identification of three dimensions. The dimensions were labelled as conjunctive, relational and disjunctive, and were assumed to be related to the criteria employed by the subjects in their similarity rankings. An analysis of variance of the individual saliences on each dimension provided evidence of linguistic relativism for both the relational and disjunctive dimensions. These findings support the contention that unilingual speakers of separate languages differ from each other and from bilingual speakers in their perception of professional concepts.     

The effects of spatial,temporal, and control variables on the free-recall serial position curve of retardates and equal-MA normals

Memory & Cognition - In Experiment I seven pictures were sequentially illuminated at a 3-see rate through seven translucent windows. A different window provided the starting point for each of...     

The impact of spouse monitoring on target behavior and recorder satisfaction

The objectives of this study were (a) to determine the impact of a spouse monitoring procedure on the target's (husband's) behavior and the recorder (wife's) view of the marriage and (b) to assess the relationship between the target's positive behaviors and the recorder's marital satisfaction rating. In one condition, husbands were informed that their behavior was being observed, whereas in a comparison group, husbands were kept unaware of the observation procedure. In both conditions, wives kept daily recordings of (a) positive behaviors emitted by their husbands and (b) perceptions of their marital relationships. No differences were found in rates of husbands' behavior or in wives' perceptions of their marriages as a function of the awareness manipulation. Analyses examining the relationship between spouse behavior and daily satisfaction ratings indicated a statistically reliable association, although the majority of variance in satisfaction ratings was attributable to unique subject variables.This article is based on a thesis submitted by the first author to the Department of Psychology of the University of Pittsburgh. The described research was supported in part by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Pittsburgh awarded to the second author.     

The interfering effect of word perception on letter identification

Subjects identified a single lowercase letter in a visual display by pressing one of two buttons. Two letters were assigned to each response. Groups received one of three context conditions: word, nonword, or single-letter displays. In words and nonwords, the flanking letters adjacent to the target varied as to whether they were response compatible or incompatible with the target. Single letters produced faster response latencies than either multi-letter condition, and words yielded slower latencies than did nonwords. Items Containing an incompatible-response flanking letter produced longer latencies than items containing a compatible flanking letter. Subgroups of subjects with different characteristic processing patterns were identified with a separate test. These subgroups were differentially affected by the context conditions in the letter-identification task. A greater subgroup difference was found in nonwords than in words.     

Correctional Literature and Other Resources

The preceding articles offer many new and exciting ideas in the field of corrections. As counselors, community workers, and educators, you may now have more specific questions regarding an area that is of particular interest to you. There are many new-approaches in penology and widespread manifestations of the old. Presented here is a wide cross section of some of the newest and boldest thinking in the correctional field.     

Stress-related immune changes in middle-aged and older women: 1-year consistency of individual differences.

This study reviews prior research and reports longer-term consistency of stress-related immune variables in middle-aged and older women who performed mental math and speech tasks 2 times 1 year apart. Leukocyte subsets, mitogen-induced lymphocyte proliferation, and natural killer cell activity were measured at baseline, after tasks, and after 30-min recovery. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) antibody titers were assessed at baseline. Pearson coefficients and standardized maximum-likelihood estimates of year-to-year covariances for leukocyte subsets and EBV titers showed moderately high to high baseline and posttask consistency and lower recovery consistency; consistency for other functional immune assays and reactivity scores for all variables was moderate to low. Results support longitudinal study of psychosocial context effects on tonic immune function and posttask scores.