Attitudes toward the lower- and middle-class psychiatric patient as a function of authoritarianism among mental health students.

There is evidence that many clinicians' activities with lower-class patients may be influenced more by attitudes reflecting a middle-class orientation than by objective criteria. Authoritarianism seems especially germane to the problems of social class bias. For the evaluative dimension of the semantic differential, it was predicted that lower-class case histories would be judged more negatively by those Ss who were more authoritarian as measured by the California F Scale. This prediction was confirmed for a group of 24 psychiatric residents and bordered on significance for a group of 16 social work students. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditioning and transfer of affective self-references in a role-played counseling interview.

Tested the differential effects of 5 forms of therapy-like intervention in the conditioning and transfer of affective self-references (ASRs) in a 40-min role-played initial counseling interview with 72 female undergraduates. Conditioning of ASRs and transfer to a TAT story-telling task were found, although hypothesized relationships between discriminative cue potency of the interventions and performance were only partially supported. An explanation involving the presumed interaction of S awareness of her own self-disclosures with intervention type, degree of threat, and conditioning performance is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Responses of A and B subjects to normal, neurotic, schizophrenic, and ambiguous communications.

Investigated the initial reactions of 20 A and 20 B undergraduates to "encounter situations" in which they were asked for help by 4 hypothetical patients communicating in normal, neurotic, schizophrenic, or ambiguous styles. For each patient communication, Ss responded to the following questions: (a) "What might he mean?" (b) "What might he be feeling?" (c) "How would you feel in this situation?" (d) "What do you think you would do?" Results indicate that (a) A's more frequently interpreted patient communications symbolically than did B's; and (b) A's exhibited greater congruence than B's, as indicated by their greater use of feeling words in describing their reactions to the hypothetical patients. Results were related to previous A-B findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)