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It is commonly assumed that teasing is restricted to encounters among intimates or close acquaintances. As a result of examining initial interactions among (American and Australian) speakers of English, however, this article shows that teasing also occurs between persons who are becoming acquainted. Analysis reveals that tease sequences unfold across three actions that constitute the tease as an invitation to intimacy: a teasable action on the part of the target, the tease proper and a moment of interactionally generated affiliation. Given teasing is one way of criticising another, it constitutes a potential breach of tact or interactional propriety. In initial interactions, however, participants can construe this potential impropriety as an invitation to intimacy, as it involves the proposal of a shared ironic stance that may be either accepted or declined by the target of the tease.

Classroom teaching tact is a kind of sensitive, rapid and accurate judgment and response ability of teachers in the face of complex classroom teaching situations. The implementation of the new curriculum reform requires teachers to have a higher level of teaching tact. Based on the self-designed questionnaire, this study investigated 200 primary school students in Hunan Normal University, explored the main influencing factors of their classroom teaching tact, and verified the rationality, reliability and validity of the questionnaire structure. It is found that the differences of gender and major have no influence on the level of classroom teaching tact of primary school students on post internship, while the differences of professional identity, personality, teaching class size, teaching reflection and post job training will bring the differences of classroom teaching tact level of primary school students on post internship. The primary school students who have high degree of professional identity, outgoing personality, small class size, good teaching reflection and more job-related classroom teaching and training have higher level of classroom teaching wit. But at the same time, we should also consider the interaction of various factors and do a holistic and dialectical thinking on the analysis of the factors that affect the level of classroom teaching tact of primary school students.

Tacts facilitate social interaction, and a strong tact repertoire can lead to the development of other verbal operants. For children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the development of a tact repertoire can reduce stereotypical and repetitive language and increase social communication, as functional language may reduce the amount of stereotypical vocal behavior that children engage in. However, teaching tact repertoires to children with ASD that maintain and generalize is difficult. The current study reviewed tact interventions for children with ASD from 2000 to 2019 to provide an overview of current tact interventions, their effectiveness, and the inclusion of intervention components that may promote maintenance and generalization of learned tacts in children with ASD. Fifty-one studies were included in the review. Of the studies that met criteria for effect size calculations 87.18% of the interventions showed excellent or high effect. Although many of the studies focused more on stimulus control to answer specific research questions, some studies implemented intervention components and procedures that could promote acquisition and generalization of learned tacts in children with ASD. We discuss implications and the need to increase research regarding tact intervention components that can increase generalization in children with ASD.

The notion of épochè, ‘suspension’, as developed by the Greek Skeptics, refers to the suspension of judgment that makes one neither affirm nor deny anything. In The Neutral, Roland Barthes takes this suspension as an ethical principle. Whereas discursive logic fosters the making of clear choices between alternative positions on something formulated as an issue, Barthes' suspension of judgment counteracts this push toward taking up positions. Barthes' term for this refusal to judge is ‘the Neutral’, which manifests itself in an array of techniques and attitudes that defer, frustrate, or subtilize judgment and thus create room for drifting, relaxation, nuance, and tact. Barthes comes to think of the Neutral as a matter of intensity, of gradient degrees, rather than of the ‘zero degree’. Such gradients allow one to minimize one's interface with the world's arrogance. Barthes' ideas, for his time as much as ours, form a utopian desideratum: that of waylaying the assertiveness that language perversely encourages in its users.

This study explored oncology healthcare professionals’ perspectives on the psychosocial support needs of diverse cancer patients during oncology treatment. Six themes were identified using thematic analysis. Healthcare professionals highlighted the importance of their sensitivity, respect and emotional tact during appointments in order to effectively identify and meet the needs of oncology patients. Participants also emphasised the importance of building rapport that recognises patients as people. Patients’ acceptance of treatment-related distress and uncertainty was described as required for uptake of available psychosocial supportive services. We offer some practical implications that may help improve cancer patients’ experiences during oncology treatment.

This study investigated the effects of tact prompts on the acquisition and retention of divergent intraverbal responding to categorical questions involving conditional discriminations. A 6-year-old boy with autism participated in the study. A multiple probe design across behaviors was used. A tact-prompt procedure was implemented. The results suggested that the tact-prompt procedure was effective to establish and increase the number of divergent intraverbal responses to questions across two categories. The child spontaneously emitted novel responses during training and generalization probe sessions, indicating occurrences of response generalization after divergent intraverbal training. Maintenance probes showed that divergent intraverbal responses were maintained at high levels for all target categorical questions 3 weeks after the completion of training.

