Mental health professionals and the general public have generally held differing attitudes toward mental illness. As part of a needs assessment survey, 102 persons (20 service providers, 20 referral persons, and 62 potential consumers) were interviewed concerning their views of mental health problems and services. Respondents first listed examples…

Change in family forms and functions is not necessarily evil or frightening unless one chooses to deify and cling to the past and to insist upon the rightness of by-gone ways. The crisis of American families today is not a crisis of form, or size or function, of governmental interference, economics or energy; it is a crisis of emotions, of…

This paper reports two studies of the effects of empathic instruction on first graders' evaluations of other people. In Experiment 1, 23 children received either empathic or non-empathic instructions, listened to a taped conversation in which the main character obtained either a positive or negative outcome, and then evaluated both the main…

A four-day workshop dealing with problems related to human sexuality and relationship counseling followed the assumption that impact and desensitization at the personal level increases the participants' ability to apply the material covered to their particular counseling setting. Initially, desensitization was facilitated through the use of…

Male and female college students were given a questionnaire containing descriptions of four stimulus persons, with gender of stimulus person varied between groups. Subjects selected any of eight occupations for which the stimulus persons might be suited, and they rated the potential of such persons to be good parents. Traditional "masculinity" of…

The author contends that marriage counselors must be aware of the changing roles for women and the implications those changes have for contemporary marriage counselors. He presents an historical overview of the American woman's place in society, followed by a review of her status today. He also examines women's place in the social and helping…

This paper reviews the author's research on the role of certain aspects of alienation in education. The first part of the paper discusses similarities between anomie and locus of reinforcement control, as they assess the normlessness and powerlessness aspects of alienation. The second part reports results from studies attempting to modify one's…

This paper outlines the development of an exciting set of changes going on in the field of linguistics at the present time. From studies of the ethnography of communication, generative semantics, variation theory, and pidgins and creoles has come a convergence of interests which highlights the concept of gradatum (rather than continuum) in…

Fatalism as measured by Rotter's internal-external locus of control scale is the degree to which a person generally believes that events affecting his life are largely determined by other forces rather than by his own efforts. The purpose of this paper is to examine behavioral science theory concerning fatalism, and develop and test which types of…

In teaching international students in Britain and students in the United States in multicultural and multiclass classrooms, a common resistance was found to the consideration of how culture and society shape identity. Even international students from collectivist cultures, who see their identities as inextricable from their communities in their…

Although the New Zealand government is spending millions of dollars to teach the Maori language in preschool language nests and immersion primary schools, its language policies are unlikely to succeed because they do not address the perceived low social status of the language. A marketing paradigm outlines how language can be viewed as a product…

This study investigated Koreans' understanding of and agreement with Korean proverbs concerning the parent-child relationship. Ninety-five proverbs were selected from literature and categorized into nine areas: value of a child, affection toward a child, boy-preference, positive or negative affection toward a daughter, importance of a child's…

This paper presents Down's syndrome as a part of the human race's rich biological inheritance rather than a condition to be pitied. The history of the discovery of the biological basis of Down's syndrome is reviewed, along with attitudes toward individuals with Down's syndrome over time and developments in medicine and education. (JDD)

If the basic idea behind multicultural education is to teach students to understand, appreciate, and accept people who are different, then educators may need to broaden the scope of who is included as a minority. They may need to include discussions about sexual orientation. A study involving seven female and four male adolescents--five of whom…

This paper examines recent Australian children's literature. It focuses on the prevailing social attitudes in Australia towards gender, environment, and multiculturalism and how these social issues are treated in the fiction books written for Australian children. The paper also examines the implications for children's literature of the…