Psychotherapists' attitudes toward clients reporting mystical experiences.

Studied the proportion of therapy clients who report mystical experiences, the diagnostic attitudes of their therapists, and the influence of personal and professional factors on attitudes toward these clients by analyzing the survey responses of 285 32–82 yr old psychotherapists (primarily males). Of the 20,670 clients seen during a 12-mo period, 4.5% reported a mystical experience; 67% of Ss had seen at least one such client during that period. Psychodynamic and behavioral therapists attributed significantly more pathology to such clients than did humanistic/existential therapists. Responses suggested that some therapists were biased in their diagnostic attitudes toward clients reporting mystical experiences. 50% of Ss said they had personally had a mystical experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When is a request for assisted suicide legitimate? Factors influencing public attitudes toward euthanasia.

A mail survey of 810 Vancouver area residents investigated how the public's acceptance of a request for euthanasia was influenced by the method of death (e.g., lethal injection vs withdrawal of life-support) and by the identity of the patient featured in a vignette (e.g., stranger vs oneself). The study also identified considerations people found most important in deciding whether a patient's request for euthanasia was legitimate (e.g., patient's pain, chance for recovery). Life-support withdrawal was found significantly more acceptable (90% support) than a lethal injection (79% support), yet the identity of the person involved did not affect the acceptability of euthanasia. However, a factor analysis suggested that the decisions about oneself may be more complex and more closely scrutinized than decisions about others. The considerations rated most important by participants paralleled legal guidelines from the Netherlands and Oregon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Faculty attitudes toward Congressional investigations.

Responses to seven open-ended questions concerning Congressional investigations of faculty members or colleges given by 57 (63%) of the liberal arts faculty at the U. of Maine are tabulated. In general, the respondents gave negative responses to question of the need for, or effects of, such investigations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Third-world managers' attitudes toward pollution.

Examined pollution awareness and concern over pollution among 120 Indian managers from several industries. Pollution attitudes were measured by questionnaire responses to the open-ended question, "What is your firm's position in regard to pollution of the environment (in your own words)?" Responses were content analyzed and coded into 3 categories: (a) nonaware (51%), (b) aware-lacking concern (30%), and (c) aware-concerned (19%). Pollution attitudes displayed significant relationships with both individual and organizational variables. It is concluded that although pollution is becoming a serious problem in India, awareness and concern are lagging compared to the more developed countries. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Educators' attitudes toward working mothers.

In an exploratory study of educators' sex-role perceptions, 411 teachers, administrators, and pupil personnel workers were administered the Attitudes Toward Working Mothers Scale. Administrators and teachers were found to have significantly less positive attitudes toward working mothers than did pupil personnel workers. Within each of the groups, males had the least positive attitudes. Marital status, maternal employment history, and child-bearing status were unrelated to these attitudes. Replication on a second sample (330 Ss) produced similar findings. (58 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dimensions of attitudes toward technology.

Administered an 80-item questionnaire measuring attitudes toward mechanization to 45 undergraduate students in physical science, biological science, social science, and fine arts. Responses were factor analyzed using a varimax rotation. Factor scores were created for 6 of the resulting factors: Global Mechanism, Mechanical Curiosity, Preference for Hand-made Goods, Alienation, Spiritual Benefits of Technology, and Human Vitalism. These factor scores were then used as dependent variables in a multivariate comparison of the students in different major fields. Most of the between-group differences in attitude toward mechanization were reflected by differences in mechanical curiosity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

American attitudes toward intelligence tests.

If one asks a representative group of Americans over 18 about the use of intelligence tests in student selection for school or college or to aid in job promotion selection "he finds that many of them are against the use of intelligence tests. High school students in the U. S. are even more strongly opposed to the use of intelligence tests." Critical attitudes toward tests involve the following issues: Inaccessibility of test data. Invasion of privacy. Rigidity in use of test scores. Types of talent selected by tests. Fairness of tests to minority groups. Among the personal and social characteristics of the critics are: Some people are distinctly hostile to any self examination. People subscribing strongly to aristocratic or equalitarian viewpoints of society may oppose testing. People who have done poorly on tests may have wounded self-esteem leading to test opposition. The punishing effects tests may have had on an individual's life chances may lead to resentment against tests. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Public attitudes toward psychotherapist-client confidentiality.

What does the general public expect of psychotherapists in terms of confidentiality and third-party access to information? A telephone survey was conducted to examine this issue. Generally, subjects believed that therapy information should not be revealed without authorization, but they nonetheless felt that confidentiality should be broken when a client reveals the occurrence of one of the following: murder (planned or confessed), suicide plans, child abuse, major theft, and treason/sabotage against the U.S. Subjects were concerned about unauthorized release of information to the courts, to a client's spouse, or to insurance companies, but felt that psychotherapists should be free to discuss clients with one another. As opposed to older subjects, younger subjects (aged 18-39) were against unauthorized disclosures to parents or the family doctor and believed that confidentiality should be maintained when a client reports illegal drug use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Teachers' attitudes toward young deviant children.

Investigated the effect of written information about the behaviors (acting out or withdrawn), label condition (label or no label), therapy condition (psychotherapy or no psychotherapy), and sex (male or female) of hypothetical 2nd graders on elementary school teachers' expectations of the pupils' present and future school functioning. The pupils' behavior was the prepotent determinant of teachers' expectations for both the present and future ratings. Acting out behaviors were viewed more negatively than were withdrawn ones; the other pupil variables did not affect teacher expectations. Teachers' future ratings of the children were consistently more positive than were their present ratings. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Authoritarianism and attitudes toward high achievers.

