University students' felt alienation and their attitudes toward African-Americans, women and homosexuals.

177 respondents attending a midwestern state university reported greater alienation from the wider society when they held more positive attitudes than negative ones toward women and homosexuals. Alienation and attitudes toward African-Americans, women, and homosexuals were not influenced by gender or religiosity.     

Teaching dancercise to persons who are mentally handicapped: Programming transfer of stimulus control to a community setting

This study demonstrated procedures to promote the acquisition and transfer of stimulus control of an age-appropriate exercise skill. Three young adults diagnosed as mentally handicapped in a residential setting were taught a commercial dancercise routine during individual training sessions using a package of instructional procedures. A combination of a multiple baseline across subjects and a multiple baseline across response groups design showed that skill acquisition occurred only after each subject received training, and that performance did not generalize across exercise response groups. Training progressively incorporated more participants, new teachers, and new settings. Ultimately, subjects performed in a community dancercise class attended by 100 nonhandicapped persons.     

Inferring Emotions From Multiple Cues: Revealing Age-Related Differences in "How" Without Differences in "Can"

This study examined differences in children's use of social cues to make emotional inferences. Children ages 4, 5, and 8 years were presented with stimuli that depicted another child in affectively congruous and affectively incongruous expression/situation combinations. The intensity of positive and negative facial expressions was varied across situations. Subjects judged the target's feelings and selected among the alternative facial expressions or situations the one they had just seen. No significant age-related differences were found in the extent to which children registered and used both the expressive and situational information when making emotional inferences. The main experimental measure asked children to explain their judgments. In explaining their judgments, subjects' rationales indicated that they: (a) used both the situational and expressive cues; and (b) were sensitive to congruous versus incongruous cues, and even to mild versus strong incongruous cues. Children's rationales also reflected a sensitivity to expressive and situational negativity. For each age group, the rationales were more elaborate when the cues were problematic. Characteristic strategies, however, were also found for each age group. These distinct strategies may reflect social-life changes in children's social "theories" of emotion.     

MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALING WITH A PRIORI DIMENSIONS

W aern Y. Multidimensional scaling with a priori dimensions. Scand. J. Psychol., 1972, 13 , 178–189.—This paper presents a method of multidimensional scaling by direct similarity estimates. The method is presented as an alternative to other multidimensional scaling methods, when hypotheses can be made concerning the dimensions underlying the perceptual variation. The method is used with five different sets of stimuli and compared, to an as to dimensions assumption-free component analysis, based on a vector model. The two methods resulted in similar configurations in most cases. One difference was found in a colour material, where the assumed dimensions could be regarded not to be orthogonal to each other. Here the a priori scaling revealed the assumed configuration as projected on the oblique axes whereas the component analysis could not give this information.     

Encoding and memory for verbal and pictorial stimuli

Memory for visually presented verbal and pictorial material was compared using stimuli chosen to minimize non-essential differences between the two types of material. Experiment I required retention of a short list; verbal and pictorial stimuli were remembered equally well. Experiment II required recall of single items after 30 s of backwards counting; recall was much superior for pictorial stimuli. The type of task appeared to affect encoding, with verbal encoding reported to be predominant in Experiment I and visual encoding, or imagery, common in Experiment II.     

Transformation of Perception of Trauma by Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Group Therapy

Intensive work with child survivors of the Holocaust has made us aware of the clinical importance of understanding the ways children perceive their traumas and the conclusions they draw about how they must live their lives. When these perceptions are transformed congruently with the child's development, the survivors can cope quite well. In this paper we refer to now middle-aged survivors who are still guided by their child perceptions. We will describe how we have used conjoint group psychotherapy to facilitate processes of transformation even at this late stage. The model we provide for trauma work with Holocaust survivors whose traumatization occurred decades ago may well provide tools to reduce future suffering of children who are victims of massive traumatization today.     

The Moderating Effects of Children's Fear and Activity Level on Relations Between Parenting Practices and Childhood Symptomatology

Parenting practices have been previously linked to childhood symptomatology. However, little consideration has been given to the potential effect of individual differences within the child on this relation. The current study assessed the moderating effects of children's activity level and fear on relations between parenting practices and childhood aggression and depressive symptoms using a sample of 64 fourth-, and fifth-grade boys. The findings showed that poorly monitored active boys and fearful boys who were exposed to harsh discipline exhibited high levels of aggression. Boys characterized by high fear who were exposed to harsh discipline or whose parents were extremely overinvolved showed elevated levels of depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that integrating children's individual differences with parenting models enhances our understanding of the etiology of childhood symptomatology. The intervention implications of such an integration are discussed.