Patent Productivity of Research Chemists as Related to Age and Experience

Some previous publications have indicated that the creative skills of chemists tend to decline once they are past their thirties or early forties. These conclusions have been based on such criteria of creativity as merit ratings, citations in the literature, etc. In the present study, patent records for all 89 professional men (mostly chemists and chemical engineers) in one division of a large industrial scientific organization were analyzed to determine whether creativity as measured by the production of patentable ideas tended to decrease with age, to increase, or to remain about the same. In the statistical treatment of data both longitudinal and cross-sectional methods were used. All the results were consistent in revealing no decline in creative productivity with increase in age, and indicated instead a tendency for productivity to increase as chemists mature.     

Persuasion criteria in research and practice: Gathering more meaningful psychotherapy data

Psychotherapy research should ultimately benefit the psychotherapy client. Unfortunately, traditional psychotherapy research continues to have little influence on practicing clinicians and, therefore, does not benefit psychotherapy clients. As behavior analysts begin to show interest in this area of research, they may be in a position to improve its quality. We argue that traditional psychotherapy researchers have become prematurely wedded to a methodology that does not address the concerns of clinical audiences. Furthermore, we make a case for defining and evaluating psychotherapy data in terms of its capacity to influence both researchers and clinicians. We also suggest several alternative methods for gathering psychotherapy data based on the case formulation approach. We argue that this approach may be one of the most promising methods for gathering useful psychotherapy data.     

Social Identity,Relative Deprivation,and Coping With the Threat of Position Loss: A Field Study Among Native Shopkeepers in Amsterdam1

The present study investigates how native shopkeepers in Amsterdam respond to the threat experienced by the emergence of immigrant stores. A survey among 101 native shopkeepers confirmed that psychological, rather than instrumental, considerations play an important role. First, perceptions of fraternal deprivation were relatively independent of the amount of egoistical deprivation people perceived. Instead, the experience of fraternal deprivation was related to people's identification as native shopkeepers. Second, egoistical deprivation resulted in negative perceptions of all other entrepreneurs, regardless of their ethnic origin. Third, regardless of perceived egoistical deprivation, native shopkeepers were more likely to discredit immigrant entrepreneurs, as they thought they were more fraternally deprived.     

Ret in the college classroom

Thirty-five undergraduates participated in an outcome study which compared the results of enrollment in an RET seminar with enrollment in a seminar on another psychotherapy topic, Humanistic Psychology, and two seminars which lacked a psychotherapeutic orientation: Social Development and Extra Sensory Perception. RET instruction failed to decrease irrationality significantly. However, students who received RET instruction had significantly higher perceived self-efficacy than did those in the two nontherapy oriented seminars. There was a significant, inverse relationship between academic achievement (grade point average) and irrational beliefs about need for comfort, need for approval, awfulizing, and low frustration tolerance. Perceived self-efficacy was significantly and positively associated with high academic achievement. Superior students were significantly less likely than their peers to awfulize or exhibit low frustration tolerance; the poorest students were the least likely group to perceive themselves as effective. The implications of these findings for educators and counselors were addressed.A fellow in Rational-Emotive Therapy, Naomi McCormick, Ph.D. is a professor and William Tooke, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the State University of New York-Plattsburgh. An earlier version of this article was presented at the World Congress on Mental Health Counseling: A 35th Anniversary Celebration of Rational-Emotive Therapy, Keystone, Colorado: June 13–16, 1990. The authors are grateful to H. Morlock for his methodological insights and thank G. Brannigan, N. Smith, and P. Jarvis for assisting in data collection. Special thanks go to H. Rock for providing information on students from the college's Office of Institutional Research.     

Perceived depth vs. structural relevance in the object-superiority effect

When subjects must identify a barely visible line in a briefly flashed display, their accuracy depends on the configuration of the context in which the target line appears. Weisstein and Harris (1974) found that accuracy is highest when the target is part of a pattern that resembles a unified, three-dimensional object, and lowest in a flat-looking pattern composed of disconnected lines; they labeled this phenomenon the object-superiority effect. In the three experiments reported here, identification accuracy was found to correlate highly and significantly (r =.78) with the judged depth of the patterns. Judged structural relevance of the target line to the pattern (McClelland & Miller, 1979) was uncorrelated with accuracy (r=?.28). Even when the target line appeared as an isolated fragment within the context pattern, a pattern perceived as three-dimensional yielded higher identification accuracy than one perceived as flat.     

The role of empathy and social anxiety in Latinx adolescents' indirect peer aggression during the transition to high school

The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between decreased empathy (i.e., cognitive and affective) and indirect and cyber peer aggression among Latinx adolescents during their transition to high school. Further, we examined the degree to which social anxiety moderated this relationship. Participants were 469 Latinx ninth graders, ages 13–17 years (M = 14.52, SD = 0.58; 58% girls). Adolescents completed the Revised Peer Experiences Questionnaire, Cyber Peer Experiences Questionnaire, Basic Empathy Scale, and Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents at two different time points, 3 months apart. Hierarchical linear regression analyses revealed concurrent and prospective relationships between lower cognitive empathy and the perpetration of both indirect and cyber aggression. In addition, social anxiety moderated the concurrent associations between both types of empathy and both types of aggression perpetration. Results suggest that interventions that facilitate cognitive empathy and decrease social anxiety may help to reduce adolescents' indirect and cyber aggression toward peers throughout the high school transition.     

Parental language mixing in bilingual families

An important question about early bilingualism that concerns both parents and researchers is the degree to which one language may interfere with another. This question rests on an implicit assumption that learning more than one language must always produce confusion and/or interference between (or among) the languages. Although many naturalistic studies have addressed this issue, no firm answers are yet available from the conflicting results obtained. Several factors appear to be responsible for the contradictory evidence, including the small numbers of subjects in each study, the large number of different language combinations of varying similarity that have been examined, and the variety of linguistic input situations (e.g., sequential bilingualism, language separation between home and school, parent/language separation), that have been observed. There is a consensus that children's language mixing can be eliminated if parents adhere strictly to the principle of one parent/one language enunciated by Grammont (Ronjat, 1913). However, this claim has not been directly examined. The primary goal of the present study is to characterize the linguistic input available to a child growing up with two languages. Analyses of the data show that a large proportion of parents, even those firmly committed to maintaining a strict separation of language by parent, model linguistically mixed utterances for their children. This finding suggests that children's early language mixing does not reflect interlinguistic confusion. Rather, it suggests that the child is formulating hypotheses about language based on the data available, i.e., that using the language of both father and mother in a single utterance is acceptable.