Working with people convicted of extremist offences who have either offended, or are perceived to have offended, for ideological reasons − whether supportive of a political or religious identity or for the rights of animals − presents challenges to the supervising probation officer. Despite it being impossible for a service user to prove categorically that they are no longer supportive of ideological views that advocate harmful behaviour, there can still be an expectation from offender managers, MAPPAs, Parole Boards and offenders themselves, that evaluating enduring sympathies with harmful groups forms the main part of risk and offender management. How then can service users and probation staff work productively together, without an offender manager being excessively naive or collusive, or the offender receiving supervision reliant on disproportionate, and possibly counter-productive, levels of control?

Although research in health care suggests that one of the most important factors for efficient medical delivery is the child’s willingness to cooperate, little is known about how caregivers facilitate cooperation with young children during medical treatment. In this article, we explore interactions between parents, nurses, and young children during pediatric nebulizer treatment in terms of tact as a pedagogical concept. Based on our analysis, which followed a hermeneutic approach and included video observations of five hospitalized children aged between 15 and 30 months, we present four themes related to pedagogical tact of caregivers and children’s willingness to cooperate, and discuss the role that medical products can play in this cooperation. The results benefit pediatric health personnel, as well as product designers.

In this article, we explore the nature of good postnatal care through a hermeneutic unpacking of the notion of tact, drawing on the philosophical writings of Heidegger, Gadamer, and van Manen. The tactful encounters considered were from a hermeneutic research study within a small, rural birthing center in New Zealand. Insights drawn from the analysis were as follows: the openness of listening, watching and being attuned that builds a positive mode of engagement, recognizing that the distance the woman needs from her nurse/midwife is a call of tact, that tact is underpinned by a spirit of care, within tact there are moods and tact might require firmness, and that all of these factors come together to build trust. We conclude that the attunement of tact requires that the staff member has time to spend with a woman, enough energy to engage, and a spirit of care. Women know that tactful practice builds their confidence and affects their mothering experience. Tact cannot be assumed; it needs to be nurtured and sheltered.

After spending two years in Egypt doing an ethnographic study of street girls in Cairo, I (Nelly Ali) was struck by the lack of published academic material on the subject of street girls in general, and on the methodological and ethical challenges, problems and barriers that researching childhood and youth sexualities presents in particular. At the shelter, the ethical dilemmas were not straightforward to reconcile and had not been covered in my ethics procedure or preparation. As the dilemmas themselves were not easy to categorise, reconciling them needed a degree of diplomacy and tact. One such situation arose when Taghreed, a 15-year-old mother at the shelter, shared in a group therapy session that she had previously engaged in a sexual relationship with one of the girls in a government correctional institution where she was held before coming to the shelter. As soon as she had finished sharing this piece of information, she was instructed to not elaborate any further and keep the story for a one-to-one session with her therapist. After this incident, Taghreed was no longer permitted to spend time alone with the under fives because of the ‘danger’ this posed to the children. When I asked what had happened and why the staff suddenly felt she was a threat, they said

Background: The most characteristic manifestations of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) are abnormalities in social behavior. However, distinguishing bvFTD based on social behavior can be difficult in structured clinical settings. Methods: Using a Social Observation Inventory, 10 patients with bvFTD and 10 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) were compared to their caregiver interlocutors on 1-hour mealtime, in-home videotaped segments. Results: Compared to caregivers and patients with AD, patients with bvFTD were significantly disturbed in social behavior. In contrast, patients with AD were indistinguishable from their caregivers. The lack of “you” comments and decreased tact and manners distinguished 92.6% of the patients with bvFTD from patients with AD and caregivers. The Social Observation Inventory scores correlated with scores on frontal-executive tests and socioemotional scales. Conclusions: The systematic observation of social behavior during routine activities may be one of the best ways to distinguish patients with bvFTD from normal individuals and from patients with other dementias.

Relatively few previous studies of individuals receiving a diagnosis of Motor Neurone Disease within the UK health care system have employed qualitative approaches to examine the diagnostic journey from a patient perspective. A qualitative sociological study was undertaken, involving interviews with 42 participants diagnosed with MND, to provide insight into their experiences of undergoing testing and receiving a diagnosis. Adopting a sociological-phenomenological perspective, this article examines key themes that emerged from participant accounts surrounding the lived experience of the diagnostic journey. The key themes that emerged were: The diagnostic quest; living with uncertainty; hearing bad news; communication difficulties; and a reified body of medical interest. In general, doctor-patient communication both at pre and post diagnosis was experienced as highly stressful, distressing and profoundly upsetting. Participants reported such distress as being due to the mode of delivery and communication strategies used by health professionals. We therefore suggest that professional training needs to emphasize the importance to health professionals of fostering greater levels of tact, sensitivity and empathy towards patients diagnosed with devastating, life-limiting illnesses such as MND.

