The Therapeutic Benefits of Children’s Literature: Responding Through Making Art and Writing Stories

This study explores the use of a children's book followed by the application of the Draw A Story (DAS) art therapy assessment tool by Rawley Silver (1988). The study takes place in three elementary school classrooms located in the greater Bay Area region. Previous literature addresses the historical uses of children’s books and their potential to offer therapeutic benefit to young readers. Through a quasi-experimental, one-group posttest only design, eighteen second to third grade level students were asked to reflect on a children’s book by writing a story of their own. Participants were between the ages of seven and nine, and all attended the same school. After choosing two DAS provided stimulus cards, participants drew images including the two cards and explained their images through a story with them in it as the main character. Quantitative data was collected and scored based on the three DAS scoring scales: Scale for Assessing Emotional Content, Scale for Assessing Self-Image, and Scale for Assessing Use of Humor. Results were categorized as expressing more positively themed, neutral themed or negatively themed content in the artwork and description of the story. Themes were compared to the themes presented in the children's book to assess for similarities. It was concluded that 64% of participants appeared to identify with a drawn subject who had a positive or aggressive self-image, with 28% presenting more negative or dark humor in emotional content. No significant findings were made in the similarities of the participants’ artwork and story to the themes in the children's book. Future research should inquire for direct examination of students’ art and stories made in response to a children's book without any additional stimulus card or assessment.

Uni-Representational Vs. Cross-Representational Difference in Imagery Formation: Verification of Dual Coding Theory

Dual coding theory states that information is stored by visual and verbal channel separately. During formation of imagery the visual and verbal channels are used distinctly. The study explores how retrieval of visual imageries of natural scenes varies with the variation in representational forms of encoding and recognition. Each stimulus set contained two different cards for encoding and recognition purpose. Both encoding and recognition of visual scenes were varied in both pictorial (picture form) and linguistic (word form) mode. Thus four plausible conditions are pictorial encoding associated with pictorial recognition, pictorial encoding and linguistic recognition; linguistic encoding and linguistic recognition and lastly, linguistic encoding with pictorial recognition. The aim of the study is to see whether the mode of object representation influences imagery formation. The aim of the study is to explore which kind of representation benefits recognition of imagery. 40 female University students (21 to 23 years) were selected and randomly assigned in to four experimental conditions. From each participant data was collected in the laboratory set up in a single session. Nine stimulus cards were presented to each subject. Presentation of a single stimulus card in encoding situation was followed by the recognition situation. The two way ANOVA result shows changing the representational forms has significant effects on retrieval. The present finding supports the notion of Dual coding hypothesis with an additional observation that poor retrieval in case of pictorial recognition when the information has been encoded linguistically.

Figure-Background Perception in Right and Left Hemispheres of Human Commissurotomy Subjects

The right and left hemispheres of four complete commissurotomy subjects were tested for the ability to recognize and integrate figure and background elements of composite visual stimuli. In the first experiment the subjects were required to identify from a four-choice array in free vision the stimulus card that matched the briefly lateralized sample stimulus. For all subjects the left hemisphere was proficient at identifying the figure, but performed at near-chance level in recognizing the textured background. In contrast, the right hemisphere was equally adept at identifying figures and backgrounds. Both hemispheres could easily identify the isolated figure or background from a choice array, demonstrating that the observed hemisphere effects were due to figure–background interactions rather than the result of any difficulty in processing specific elements of the composite stimulus. The second experiment involved the determination of the size and position of a dot that appeared against various plain and textured backgrounds. The right hemisphere of two subjects, but not the left, performed with greater accuracy when the background consisted of a ‘natural’ texture gradient rather than a plain white backing. Similar though less consistent results were obtained when an inverted gradient or an evenly spaced grid was used as the background. For each condition, right-hemisphere performance resembled that of normal control subjects. In contrast, the left hemisphere provided a pattern of results dissimilar to that of control subjects for the various figure–background tasks described. It appeared to be generally insensitive to background effects, except when the information provided by the background was highly unusual, as from an inverted texture gradient. The results suggest a preeminent role for the right hemisphere in (i) the recognition of background components of a whole-field stimulus, (ii) sensitivity to the influence of the background on the perception of an object, and (iii) the ability to use natural perspective cues to assist in the accurate perception of an object.

