An Objective Scale for Content-Analysis of the Counselor's Interview Behavior

This paper describes a content-analysis scale, the Counselor Activity Profile, that can be used to objectively and systematically quantify and profile a counselor's interview behavior according to the amount of interview time devoted to various discrete counseling responses. Research done with the scale is also described.     

Revaluation of geometric cues reduces landmark discrimination via within-compound associations

Rats were trained in a triangular water maze in which a compound of geometric and landmark cues indicated the position of a submerged platform. Rats that then underwent revaluation of the geometric cues in the absence of the landmarks subsequently failed to discriminate between the landmarks. In contrast, those animals that received geometry training consistent with their previous experience of the geometry–landmark compound continued to discriminate the landmark cues. The experiment showed that within-compound associations had formed between the geometry and landmarks, and that representations of absent geometric cues could be evoked via presentation of the landmark cues alone. We argue that these evoked representations of the absent geometry cues can counteract any overshadowing of the landmark by geometry cues, and may sometimes result in potentiation. The results of this study do not support theories of cue-competition failure based on independent cue processing, but remain readily explicable by appeal to an account based on within-compound associations.     

The Cultural Politics of Horror Film Criticism

This article examines film criticism as a social practice. Specifically, it explores the institutional politics of horror film criticism and the various ways critics of the genre justify their own readings and interpretive discourse. It does so by way of positing a horror film “reading formation,” which serves a critical-institutional function within the film academy, namely, securing academic legitimacy for the genre while shoring up cultural and political distinctions specific to elite modes of analysis. Accordingly, the article argues that three intertextual mechanisms (canonical recycling, political auteurism, and symptomatic interpretation) both condition the appropriation of horror film texts as legitimate objects-to-be-read and work to sustain discursive power relations between scholastically credentialed and “nonexpert” reading subjects.     

Asymptotic Stability of a Class of Non-linear Singularly Perturbed Systems2

Sufficient conditions are obtained to guarantee the asymptotic stability of a class of non-linear singularly perturbed systems. A procedure for constructing a Lyapunov function for such a class of systems is given, and a clearly defined domain of attraction of the equilibrium is obtained. A stabilizing feedback control for such systems is also proposed.