Treating the black female alcoholic: clinical observations of black therapists.

Empirical observations from a decade of treating economically deprived black female alcoholics at the Lincoln Community Health Center in Durham, North Carolina, indicate that recognition of the social and cultural determinants of alcoholism is crucial to treatment. Scrutiny of the approach suggests that the psychopathology of these patients was inextricably intertwined with issues of racism, unemployment, poverty, and substandard housing. It is concluded that a comprehensive health care approach that utilizes the input of a black female therapist as the case manager has distinct advantages.

Treatment considerations with black incestuous families.

This paper is concerned with father-daughter incest among blacks and the cultural and legal issues that tend to perpetuate incestuous behavior. From a decade of observations, the authors describe findings about the psychosocial and behavioral sequelae of this phenomenon in black families.

Adaptive training and individual differences in perception.

Four types of training techniques were compared in the training of a perceptual concept-formation task. Adaptive training, a technique in which one parameter in the learning situation is varied so that the difficulty of a learning task remains constant for that individual, was compared to three intermediate approaches to training (self-adaptive, in which the trainees could control their own pace of learning by indicating when they felt they had mastered the problem, fixed sequence, and fixed task). The relationship between individual trainee's perceptual style and various stages of training was also investigated. Perceptual style was measured by the Hidden Figures Test, the Rod-and-frame Test, a Distracting Context Test, and a Cancellation Test. Results showed a definite (time to perform the task) advantage in favor of the adaptive training method. Fewer errors were committed under the self-adaptive approach, but the task completion time was significantly higher. Further analysis showed that for the adaptive-training group, measures of perceptual style could be used as predictors of future task success. No such relationship was found for other training techniques. In particular, field-independence appears to be important early in training but becomes increasingly less important, and for the final training criterion trials, is not predictive of performance. In contrast, the Distracting Contest Test-II, early in training, is not an important predictor but is an important predictor for the final criterion trials.