School consultant's implicit theories of action.

Explored the theories of school consultation held by 2 university trainers in a school psychology doctoral program in relation to G. Kelly's (1955) working hypotheses known as personal constructs. 18 paragraphs depicting different consultation scenarios were used to elicit Ss' personal constructs. Each scenario represented a different combination of child behavior, teacher hypothesis, and teacher involvement. Consultants' interpretations of problem scenarios were influenced by their perceptions of the child's behavior, the teacher's sense of involvement with the child, and the teacher's beliefs about the causes of the child's behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hypothetico-deductivism is a fraud.

Comments on G. A. Kimble's (see record 1989-28023-001) statement that the only alternative to hypothetico-deductive theorizing is the radical empiricistic approach. Reasons are offered for making the logic of explanatory induction explicit and for making it the premier account of scientific reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A view of rehabilitation psychology.

Presents 12 questions and answers which examine the role of rehabilitation psychology in dealing with the problems of deprived and disabled people. Emphasis is placed on emotional and intellectual contact with the problems of the disabled and on awareness of the difference between the viewpoints of the "insider" in rehabilitation-the patient or his family-and the "outsider." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A woman's view of DSM-III.

Argues that one reason women's treatment rates for mental illness are higher than men's is that masculine-biased assumptions about what behaviors are healthy and what behaviors are "crazy" are codified in diagnostic criteria and thus influence diagnosis and treatment patterns. Several theories accounting for women's higher treatment rates are reviewed. P. Chesler's (1972) theory of women's overconforming and underconforming to sex-role stereotypes is evaluated in the light of the I. D. Broverman et al (see record 1970-06951-001) findings that therapists' criteria for healthiness in men and healthiness in adults were the same, but their criteria for healthiness in women were different. The implications of DSM-III's definition of mental disorder, the diagnoses of Histrionic Personality Disorder and Dependent Personality Disorder, and 2 fictitious diagnostic categories (Independent Personality Disorder and Restricted Personality Disorder) are discussed to illustrate assumptions implicit in DSM-III diagnoses. It is shown that behaving in a feminine stereotyped manner alone will earn a DSM-III diagnosis but behaving in a masculine stereotyped manner alone will not. A past diagnosis regarding women's sexuality is reviewed to specifically illustrate past assumptions resulting in the labeling of healthy women as sick. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A new view of rigidity.

In an attempt to determine whether rigidity, defined as a restriction in the range of behavior, is a pervasive personality trait or if there is no necessary connection between its operation in different areas, 38 students were given five tests designed to afford them the opportunity to express different degrees of rigid behavior in different areas. The Ss failed to exhibit consistent rigidity scores on the different tasks. A theory in which rigidity is viewed as a result of conditions affecting the organism at the moment is presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dental malpractice: practical tips on avoiding a dental malpractice claim

With a few simple strategies, dentists can avoid the expensive trauma of malpractice litigation. Sometimes it's just a matter of maintaining good records.     

Psychological child maltreatment. A developmental view

This article explores the concept of psychological child maltreatment. It begins with a definition of psychological maltreatment in terms of care-giver behavior that thwarts the meeting of the needs of children. It focuses on five forms of psychological maltreatment that are of concern to the practitioner: rejecting (sending messages of rejection to the child), ignoring (being psychologically unavailable to the child), terrorizing (using intense fear as a weapon against the child), isolating (cutting the child off from normal social relationships), and corrupting (missocializing the child into self-destructive and antisocial patterns of behavior).     

A self-presentational view of social phenomena.

Self-presentation is the use of behavior to communicate some information about oneself to others. The 2 main self-presentational motives are to please the audience and to construct (create, maintain, and modify) one's public self congruent to one's ideal. It is proposed that a wide range of social behavior is determined or influenced by these self-presentational concerns. Research evidence is examined to show the relevance of the self-presentational motives to giving and receiving help, conformity, reactance, attitude expression and change, responses to evaluations, aggressive behavior, self-serving and counter-defensive attributional statements, task performance, ingratiation, and emotion. (149 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A congressional view of youth suicide.

Concern about adolescent suicide is pervasive among American teenagers. This article reviews the results of a national survey of adolescents about their knowledge of, and attitudes toward, youth suicide. More than 60% of teens surveyed reported knowing another teen who had attempted suicide and 6% reported having made an attempt themselves. The survey also provides information about adolescents' explanations for self-destructive behavior. Given this information, recommendations for effective preventive interventions and policy decisions are offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A comparative view of face perception.

Face perception serves as the basis for much of human social exchange. Diverse information can be extracted about an individual from a single glance at their face, including their identity, emotional state, and direction of attention. Neuropsychological and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments reveal a complex network of specialized areas in the human brain supporting these face-reading skills. Here we consider the evolutionary roots of human face perception by exploring the manner in which different animal species view and respond to faces. We focus on behavioral experiments collected from both primates and nonprimates, assessing the types of information that animals are able to extract from the faces of their conspecifics, human experimenters, and natural predators. These experiments reveal that faces are an important category of visual stimuli for animals in all major vertebrate taxa, possibly reflecting the early emergence of neural specialization for faces in vertebrate evolution. At the same time, some aspects of facial perception are only evident in primates and a few other social mammals, and may therefore have evolved to suit the needs of complex social communication. Because the human brain likely utilizes both primitive and recently evolved neural specializations for the processing of faces, comparative studies may hold the key to understanding how these parallel circuits emerged during human evolution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A controlled-attention view of working-memory capacity.

In 2 experiments the authors examined whether individual differences in working-memory (WM) capacity are related to attentional control. Experiment 1 tested high- and low-WM-span (high-span and low-span) participants in a prosaccade task, in which a visual cue appeared in the same location as a subsequent to-be-identified target letter, and in an antisaccade task, in which a target appeared opposite the cued location. Span groups identified targets equally well in the prosaccade task, reflecting equivalence in automatic orienting. However, low-span participants were slower and less accurate than high-span participants in the antisaccade task, reflecting differences in attentional control. Experiment 2 measured eye movements across a long antisaccade session. Low-span participants made slower and more erroneous saccades than did high-span participants. In both experiments, low-span participants performed poorly when task switching from antisaccade to prosaccade blocks. The findings support a controlled-attention view of WM capacity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A systems view of job satisfaction.

Analysis of the controversy surrounding the unidimensional vs. 2-factor assertions about employee job satisfaction indicates that extrinsic factors must be viewed as the causes of intrinsic factors. (17 ref.). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Janus view of the Journal.

The month of January of the fifth year of publication seems a good time both to look back on the journal's achievements in the past and to glance forward at its aspirations for the future. Over all, it is shown that the journal does attract and publish material relevant to the issues that it was designed to cover. If, in its content, the perfect balance has not yet been struck, the remedy lies to hand; the reader must turn writer and by his own contributions ensure a better representation of his chosen field of interest in our future publications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)