An Interview With the Association for Spiritual,Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling Leaders: Craig S. Cashwell and J. Scott Young

American Counseling Association Fellows, past presidents of the Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling (ASERVIC), and close friends, Drs. Craig S. Cashwell and J. Scott Young have made a significant impact on the field of spirituality counseling over the past 20 years. This interview emphasizes their involvement in ASERVIC and the spirituality counseling field over the course of their careers and in the present, as well as the wisdom they have gained from their experiences.     

Prediction outcome and choice reaction time: Inhibition versus facilitation effects

In two-choice RT tasks Ss verbally predicted all stimulus presentations, two-thirds of the presentations, or none of the presentations. Effects of stimulus probability were similar for each type of prediction trial: Correct Prediction Outcome (PO), Incorrect PO, and No-Prediction (NP). When comparisons between Prediction and NP trials were between Ss, reactions on NP trials were significantly faster than reactions POs, but were not slower than reactions to Correct POs. However, when Prediction and NP trials occurred within Ss, reactions on NP trials were not faster than reactions to Incorrect POs, but were significantly slower than reactions to Correct POs. Speculations about Ss' implicit stimulus predictions are offered to interpret differential implications of inhibition and facilitation.     

Learning the functional significance of mnemonic actions: A microgenetic study of strategy acquisition

How children learn to use memory strategies in a microgenetic investigation of learning and metacognition is examined. Seven- and eight-year-olds were given two memory trials with 24 pictures on each of 5 consecutive days. Days 1 and 2 were baseline, practice trials; Day 3 included strategy training; and Days 4 and 5 were unprompted tests of strategy maintenance. All children were taught how to label, rehearse, and group the pictures as well as to self-test their own memories and use blocked recall. Half of the children were shown the actions and told to do them; the other half received elaborated feedback on the usefulness and appropriateness of the techniques for remembering. The elaborated instructional group exhibited significantly greater recall, clustering, strategic study behavior, and metamemory regarding the mnemonic techniques than the other group. Path analysis provided evidence of a causal role of training and metacognitive awareness that mediated the use of sorting and higher recall. The study illustrates how learning the significance and utility of mnemonic techniques can influence children's acquisition of the tactics as self-controlled strategies. In addition, the microgenetic method affords patterns of data across time and experience that permit richer interpretations of strategy learning and memory development.     

Toward a theory of apractic syndromes

Theoretical development on human motor behavior has occurred largely independently of data on pathological movement disorders. This paper represents an initial attempt to interface findings from studies of apraxia and those of normal motor behavior with a view to formulating a common theoretical framework. Such an integration may ultimately aid in understanding the nature of skill acquisition and provide insights into the organization of motor systems. Three putative theoretical models of movement control are discussed with reference to apractic syndromes. The most commonly accepted view—the hierarchy—possesses properties such as linear transitivity and unidirectionality of information flow that render it inadequate in explaining functional plasticity in the central nervous system. The heterarchy, which incorporates reciprocity of function and circular transitivity, is a more likely candidate but suffers from an inability to regulate the degrees of freedom of the system. Our favored candidate is the coalition model which embodies heterarchical principles, but in addition, offers a solution to the problems of degrees of freedom and context for motor systems. Evidence is reviewed from apraxia of speech and limbs in terms of a coalitional style of control and an experimental approach, consonant with coalitional organization, is developed. We promote the claim that an understanding of apractic behavior—and perhaps motor systems in general—will benefit when clinicians and experimenters embrace a theory of context and constraints rather than a theory of commands as is currently in vogue.     

Coding processes in preselected and constrained movements: effect of vision

Three experiments were conducted in which visual information was manipulated either at the endpoint or during preselected, subject defined and constrained, experimenter-defined movements. In Experiments 1 and 2 the subject's task was to reproduce the movement in the absence of vision. Augmenting the terminal location of the criterion movement with vision had no differential effect on reproduction in Experiment 1, although preselected movement accuracy was significantly superior to constrained. Providing vision throughout the criterion movement in Experiment 2 not only failed to improve the accuracy of constrained movements but decreased reproduction performance in preselected movements. In Experiment 3 procedures were adopted to control the allocation of the subjects' attention during the criterion movement. The subjects reproduced by vision alone, movement alone, or with both visual and movement information available. When subjects were informed of the modality of reproduction prior to criterion presentation, they were able to ignore concurrent input from vision and attend to movement information. In the absence of precues visual information was spontaneously attended. The data were interpreted as contrary to closed-loop assumptions that additional information necessarily enhances the strength of a motor memory representation. Rather, they can be accommodated in terms of Posner, Nissen and Klein's (1976) theoretical account of visual dominance and serve to illustrate the importance of selective attention effects in movement coding.     

Anti-Autonomism Defended: A Reply to Hill

In the current issue of this journal, Scott Hill critiques some of my work on the “is”-“ought” controversy, the Hume-inspired debate over whether an ethical conclusion can be soundly, or even validly, derived from only non-ethical premises. I’ve argued that it can be; Hill is unconvinced. I reply to Hill’s critique, focusing on four key questions to which he and I give different answers.

Construct validation of the Self-Control Schedule

The present paper describes an investigation of the construct validity of the English version of M. Rosenbaum's (1980, Behavior Therapy, 11, 109–121) Self-Control Schedule (SCS). A total of 121 Brigham Young University students took the SCS and several other measures. t tests were conducted between the Brigham Young University student SCS means and the SCS means of samples from two midwestern universities. Pearson correlations between the SCS, the SCS subscales, Rotter's I-E scale, the Manifest Anxiety scale, and the Religious Orientation scale were computed. Reliability analyses were conducted on the SCS subscales. The results (a) provide additional normative data about the SCS, (b) further establish the comparability of the Hebrew and English versions of the SCS, (c) expand the nomological network and support the construct validity of the SCS, and (d) indicate that the SCS may have potential as a multidimensional instrument.     

Personality differentiation and prediction of persistence in physical science and engineering

Discriminant analyses techniques were applied to freshmen California Psychological Inventory (CPI) and Holland Vocational Interest Inventory (VPI) data for 914 male students and were used to predict curricular membership after two years of university education. The results suggest that those who persist in physical science, engineering or other curriculum are significantly discriminable from one another on the basis of freshman personality data, and that these personality variables show reasonable predictive stability when applied to a cross validation sample. Physical scientists appear to be markedly differentiated from engineers or others along an introspection-intellectual versus social conventional dimension. The predictive power of CPI and VPI personality variables while statistically exceeding chance is considerably less than that previously reported for ability or interest measures.