In 2 studies 204 Ss completed scales measuring right-wing authoritarianism, general attitudes toward high achievers, global self-esteem, and items concerned with voting preference, causal attributions, personality characteristics, deservingness, responsibility, and affective reactions to the rise and fall of 3 political leaders. Study 1 distinguished between components of right-wing authoritarianism and showed that the nonaggressive rule-follower with high global self-esteem was more likely to favor the fall of high achievers. Study 2 showed that right-wing voting preference moderated relations between authoritarianism and Ss' affective reactions and that prediction of these variables was significantly enhanced when personality, attribution, and derservingness were added to the regression equation after controlling for the effects of age and gender, right-wing political preference, and authoritarianism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychological androgyny and attitudes toward feminism.

Administered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and Spence and Helm Attitudes toward Women Scale to 50 male and 50 female undergraduates. Only males with a preference for the feminine sex role differed from the other sex and level-of-androgyny groups, in that they exhibited traditional, conservative attitudes toward the rights and roles of women in contemporary society. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Correlates of managers' attitudes toward change.

Correlated a measure of a general readiness to accept change and a measure of attitudes toward change in a specific area (promotions policy) with age, education, managerial rank, frustration-contentment, level of self-confidence, and extraversion and neuroticism (Maudsley Personality Inventory) in 258 managers. Older managers were more conservative than the younger managers, and the confident were more radical than the unconfident. Stable introverts and emotional extraverts tended to support innovation, while emotional introverts and stable extraverts did not. The relation between readiness to accept change and managerial status, education, and contentment depended on the type of change and was not always linear. Results support the notion of a general readiness for change underlying attitudes toward change in a specific area. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Public attitudes toward mental health professions.

"The study reported here involves the application of opinion sampling methods to public attitudes toward mental health professions." The following titles were employed: doctor, physician, nurse, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychologist, clinical psychologist, research psychologist, mental hospital attendant, social worker. The Semantic Differential was used. The sample of respondents was obtained from the Opinion Panel of the Institute of Communications Research; 207 of 239 panel members returned questionnaires on time. "A very high, positive, public attitude was found for the professions as a whole." Virtually no distinction is made between the concepts doctor and physician. "No distinction is made… among the concepts Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, Clinical Psychologist, and Research Psychologist on the Semantic Differential… . There are large and significant differences between the concept Doctor and Physician and the cluster of concepts whose titles start with the morpheme 'Psych-.' " The mental hospital attendant is held in relatively high esteem. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychotherapists' personal problems and self-care patterns.

Psychotherapy practitioners (N?=?155) responded to an anonymous self-report questionnaire focused on their personal problems, their recent self-care patterns, and their attitudes toward personal therapy. The most frequently reported personal problems clustered around emotional exhaustion and fatigue, but these were concerns only among less than half of the sample. Personal therapy had been experienced by almost 90% of participants, and their average ratings of its value were very positive. Cost and accessibility were the most frequently noted concerns regarding personal therapy. These findings afford a more positive image of the personal life of the psychotherapist than has been rendered by previous surveys. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parental attitudes toward mouthguards

An 11-item, one-page questionnaire was mailed to 1800 parents chosen at random in the Henrico County, VA public school system. Parents were asked questions such as "who should be responsible for mouthguard wear?" "what sports should require mouthguards?" and "has [their] child ever sustained an oral or facial injury?" The parental responses indicate that mouthguard enforcement is the responsibility of both parents and coaches. Of the total injuries reported, 19% were sustained in basketball, 17% in baseball, and 11% in soccer. Despite these high injury rates, however, there was a lack of perceived need for mouthguard use in these sports. When asked which sports should require a mouthguard rule, the sports that generated the most responses were, in decreasing order, football, boxing, ice hockey, wrestling, field hockey, and karate. Parents were more likely to require mouthguards for their sons than daughters, and more likely to require them for their children who participated in a mandatory mouthguard sport, a contact sport, or who had been previously injured. The authors conclude that because parents view themselves as equally responsible as coaches for maintaining mouthguard use, both groups should be targeted and approached as a possible source for the recommendation of mandatory mouthguard rules in basketball, baseball, and soccer.     

Clinician attitudes toward time-limited and time-unlimited therapy.

Although the use of short-term therapy continues to increase, the impact of this trend on practicing clinicians remains relatively underinvestigated. We examined the attitude and skill patterns of licensed psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers with regard to time-limited and time-unlimited therapy. Significant attitudinal and self-report skill differences were found between the two treatment types and across the employment setting of therapists. Implications of these differences are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Screening employment applicants for attitudes toward theft.

Describes the Reid Report, a 3-part instrument (scoreable attitudes-toward-theft inventory, biographical data blank, admissions list of past delinquencies) designed to predict the likelihood that an employment applicant will steal from his employer. For a sample of 254 employment applicants, Reid Report evaluations were correlated with evaluations based on polygraph interviews. For each device the evaluation alternatives were: recommeded for hire, qualified recommendation, not recommended. Chi-square for the 3 * 3 table was 45.15 (p