The relationships among cognitive development,locus of control,and gender

Research has shown that perhaps 50% of all adults in this country are not able to perform abstract reasoning tasks described as formal opertions in the Piagetian cognitive developmental framework. Abstract reasoning is related to an individual's ability to perceive contingencies between their actions and subsequent outcomes. This pattern is seen as crucial for the development of an internal locus of control. Fifty-eight male and female undergraduates completed the Rotter Internal-External scale and a Cognitive Developmental Level assessment. For women, a highly significant inverse relationship was demonstrated between cognitive developmental level and locus of control. Women with higher levels of cognitive development were more likely to be internal. For men, no such relationship was found. Such results suggest that locus of control develops differently in men and women.     

Between Addition and Difference: A Place for Religious Understanding in a World of Science

Among contemporary religious believers, some follow in the footsteps of Newton, allowing their religious understanding to fill in gaps left by the sciences. Others take a more Wittgensteinian approach, discretely separating religious from scientific ways of thinking. Because neither of these relatively irenic positions captures the important element of cultural reform that is prevalent in so much of the religious life of the past, George Lakoff's recent work in cognitive studies is used to suggest ways that religious ideas may be used to challenge and enrich scientific thought. A scrutiny of Richard Dawkins's biological analyses of human behavior reveals the distorting limitations of exclusively scientific understanding, thereby clearing conceptual space for genuinely religious values, actions, responsibilities, and forms of human life.     

Predicting career performance of physicians using the biographical inventory approach

Two critical problems face professional and technical schools and their admissions committees: (1) the criterion problem of defining what constitutes a “good” career practitioner, and (2) the predictor problem of assessing in advance which applicants to the various schools are most likely to become these “good” career practitioners (and not just good students). The present project, working with a 333 physician sample, was designed to establish such criteria and predictors in the field of medicine. Seven important composite and summary criteria were established and five of them were successfully predicted with cross-validities at levels beyond .40 and ranging as high as .56 by a 351-item biographical inventory. A triplecross validation item-analysis design was used.     

Retrieval processes in fifth graders and adults

This research was concerned with retrieval processes which underlie conceptual clustering. In a free recall task with categorized lists, fifth graders' and adults' retrieval was examined temporally by means of interword response times. List organization and retrieval cue factors were manipulated in order to assess the developmental relevance of an hypothesized three component retrieval model. The results indicated that both age groups used a qualitatively similar retrieval strategy, involving search for and decoding of higher-order memory units. Providing retrieval cues eliminated the category search component, but also increased the likelihood of exhaustive recall attempts under random presentation conditions. The results were discussed in terms of the inter-relationships between storage and retrieval strategies. Age-related differences in retrieval time were attributed to insufficient reorganization during input and failure to attempt to recall all of a category's members.     

Maintaining disulfiram ingestion among outpatient alcoholics: a security-deposit contingency contracting procedure

Disulfiram is frequently prescribed to alcoholic patients as a deterrent to drinking. Although ingestion of ethanol by a disulfiram patient quickly results in an intense dysphonc reaction, the drug is not generally credited with significant value in alcoholism treatment (Mottin, 1973). It is suggested that most alcoholics simply stop taking the medication (Gerrein et al., 1973). and review articles conclude that motivation for abstinence is the crucial variable involved in successful disulfiram treatment (Ditman, 1966: Mottin, 1973).Motivation may be a characteristic of environmental contingencies rather than of individuals. If so, environmental contingencies should permit one to design into a disulfiram treatment progrim the requisite motivation to achieve therapeutic success. Contingency management procedures supporting disulfiram ingestion reported to date (Liebson et al., 1973: Haynes, 1973) have been of the sort to be imposed upon difficult populations rather than offered to general treatment applicants. Contingency contracting may represent a technique for supporting disulfiram ingestion appropriate to the broader general population of voluntary alcoholism treatment applicants. Contingency contract treatment (Homme, 1969; Stuart, 1971) is a procedure in which client and therapist mutually agree to establish an incentive for the client to achieve a behavioral goal. Contingency contracts can be viewed as a form of self-control therapy, and have been applied in a wide variety of problem areas, including school problems (Homme, 1969: Cantrell, et al., 1969). delinquency (Stuart, 1971),weight control (Mann, 1972). smoking reduction (Elliott and Tighe, 1968: Winett, 1973), drug abuse (Boudin, 1972), and alcoholism (Miller, 1972).Frequently contingency contracting involves the client's posting of a financial security deposit to serve as his incentive for achieving the agreed-upon therapeutic goal (Tighe and Elliot, 1968). This security deposit can be earned back consequent upon achieving specific goals, or sacrificed consequent upon failure. Controlled studies by Mann (1972) and by Winett (1973) have demonstrated this security-deposit procedure to be effective in enhancing weight loss and smoking reduction, respectively.We report here on our experience with application of the security deposit contracting procedure to maintaining routine disulfiram ingestion among outpatients in an alcoholism treatment program.     

Compound conditioning: Elimination of the blocking effect

Prior conditioning employing one element of a compound stimulus as the CS blocked the acquisition of a Conditioned Emotional Response (CER) to the second element of a simultaneous compound stimulus that was subsequently used as the CS in further conditioning trials. Presentation of a brief “surprise” stimulus 3 or 5 sec after the occurrence of the US during the compound trials eliminated the blocking effect.     

Reversal and nonreversal shifts in autistic children

Reversal and nonreversal shifts in nineteen 2- to 14-year-old autistic children were studied. Each child was taught both a reversal and nonreversal shift discrimination task. The reversal shift condition entailed teaching the child to respond to one (the S+) of a pair of stimuli during training and subsequently reversing the S+ during testing. The nonreversal shift condition consisted of teaching the child two unrelated discriminations during training and testing. The results indicated that the older autistic children did better on reversal shifts than younger children who did better on nonreversal shifts. These findings are consistent with those for normal children.     

Training school psychologists in neuropsychological assessment: Current practices and trends

Directors of school psychology programs at the Master's, sixth-year and doctoral levels were surveyed as to their program's degree of emphasis in neuropsychological screening and assessment. Despite variability according to program level, directors identified a need for training in these areas. This was particularly evident at the doctoral level, where greater flexibility exists in designing a student's program of studies. The results of this survey support the notion that training in neuropsychological screening and assessment techniques is appropriate in the preparation of specialists in the area of school psychology.