This article is a longitudinal case study that demonstrates how company middle managers acting as European works council (EWC) delegates are well placed to represent the interests of the wider workforce. Contrary to widely held assumptions about the role of management on EWCs, namely that such delegates represent nothing more than the ‘managerial capture’ of this European institution, the article exemplifies such delegates as possessing skills sets which incorporate communication, organization, strategy, assertiveness, tact and diplomacy that can benefit the EWC. The delegates in this study developed both solidarity and a shared sense of identity among employees that spanned national borders; delegates also influenced both company policy and strategy. Ultimately these delegates operating in a strictly non-unionized IT company helped transform the company EWC from its initial description as ‘the best kept company secret’ into a more purposeful structure of employee representation.

This essay explores the theme and representation of touch in Austerlitz (A) and Die Ausgewanderten/ The Emigrants (DA/TE) and argues that the absence of touch and an excess of touch are both shown to be threatening, if not deadly. So touch must be mediated, and the complex interplay of distance and proximity characteristic of touch is encapsulated in the notion of tact. Sebald's texts explore tact in three ways: in allusions to particular objects, particularly gloves and dust; in the visual evocation of touch in photographs; and in the mode of narration itself. Nevertheless, the careful negotiation between the 'too much' and the 'too little' of touch tips easily into an aesthetics of reticence that both facilitates and disguises the privileging of a melancholic sensibility over the untouchable body of the woman. The obscene, untouchable body is exemplified by Gwendolyn Elias, and the seductive, untouchable body by the erotic mother and female lover. © The Author(s) 2011.

This paper proposes a fuzzy-DDG method to solve the multi-objective optimization problem in regard to the anisotropic conductive film (ACF) attach process for thin-film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD). As such, this paper has been motivated by a desire to decrease the usage of ACF materials in the ACF attach process. Herein, the experimental Taguchi method will be used to find the optimal solution for this problem. This paper will study the optimization problem of yield rate and tact time with respect to control factors of TFT-LCD. In using the Taguchi method, five test cases are discussed: the first involves the optimal yield rate problem; the second, the optimal tact time problem; and the third, solving multiple problems by simultaneously considering yield rate and tact time. Additionally, the conventional multiple performance characteristics index (MPCI) method is used, although it exhibits a less than optimal fuzzy inference structure, and fuzzification as well as defuzzification processes are required; in the fourth and the fifth cases, a new fuzzy DDG method is used to determine the multiple objective problems. Notably, the conventional fuzzy inference structure is not required in this algorithm and only graph-based matrix operations are required. Testing results show that the fourth and the fifth cases are more convenient in regard to arithmetical operations, compared to the third case. The fourth case illustrates the problem with the vertex order included only; only crisp potential values are derived. The fifth case illustrates the problem with the vertex S/N ratio values included and fuzzy potential values derived. Experimental results are provided to verify the validity of the proposed fuzzy DDG method.

This paper presents work conducted as part of an evaluation of the Ticketing Aggressive Cars and Trucks (TACT) III program of the North Carolina Highway Patrol. The goal of the TACT program is to reduce the contribution of aggressive driving behaviors to crashes involving commercial motor vehicles. In the present study, camera-based detection methods were used to identify the incidence of following too closely within the context of prevailing commercial motor vehicle and passenger vehicle volumes, speeds, and lane position both before and during TACT program enforcement operations. The data suggest that enforcement under the TACT program may have differential effects on the following distances of cars and trucks. An increase in the following distances of commercial motor vehicles was observed in the rightmost lane of an Interstate facility. A slight decrease in the speeds of commercial motor vehicles was also observed during the enforcement period, but no significant changes in speeds or vehicle following times were observed for passenger vehicles. The results indicate that the methodology developed is sensitive and is able to detect changes in driver behavior. It may thus become a potential alternative strategy for evaluation of the TACT program. The use of roadside instrumentation further enables future applications for automated driver feedback, in which following too closely and speed violations may be detected automatically and the information relayed to the driver in an infrastructure-to-vehicle context like that for dynamic speed signs. Automated methods developed as part of this research could also be used for automated enforcement in future applications.

