Word: psychologistic
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More immediately worrisome to parents in comfortable, middle-class Bergenfield (pop. 25,600) is what psychologists call the cluster effect. "After a suicide, there is always an increase" in copycat deaths, says Herbert Nieburg, a psychologist in nearby Westchester County, N.Y., where six boys from the area killed themselves in separate incidents over a four-month period in 1984. The impulse to imitate a suicide can be powerful, especially among adolescents, who tend to romanticize adventure and recklessness. "Kids see that this is a glamorous way to die, a way to get a lot of attention that they couldn...
Walker believes that such potentially productive students could fill schools like Hope University across the U.S. She has a point: savants are of growing interest to psychologists. Leon Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, feels that "few researchers have looked at mental retardation in a fine-grain fashion. They haven't gone into the heads of the kids." Psychologist Bernard Rimland, of the Institute for Child Behavior Research in San Diego, notes, "It isn't surprising that we don't understand much about these aberrations. We haven't even begun to understand...
Written in the context of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's widely-publicized call for a smoke-free society by the year 2000, the report holds interest for researchers, pharamaceutical companies and policy makers, said Jan L. Hitchcock, a psychologist and associate director of the Institute...
King and Kitchener's work departs from widely accepted theories like those of the celebrated Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. He also described levels of readiness for certain kinds of reasoning, concluding that logical thought begins by age 7 and by 12 escalates to the ability to deal with abstractions like the future. "His emphasis was on logical reasoning," says King. "We are looking at a different domain of problem solving." In that domain, adds Kitchener, "logic alone is not enough for mature judgments...
Though still experimental, the reflective-judgment yardstick has attracted the interest of cognitive scholars around the country. One psychologist who edits a journal in the field privately describes Kitchener and King as "on the cutting edge" of as yet uncharted research. Some experts, like Irving Sigel, research scientist for the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., consider the interviews a promising new means for assessing "whether a student has the skills to go about understanding and solving new problems." Harvard's Fischer is particularly hopeful about the potential for measuring the broad-gauge effects of a college education. Indeed, Kitchener...