Reactions following the sudden death of a classmate

Findings from a study of adolescents grief reactions following the sudden death of a friend and a classmate are presented. The group (26 classmates) was followed up after one and nine months. Interviews and a questionnaire including the Imapact of Event Scale and the Hogan Grief Inventory were used. The general grief scores on the Hogan Grief Inventory indicated that the grief level was similar to that of adolescents who had lost siblings. The scores on the Impact of Event Scale showed a descline in distress level from 1 to 9 months. However, after 9 months about 1/5 of the students still scored above a clinical cut-off point indicating post-traumatic stress levels. Recommendations for improving help following such events are presented.     

校长领导行为与校长类型

对3800名中小学教师和200名校长进行问卷施测,考察校长工作角色五个方面的相互关系,并在此基础上对校长领导行为进行聚类分析,得到四个类型。四种类型校长所在学校的组织气氛和学校效能感均有显著差异。     

Quantitative and methodological aspects of stimulus equivalence

The number of different ways of linking stimuli in the training phase of a conditional discrimination procedure designed to teach equivalence relations has hitherto been underestimated. An algorithm from graph theory that produces the correct number of such different ways is given. The establishment of equivalence relations requires transitive stimulus control. A misconception in a previous analysis of the conditions necessary for demonstrating transitive stimulus control is indicated. This misconception concerns responding in an unreinforced test trial to a negative rather than a positive comparison stimulus. Such behavior cannot be attributed to discriminative control by degree of association with reinforcement if the negative comparison stimulus has been less associated with reinforcement than the positive comparison stimulus in an antecedent training phase.     

Application of optimal sign-vectors to reliability and cluster analysis

Expressions involving optimal sign vectors are derived so as to yield two new applications. First, coefficient alpha for the sign-weighted composite is maximized in analogy to Lord's scale-independent solution with differential weights. Second, optimal sign vectors are used to define two groups of objects that are maximally distinct in terms of a function of the squared euclidean distances between groups. An efficient computing algorithm is described along with several examples.This research was supported in part by a research grant (DA 01070) from the U. S. Public Health Service.     

The effect of question repetition within interviews on young children's eyewitness recall

This study investigated the influence of question repetition and question type (answerable, unanswerable, or opinion seeking) on children's recall. A total of 136 children (5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds) watched a live 15-min presentation. One week later, the children were asked 20 questions that were repeated an additional two times within the interview. Accuracy of children's responses to unanswerable questions declined with repetition. Children were more likely to change a response to an unanswerable question than to an answerable question. Overall, children maintained the same answers to only three-quarters of the repeated questions. The most common pattern of change was for children to change their answer the second time a question was asked and then to maintain that answer when questioned again. The high percentage of changed answers within a single interview has important implications for forensic interviewing.     

Derived stimulus relations, semantic priming, and event-related potentials: testing a behavioral theory of semantic networks

Derived equivalence relations, it has been argued, provide a behavioral model of semantic or symbolic meaning in natural language, and thus equivalence relations should possess properties that are typically associated with semantic relations. The present study sought to test this basic postulate using semantic priming. Across three experiments, participants were trained and tested in two 4-member equivalence relations using word-like nonsense words. Participants also were exposed to a single- or two-word lexical decision task, and both direct (Experiment 1) and mediated (Experiments 2 and 3) priming effects for reaction times and event-related potentials were observed within but not across equivalence relations. The findings support the argument that derived equivalence relations provides a useful preliminary model of semantic relations.     

Mental rotation and temporal contingencies.

A task that requires subjects to determine whether two forms of the same shape, but in different orientations, are mirror images or identical except for orientation is called a handedness recognition task. Subjects' reaction times (RT) on this task are consistently related to the angular disparity (termed alpha) between the two presented forms. This pattern of data has been interpreted to indicate that subjects solve the task by imagining that one of the forms rotates into the orientation of the other (termed mental rotation). The speed with which one imagines one of the forms rotating has been widely considered a fixed capability of the individual, and thus immune to the effect of contingencies. We present an experiment that assesses the effects of temporal contingencies in a handedness recognition task on the slope of the function RT = f(alpha). The data indicate that the slope of this function can come under the control of temporal contingencies.     

我国大学科系职业兴趣类型图初探

为了使ＨＯＬＬＡＮＤ式中国职业兴趣量表实用化,本研究以Ｐｒｅｄｉｇｅｒ关于工作世界图的构想来建构适合我国中学生使用的大学科系职业兴趣类型图。通过各种检验,在理论上获得了支持。     

Sprachspiel vs. vollständige Sprache

The article formulates a criticism of Wittgenstein's later philosophy which, in its substance, I would like to think, is fairly the same as the (hermeneutic) criticism issued by Apel and Habermas in the sixties. Contrary to these philosophers, however, I try to make the point by focusing on the distinction between language game and language, respectively between intralanguage relations of family resemblance (between language games) and interlanguage translation relations. The notion of a complete language is introduced — completeness of a language being, roughly, its possibility in principle of being translated into any (other) language — and the criticism of Wittgenstein is formulated as the allegation that he does not, or will not, acknowledge such a concept of completeness.So far the contents of the first part of the article. The rest of it assembles some hints, remarks and reminders which bear upon the question of the completeness of a language. These considerations include comments on the conditions of translatability, on the performative (agent's) knowledge or intention-in-action of the acting person, on Habermas' concept of communicative competence and on the notion of a responsible subject of action. It is alleged that to speak of translation and reporting an event as language games is misleading.     

Cluster analysis in community research: Epistemology and practice

Cluster analysis refers to a family of methods for identifying cases with distinctive characteristics in heterogeneous samples and combining them into homogeneous groups. This approach provides a great deal of information about the types of cases and the distributions of variables in a sample. This paper considers cluster analysis as a quantitative complement to the traditional linear statistics that often characterize community psychology research. Cluster analysis emphasizes diversity rather than central tendency. This makes it a valuable tool for a wide range of familiar problems in community research. A number of these applications are considered here, including the assessment of change over time, network composition, network density, person-setting relationships, and community diversity. A User's Guide section is included, which outlines the major decisions involved in a basic cluster analyses. Despite difficulties associated with the identification of optimal cluster solutions, carefully planned, theoretically informed application of cluster analysis has much to offer community researchers. Editor's note: Dr. Edward Seidman served as action editor for this article while serving as Associate Editor for Methodology.