ERVING GOFFMAN Is one of the most im portant sociologists of the twentieth century. Popular textbooks in sociology (e.g., Gid dens, Duneier, and Appelbaum 2005; Ma cionis 2007) and social psychology (e.g., Aronson, Wilson, and Akert 2006; Cahill 2007; DeLamater and Myers 2007) devote large sections and entire chapters to Goff man's ideas concerning the presentation of self, face-work, the management of stigma and framing, among others. However, with the exception of Brown (2003), no pub lished teaching articles or notes exist that offer in-class teaching techniques concern ing Goffmanian sociology. We feel that sociology instructors need more teaching techniques concerning Goffmanian sociol ogy in order to enliven the material and make it relevant to students' ordinary be haviors and everyday lives. To this end, we discuss in this note the teaching technique we call the "shirt-weenie" demonstration. We found this demonstration helpful in teaching social psychology undergraduates the power of face-work and tact in influenc ing and structuring their own individual behavior.

From a rhetorical perspective, Mendel’s work and its reception elicit two important questions: (a) why were Mendel’s arguments so compelling to 20th century biologists? And (b) why where they so roundly ignored by his contemporaries? The focus of this article is to examine the latter question while commenting on the former by employing several tactics for rhetorical analysis including historical, textual, and audience analyses. These analyses suggest that Mendel’s argument resembles 20th century biological arguments in its use of mathematical principles and formulae to both inform the design of experiments and support the law-like regularity of conclusions. These procedures, however, were not regarded by his audience of hybridists, botanists, cytologists, and naturalists as sufficiently persuasive or necessarily even legitimate. I will argue that had he taken a more rhetorical tact and considered the position of his audience on the legitimacy of the scope of his conclusions, his methods for making arguments, and his assumptions about heritable characters perhaps his arguments wouldn’t have fallen on deaf ears.

This article describes two studies that evaluated training intended to improve the family friendliness of five components of the admissions treatment team process (Introduction, Meeting Management, Case Presentation and Discussion, Service Plans, and Tact and Technicalities) at an inpatient child and adolescent psychiatric hospital. In Study 1, we observed 18 case presentations and found that the ratings on family friendliness were low on Service Plans and Tact and Technicalities. Following three role-play training sessions, we found no statistically significant improvement. In Study 2, we used a multiple-baseline design across treatment team process components and enhanced the family friendliness of each component through mindfulness training. Follow-up observations at monthly intervals for 6 months showed continued high rates of family friendly services. Our study suggests that the mindful delivery of mental health services can produce long-term gains in the family friendliness of admissions treatment teams.

Behavior analysis has already contributed substantially to the treatment of children with autism, and further gains can result from more use of Skinners analysis of language in Verbal Behavior (1957) and in the resulting conceptual and experimental work. The approach emphasizes a unit of analysis consisting of the relations between behavior, motivative and discriminative variables, and consequences. Skinner identifies seven types of verbal operants—echoic, mand, tact, intraverbal, textual, transcriptive, and copying a text—which function as components of more advanced forms of language. This approach focuses on the development of each verbal operant (rather than onwords and their meanings) and on the independent training of speaker and listener repertoires. Five more specific contributions are described that relate to the importance of (a) an effective language assessment, (b) mand training in early intervention, (c) establishing operations, (d) an intraverbal repertoire, and (e) automatic reinforcement.

L'A. a choisi de s'interesser a une approche psychologique dans le domaine des etudes bibliques, celle de Gerd Theissen specialise dans les etudes pauliniennes. C'est a propos de II Corinthiens 3:4 et 4:6 que l'A. trouve une relation de transfert de son propre inconscient. D'autres auteurs se pretent aux commentaires psychanalytiques, Walter Wink, Richard Rubenstein et Peter Gay

A SNOWBALL sampling technique was used to con tact 76 self-defined vegetarians between October 1987 and February 1989. Respondents were ques tioned in the course of loosely-structured interviews on such topics as the type of vegetarianism they practised, the process of conversion, and nutritional attitudes. The interviews were taped and fully tran scribed, the transcripts being subjected to detailed qualitative analysis. The present paper sets out those findings which relate specifically to health concerns and motives. The findings suggest that while health motives are not necessarily the dom inant ones for the majority of this group of respondents, for many of those interviewed the per ceived health advantages represent significant ad ditional benefits of vegetarianism, benefits which complement and confirm their ethical stance.

Five hundred and five respondents, from a wide variety of business organizations, were surveyed to gather information on their perceptions of nonverbal communication. Dividing the sample on the basis of perceived decoding ability and gender revealed several differences between the groups. Nonverbal communication was more important to self-rated good decoders than to other decoders. Better decoders relied most on facial expressions for accurate information while less skilled decoders preferred voice level or tone. Women, individually, rated themselves higher than men in decoding ability and, as a group, were perceived by both men and women to be better decoders and encoders of nonverbal cues. Women working in the education field rated themselves higher in decoding ability than any other group.Recommendations for improved communication in businesses included paying more at tention to nonverbal cues, especially the facial expressions, engaging in more eye con tact, and probing for more information when verba...

