Certification and Licensure Issues

Certification and licensure are important credentials for counselors. In less than 25 years, licensure laws on counseling have been passed in 41 states and the District of Columbia. Although much progress has been made regarding certification and licensure, all is not bliss. A reaction to certification and licensure issues is provided.     

Travel: a long-range goal of retired women

The authors surveyed retired persons (predominately women) with regard to their immediate, intermediate, and long-range activities following retirement. As predicted, leisure travel emerged as a frequent long-range goal for persons retired more than 5 years. The travel activity preferences of long-retired older women present challenges and opportunities to both researchers and marketers. Length of trips and frequency of trips have been predicted from regression models, with trip length in particular being well predicted by the problem of daily life hassles. A theoretical model of continued post-retirement travel is presented as a variant of Solomon's opponent process theory of affect (R. L. Solomon, 1980). The authors suggest that to the degree that places traveled to are varied and different, older people may remain stimulated and continue to enjoy retirement.     

Individual differences in infant fearfulness and cognitive performance: a testing,performance, or competence effect?

The author conducted 2 studies to examine the relations between infant fear and cognitive testing performance in 12-month-old infants. In Study 1, fear was assessed by using 2 standard temperament questionnaires and a laboratory-based, standardized stranger approach. Individual differences in cognitive development were assessed using the Object Permanence Scale of the Infant Psychological Development Scales (I. C. Uzgiris & J. M. Hunt, 1975). All 3 assessments of fear significantly predicted object permanence performance, with correlations ranging from -.32 to -.35. In Study 2, fear was assessed via a maternal report questionnaire, and habituation performance was assessed via a basic-level categorization task. Familiarity with the examiner and with the testing environment was manipulated to test for a familiarity influence on performance. Testing revealed individual differences in both fear and habituation. Results suggest that highly fearful infants required more trials to habituate and were less likely to meet the habituation criterion than infants who were less fearful. Methodological and conceptual implications of these results are discussed.     

Reaction time reduction after parafoveal preview in a lexical decision task

Time and the accuracy of a lexical decision performed on a letter string (either a word or nonword), presented foveally after a parafoveal preview displayed at 5 degrees of eccentricity and 100 msec. duration were measured. Students of Padova University, 10 women and 7 men, ages 19 to 23 years were subjects. The hypothesis investigated was whether the facilitatory effect, a reduction in lexical decision time due to the parafoveal preview, was tied to global visual information acquired in the visual periphery during the preview presentation. In Exp. 1, eight subjects performed the task either with no preview (No Preview) or with a preview presented at 5 degrees eccentricity in two conditions, preview of the same foveal string (Preview-Letters) and preview of symbols ("x xx...") of the same length as the foveal string (Preview Symbols). In Exp. 2, 9 subjects performed the task with two preview conditions, No Preview and preview of the foveal string in uppercase letters at 5 degrees of eccentricity (Preview Uppercase). Analyses suggested the reduction in lexical decision time due to the Preview with respect to the No Preview condition is tied to global information extracted during parafoveal presentation. The reduction in lexical decision time depends on word texture, i.e., letters' identities and also word boundary, in addition to word length.     

Differential effect of lesion side on intra-individual variability in children with focal lateralized epilepsy

A differential impact of hemispheric side (left vs right) on cognitive measures, specifically Verbal and Performance IQ, has been described previously for both focal onset seizures and lateralized brain lesions. This study revealed a differential effect on intra-individual variability, measured as subtest scaled-score range, on the Dutch WISC-R and WISC-III, in children with epilepsy. The presence of documented brain lesion was associated with elevated variability on the Verbal Scale for the left hemisphere seizure group and with decreased variability on the Verbal and Full Scales for the right hemisphere seizure group.     

Reward Allocation by Impartial Allocators to Friend or Stranger Co-workers under Equal and Unequal Ability and Performance

The effects of a relationship variable (friends, strangers), an ability variable (equal, unequal), and a performance variable (equal, unequal) were studied in 40 male and 40 female university students. Eight versions of a hypothetical vignette were prepared to manipulate the eight treatment combinations. After reading an assigned vignette, subjects were asked to allocate $90 between two stranger or friend co-workers. Among other effects, the Relationship by Ability by Performance interaction was significant. The stranger, unequal ability, unequal performance allocations to the lower ability co-worker were significantly higher than the stranger, equal ability, unequal performance allocations, and the stranger, unequal ability, unequal performance allocations were higher than the friends, unequal ability, unequal performance allocations; this difference approached significance (p < .06). The questionnaire data revealed that, despite having favored strangers, the impartial allocators expected strangers to be less satisfied with their distribution than friends with their distribution. In this study, impartial allocators tended to compensate strangers to a greater extent for low performance or ability than friends or, alternatively, were more likely to ignore performance and ability differences between strangers than between friends.     

Validity Rates of the Personality Assessment Inventory and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory–2 in a VA Medical Center Setting

This paper presents some notions regarding the all important question of projective stimulus ambiguity. It is suggested that in spite of the observation that TAT stimulus ambiguity has been the most studied, the problem of stimulus ambiguity must be considered a vital problem in relation to projective tests as a whole. Findings specific to an extended DAP (involving the inclusion of a self-portrait) are reported and the relevance of these findings to the problem of stimulus ambiguity is discussed.     

Building a Bridge of Trust: Collaborative Assessment With a Person With Serious Mental Illness

Collaborative assessment utilizes psychological testing to help people make positive changes in their lives. Limited research has evaluated the utility of collaborative assessment for persons with serious mental illness. This case example uses the Personality Assessment Inventory to illustrate the usefulness of collaborative assessment with a person with serious mental illness. This approach informed not only diagnostic considerations but also revealed the client's current level of distress, contributed to enhanced therapeutic alliance, and directly pointed to psychiatric rehabilitation strategies.