Effect of Experimenter's Expectancy in Relation to Type and Structure of the Experimental Task

The present studies sought to investigate variables related to the mediation of the experimenter's expectancy effect and the generality of this phenomenon. It was hypothesized that the type of experimental task, defined by the presence or absence of factual or emotional components, and the structure of the task, defined by the ambiguity which the subject faces in making the judgments required of him, exert a moderating influence on the transmission of the experimenter's expectancy. Two studies employing a Rosenthal replication and numerosity estimation (Study 1) and a modified Rosenthal replication and modified numerosity estimation (Study 2) were run. 40 male experimenters ran 154 female subjects in both conditions across each of these studies. Subjects rated photographs of faces for success or failure in the Rosenthal replications and the number of dots per stimulus card in the numerosity estimations, with positive and negative expectancies induced in the former and over- and underestimation biases in the latter. It was concluded that the type of task and task-structure are indeed crucial variables for the transmission of the experimenter's expectancy.

Effects of Punishment on Learning by Aphasic Subjects

Effects of three types of punishment on learning a paired-associate visual-matching task by aphasic Ss were investigated. Ss matched response buttons with stimulus patterns in three punishment conditions—time-out, when E inactivated the pushbuttons and refrained from presenting a stimulus card for a period of 15 sec.; response-cost, when E took a penny from S for every incorrect response; and presentation of an aversive stimulus, during which 95 dB SPL of noise was presented for 0.75 sec. contingent upon an incorrect response. Each punishment condition lasted either until criterion (10 correct responses in 10 trials) was reached, or until 10 min. had elapsed. All aphasic Ss learned the task under at least one type of punishment condition; types of punishment had differential effects for individual Ss, and Ss learned more rapidly when positive reinforcement and punishment were combined.

Performance of Medically Diagnosed Brain-Damaged Children and Control Ss

A group of 50 sets of geometric designs was administered to 24 children diagnosed as brain-injured by a physician and 24 control children who were matched on sex, age, and verbal ability as determined by a vocabulary test. Two administrations of the test were given to each child. The first time children were presented with a stimulus design and after a 5-sec. interval asked to select the same design from four alternatives on a second card. The second administration involved marching the stimulus design with one of the four alternatives with the stimulus card still in view. The difference in performance between the two groups under both conditions was significant ( p < .001).

Personal Relevance and the Choice of Constructs for the Repertory Grid Technique

A number of studies have shown with psychological testing that the form a particular response takes will depend on the personal relevance to the subject of the stimulus, and that the more personally relevant the stimulus the less the effects of other response determinants. For example, Dahlstrom (1962) has listed six “contextual” and five “mediating” variables which he feels account for responses to such test items as those composing the M.M.P.I. These variables include the experimental setting, the examiner and the specific test items (contextual variables), and the veridical facts, personality styles, test instructions (mediating variables). Similar arguments have been advanced with regard to projective testing by Hutt (1951, 1954) and Wertheimer (1957), among others. Caine (1967) has shown that response suppression operates in a sentence building test only when the test material is of limited personal significance to the subject, and that the consistency of response between different testing levels along the overt/covert dimension pertains only when the stimulus material is of psycho-pathological significance. With the T.A.T., Smail (1966) has argued that if meaningful results are to be obtained responses must be interpreted in the light of the patient's particular situation much more than is the general practice, and that responses which are clinically typical of a given diagnostic group may only appear where the stimulus card accurately reflects the situation in which the patient finds himself.

Perceptual Disembedding in Monkeys: Note on Method and Preliminary Findings

A technique has been developed to study the ability of monkeys to disembed a visual item from the complex organized field of which it is a part. By means of a variation of single-cue concept-formation techniques 3 monkeys were trained to indicate the presence or absence of a particular simple figure on a stimulus card. Following this, Ss were tested in a critical series of complex figures. In some of these (positives) the simple figure was present but “hidden” or embedded; in others (negatives), which were structurally identical with the positives except for a change in a small element, the simple figure was absent. Preliminary results with two series of simple and complex figures indicate that some monkeys are very proficient at perceptual disembedding. This ability seems to be independent of learning and related capacities. Some of the possible uses of this technique in the study of problems of perceptual development in monkeys were discussed.