The effects of value confrontation and reinforcement counseling on the career planning attitudes and behavior of adolescent males

An experiment was conducted to compare the relative effectiveness of a value confrontation procedure and a procedure based on verbal operant conditioning in enhancing career development attitudes and increasing the frequency of information-seeking behavior in rural adolescent males. Ninety subjects were identified as internally controlled or externally controlled based on their locus of control scores and then randomly assigned to one of the two experimental treatment groups or a control group. The value confrontation procedure involved developing an awareness of self-dissatisfaction about one's career planning and relating this self-dissatisfaction to the importance one gave to the values logical and responsible. These values had been identified empirically in this study as having a relationship to career planning. The reinforcement counseling treatment involved the interpretation of individual career maturity data followed by the verbal operant conditioning of responses indicative of career maturity. Post tests administered 7 weeks after the treatments showed that the value confrontation procedure resulted in significantly greater frequency of information seeking for internally controlled subjects when compared to the reinforcement counseling and control procedures. No treatment was significant in increasing the maturity level of career development attitudes.     

Why additive utility models fail as descriptions of choice behavior

This experiment sought to determine whether previously found metric violations of additive expectancy-value models C.F. J. C. Shanteau, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1974, 103, 680–691; J. G. Lynch and J. L. Cohen, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978, 36, 1138–1151) were attributable to the inappropriateness of these models or to nonlinearities in the relationship between numerical ratings and underlying psychological impressions. Undergraduate participants performed two tasks employing the same experimental stimuli. In the first task, they rated the subjective values of hypothetical bets, judged separately and in combination. In the second task, they made pairwise comparisons of the same bets in terms of preference. The use of the same experimental stimuli in both tasks allowed a test of alternative models of utility judgment through application of the criterion of scale convergence (M. H. Birnbaum & C. T. Veit, Perception and Psychophysics, 1974, 15, 7–15). Results suggested that the additive expectancy-value model of judgments of the utilities of combinations of outcomes should be replaced by a weighted averaging rule in which the weight given to the value of each outcome in the averaging process is greater when this value is negative and extreme than when it is neutral.     

Discrimination between reinforced action patterns in the rat

Laboratory rats were rewarded for face-washing, rearing, or scratching by being given the opportunity to press retractable levers for food reward. Yoked control animals received the same number of lever presentations and food rewards, but did not have to face-wash, rear, or scratch to obtain the levers. The experimental animals showed increases in number of bouts of reinforced target behavior above control levels, and the total amount of time spent face-washing increased when a 1.5-sec criterion for reinforced bout length was introduced. The activities in this experiment were made to serve a discriminative as well as an instrumental function, since the cue to tell the rat which lever to press for reward when the levers were presented was the activity that the rat had engaged in to obtain lever presentation. In two separate experiments high levels of discrimination between behaviors were obtained. Discrimination was worse following scratching than after other actions, and scratching also showed relatively poor instrumental conditioning. The relationship between Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning processes in this situation is discussed.     

Dichotic listening in a child recovering from acquired aphasia

A right-handed 6-year-old boy with acquired aphasia of left-hemisphere origin was investigated with various dichotic listening tasks 8 and 13 months after onset of the symptoms. Total right ear extinction was found repeatedly using both numbers and words as stimuli. Furthermore, magnitude of right ear extinction was not amenable to modification through verbal training, but disappeared when words were presented to the child's right ear with simultaneous white noise to the left ear. The findings are discussed in terms of the plasticity of cerebral dominance during childhood.     

Anxiety, learning, and memory: A reconceptualization

A new theoretical framework for work on anxiety and memory is proposed. Anxious subjects engage in task-irrelevant processing which preempts processing resources and some of the available capacity of working memory. They typically attempt to compensate for the adverse effects of this task-irrelevent processing on task performance by increased effort. It follows from these theoretical assumptions that anxiety will have differential effects on performance efficiency (i.e., the quality of performance) and on processing effectiveness (i.e., performance efficiency/effort). Anxiety will always reduce processing effectiveness, but will not impair performance efficiency if there is sufficient effort expenditure. Consequently, reliance on measures of performance efficiency will often obscure the detrimental effects of anxiety on processing effectiveness.     

Construct validity of four basic Vocational Interest factors

To find evidence of the generalizability of four interest factors established for tests within the Roe-Holland framework, factor scores derived from a Vocational Interest Inventory grounded in Roe's system were correlated with the empirically based Strong-Campbell Occupational scale scores. For this sample of 300 counseling clients, a majority of the hypothesized relations were found, and arranging the occupations along these bipolar dimensions both sharpened the definitions of the factors and provided an additional interpretive aid for counseling.     

Compounds,confounds, and models in developmental information processing: A reply to Trabasso and Foellinger

A point by point examination of Trabasso and Foellinger's paper shows their criticisms of my 1970 work to be based on errors of fact (regarding the data I reported) and errors of method (regarding proper procedures for model evaluation). Factual errors are refuted by summarizing crucial data reported in 1970 but ignored by my critics. Errors of method are refuted by contrasting my $\text{CSVI}\text{BE}$ model and data with Trabasso and Foellinger's model and data in the light of the scientific epistemology of model evaluation. The issues of “general” versus “local” models, their “empirical scope,” “number of empirical parameters,” and “simplifying assumptions” are examined. Five ways of evaluating models are distinguished, and in all five my 1970 model is shown to be superior to that of Trabasso and Foellinger. The 1970 data (in light of the controls built into the CSVI task) and new unreported data exhibiting developmental step functions confirm the model of a developmental growth of M (mental energy, working memory), which occurs concurrently with and independently from the growth of executive/control structures. Executive growth alone cannot explain the obtained results.