A survey of communicative disorders students' attitudes toward stuttering

Cooper's (1975) Clinician Attitudes Toward Stuttering (CATS) inventories were conpleted by 1,902 speech-language pathology and audiology students from 33 universities, each in a different state. The majority of respondents perceived stutterers as having psychosocial problems and believed that client and parental counseling were essential aspects of treatment. These views were relatively unaffected by student training and clinical exposure. In addition, most of the assumptions of Johnson's diagnosogenic theory of stuttering were held by the majority of the students surveyed. Most of the respondents believed that stuttering was difficult to modify and that speech clinicians were neither adept nor comfortable treating stutterers. These latter attitudes were significantly affected by training, i.e., the more advanced the students' training, the more pessimistic their views on clinician competence. Other professional attitudes and the effect of training on them are also discussed.     

Helping as a function of empathic responses and sociopathy

The present study reports two experiments which investigated helping as a function of empathic anxiety (anxiety in response to modeled distress) and individual differences in sociopathic tendencies. The first experiment concerned the effects of empathic anxiety, sociopathy, and perceived similarity/dissimilarity to a distressed person on helping. As predicted, subjects who experienced high levels of empathic anxiety helped more than subjects who experienced low levels of empathic anxiety. High sociopathic subjects experienced lower levels of empathic anxiety and helped less than did low sociopathic subjects. However, a path analysis disclosed that sociopathy's relationship to helping was not due to (or mediated by) empathic anxiety. The similarity manipulation did not influence empathic anxiety or helping. In the second experiment, subjects were classified as primary or secondary sociopaths (based on their levels of trait anxiety). As in the first experiment, empathic anxiety and sociopathy were significantly related to helping. Primary sociopaths displayed less empathic anxiety than secondary sociopaths, but the two groups did not differ in their willingness to help. Thus, in neither study could the sociopath's behavior be explained by empathic anxiety. The discussion concerned empathy as a mediational variable in helping and the role of personality variables in helping. A post hoc explanation of the sociopath's behavior, based on Schwartz' theory of the characteristics of helpers, was proposed.     

A comparison of the roles of exemplar,action, coordinate,and superordinate relations in the semantic processing of 4- and 5-year-old children

Four types of semantic relation, assumed by different researchers to be implicated in the organization of semantic information, were investigated by means of false recognition and word association tasks presented to independent samples of 4- and 5-year-old children. The same set of basic object stimulus words was used for each task as a means of validating the findings. Twenty-four girls and twenty-four boys at each age level were divided into four experimental groups for the false recognition task. One of four categories of experimental foil words, representing the four types of semantic relation, namely, exemplar, action, coordinate, and superordinate, was presented to one of the four groups. It was found that 4-year olds produced false alarms to exemplar and action relations significantly more frequently that to coordinate and superordinate relations. Five-year olds, in contrast, produced false alarms to exemplar and coordinate relations significantly more frequently that to action and superordinate relations. An independent group of 12 girls and 12 boys at each age level took part in the word association task. Among the 4-year olds, action relations were produced significantly more frequently than either particularization (exemplar and contextual) or coordinate relations. Among the 5-year olds, action relations were produced significantly more frequently than particularizations but the difference between action and coordinate relations was no longer significant. Coordinate groupings, following Riegel [in G. B. Flores d'Arcais & W. J. M. Levelt (eds.), Advances in psycholinguistics. New York: American Elsevier, 1970], were interpreted as implicit classifications derived from the intersect of stored relations. There was little evidence to support the hypothesis that young children comprehend word meanings in terms of logical class inclusion structures.     

DIFFERENT ARCHITECTURES OF CREATIVITY: LOUIS AND NATHANIEL KAHN

The author analyzes Nathaniel Kahn's documentary film My Architect: A Son's Journey, a tribute to the writer‐director's father Louis, the famous architect, who died suddenly when Nathaniel was eleven years old. The film's poetic, evocative images form a testimony to the silent working through that Nathaniel did in searching for his lost father and to the complex intertwining of mourning and creativity. Creativity is seen as both the cause and the effect of working through, as it gives life to a new meaning and allows replacement of the lost object by an object found again. Bereavement, symbolization, and the birth of representation appear to be connected with one another, both when the most elementary representations are involved and when the more complex and artistic ones are. Where and when it is possible to recover a representation that can survive the absence of the lost object, there is a potentially creative psychic space that can be made fertile again.     

On ego development and the structure of personality

present a theory of ego development as composed of several substructures related so that achievement of a given stage in one substructure is necessary but not sufficient for achieving the corresponding stage of another. The postulation of an exact relation belies what is known of the texture of human behavior and is premature in the absence of precise measurement of the several substructures and precise matching of stages. An alternative, the empirical method of simultaneously constructing a measure of ego development and portraits of the several stages, which Snarey et al. criticize for lack of strict logical coherence, is in the best tradition of contemporary science. The stage portraits are “prototypes” or “fuzzy sets.” Any mental structure can be divided into substructures, but the most general, superordinate structure is likely to prove most useful.