Transactional analysis: Basic tenets and philosophy

(This is the first in a series of three articles by Dr. Kambly, a psychiatrist with 25 years' experience working with students and their families. It is hoped that these articles will be of great value to school psychologists in working with students.) Within each of us there are three unique beings, or ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child. Dusay's “Egogram” is discussed. This is a new concept in evaluating personality structure. Three types of Transactions are reviewed: complementary, crossed, and ulterior. Ulterior transactions form the basis for psychological games. Various types of stroking are discussed, and a stroking profile is mentioned, which ties together the concepts of stroking. Stamps represent a saving up of feelings, to be turned in later as justification for action or non-action. Contracts are discussed in terms of their basic relation between the psychologist and the student. Four basic requirements for a valid contract are: mutual consent, valid consideration, legal object, and competency. Contracts represent goals, and the student must be helped to get where he wants to go. Students benefit from a reactive environment.     

Recreational Activity Clustering among Adolescents

Abstract

Data on participation in 15 recreational activities were obtained from a sample of 2,760 junior and senior high school students. Interrelationships among activities were examined by use of a hierarchical clustering procedure for males and females within each of the following four age groups: 11–12, 13–14, 15–16, and 17–18.

The data indicated that the two a priori designated clusters of outdoor recreation and competitive recreation activities were of limited value for categorizing interrelated activities. However, the clustering procedures suggested that if the outdoor recreation and competitive recreation clusters were defined more narrowly, many of the activities within them did interrelate. A third group of activities emerged which had a very low relationship to the other two clusters and to each other. They were given the generic title “unique recreation activities” to indicate their relative independence.     

Chinese adolescents' reasoning about democratic and authority-based decision making in peer,family, and school contexts

This study explored the judgments and reasoning of Chinese adolescents (13-18 years of age) from 3 regions of mainland China (N = 574) regarding procedures for making decisions involving children in peer, family, and school contexts. Participants evaluated 2 democratic decision-making procedures (majority rule and consensus) and decision making by adult authorities for 2 decisions embedded in each social context. Judgments and reasoning about decision-making procedures varied by social context and by the decision under consideration, and evaluations of procedures became more differentiated with increasing age. The findings reveal that concepts of rights, individual autonomy, and democratic norms (majority rule) are salient aspects of Chinese adolescents' social reasoning and are used to evaluate critically existing social practices.     

Higher order occasion setting

Higher order occasion setting with serially presented stimuli was investigated in an appetitively motivated, discrete-trial operant study with rats. Reinforcement of barpressing during an occasion-setting light (a discriminative stimulus) was contingent on immediately preceding second-order occasion setters (i.e., a click train or a buzzer served as a conditional discriminative stimulus). Moreover, the meanings of the clicks and buzzer were themselves indicated by a third-order occasion setter that preceded them (i.e., a white noise acted as a second-order conditional discriminative stimulus). Subjects responded more frequently and had shorter latencies to the first response in the presence of the light on trials during which barpressing was reinforced than on trials during which barpressing was not reinforced. The likelihood that the subjects solved the problem by responding to unique compound stimuli was minimized by the insertion of a 5-sec gap between the different controlling stimuli presented on each trial. Thus, these subjects appear to have mastered a second-order conditional discrimination, which is equivalent to third-order occasion setting if the discriminative stimulus (light) is viewed as a first-order occasion setter. Although the subjects learned to respond appropriately to each of the compound stimuli, differences in responding to specific stimuli were consistent with a higher order feature-positive effect. Some implications of higher order occasion setting are discussed, including the issue of independence between the different levels of occasion setting signaled by a single stimulus.     

An examination of treadmill running familiarisation in barefoot and shod conditions in healthy men

Running on a treadmill is an activity that is novel to many people. Thus, a familiarisation period may be required before reliable and valid determinations of biomechanical parameters can be made. The current study investigated the time required for treadmill familiarisation under barefoot and shod running conditions. Twenty-six healthy men, who were inexperienced in treadmill running, were randomly allocated to run barefoot or shod for 20 minutes on a treadmill at a self-selected comfortable pace. Sagittal-plane kinematics for the ankle, knee and hip, and ground reaction force and spatio-temporal data were collected at two-minute intervals. For the barefoot condition, temporal differences were observed in peak hip flexion and peak knee flexion during swing. For the shod condition, temporal differences were observed for peak vertical ground reaction force. No temporal differences were observed after 8 minutes for either condition. Reliability analysis revealed high levels of consistency (ICC > 0.90) across all consecutive time-points for all dependent variables for both conditions after 8 minutes with the exception of maximal initial vertical ground reaction force loading rate. Participants in both barefoot and shod groups were therefore considered familiarised to treadmill running after 8 minutes.