Today's pragmatic college students expect to see the relevance of the out-of-class writing assignments. I have discovered that students are more motivated and write business letters more conscientiously when the letter meet legitimate needs and will be mailed to the recipient. THE LETTER ASSIGNMENT At least once a semester, I assign students a business letter that I will mail. Sometimes I approach university administrators, faculty committees, and others who have a serious need for student evaluations or opinions. I select a different topic each semester and ask a relevant person to write a letter to my class seeking their opinions on a topic in which students are the experts. The class assignment is to answer that letter. My students have answered letters written by the following people: * The chair of the school curriculum committee who sought student comments during a major curriculum review * The University Registrar asking for student reactions to proposed registration enhancements * The Director of Financial Aid who wanted to know about student satisfaction with the financial aid delivery system * The author of our textbook who was working on the next edition of the text. The ideas for people to correspond with are limitless - the director of the advising center, the bookstore manager, the student government president, the dean of the school may all have topics on which they would like some thoughtful student opinions. Here are some suggestions for a successful assignment: 1. Use people who really need student opinions. Students sense if the assignment is not a sincere one. When you approach the individual, determine his or her interest in actually using the student responses. 2. Ask the individual to write a letter to the class requesting the needed information. Offer to help write the letter so that the assignment provides the writing experience you need for your class. A clear, well-written letter will allow students to organize their responses more easily. 3. If students are asked to evaluate a particular service or product, be sure that the original letter is written in an open and non-defensive manner that encourages both positive and negative responses. Students need practice in offering both positive and negative criticism in a professional and tactful manner. 4. Help students prepare to write the assignment. As part of an audience analysis, lead students to understand the specific kind of information that will be most useful to the reader. Emphasize appropriate tone, particularly noting the need for tact if some students hold strong negative views about the topic. You may need to remind students of their relationship to the reader and appropriate protocol for addressing the individual. If you use this assignment early in the term, you may want to devote most of a class period to the audience analysis. Later in the term when students are more skilled in analysis, the assignment may require little discussion. …

It is by the application of the principle of neutrality, born of his respect for the essential otherness of the patient, that the analyst focuses the dyadic analytic work in the service of the patient's growing self-analytic capacity. Thus, the general principle of neutrality is distinguished from the technical tactic of abstinence, the latter being a specific function utilized to facilitate and foster analytic regression. Neutrality can be defined as it applies to the major subfunctions of the analyst's work ego. Perception of the patient's intrapsychic processes (both empathically and cognitively) requires a neutrality of appearance on the analyst's part in order to minimize the distortion of the unfolding transference neurosis. Integration and understanding of the patient's communications require mastery and neutralization of the analyst's own internal processes in order to minimize countertransferential distortions. Appropriate interpretive intervention requires neutrality of action, i.e., mastery of impulses related to power, neutralizing them into the service of the analytic work; tact is defined as a specific psychoanalytic function in this regard. Collaborative ignorance is examined as a specific instance of false neutrality. In this an analytic guise serves to mask a countertransferential conflict. Neutrality serves as an overriding technical principle, not an imperative for perfectionism . Factors intrinsic to the analytic process also influence the application of this principle.

THE maternal and infant mortality and morbidity rates in the United States are described as appalling in terms of the technological development of that country. Studies related to factois correlated to maternal and infant mortality and morbidi ty are reviewed. Such con cerns as early prenatal con tact with a physician, nutri tion, age of first parity, drug usage, cigarette smoking, al cohol ingestion, venereal dis ease, and genetic factors are cited as affecting the health of the mother and infant. The need for prenatal educa tion is argued. This educa tion would have as its goal awareness on the part of pregnant women that their behaviour affects the health of their infant. Such pro grammes would be evaluated in terms of their effect upon maternal and infant mortality and morbidity rates. To be most effective, it is suggested that prenatal education prog rammes be developed and con ducted by health educators.

Cross-cultural data that have recently become available make it possible to test several hypotheses derivable from Freud's theories relating to male homosexuality and the development of the super-ego. These hypotheses are (1) relatively little father-son contact during early childhood increases the probability of homosexuality; (2) under a condition of relatively high father contact, increased sexual attachment to the mother decreases the probability of homosexuality; (3) relatively little father-son contact during early child hood impedes the development of the son's super-ego; and (4) there should be a negative zero-order correlation between homosexuality and the super- ego development. This correlation should vanish once degree of father con tact is controlled. The data from fifty-one societies indicate that hypotheses (1), (2) and (3) are strongly supported, and hypothesis (4) is moderately supported. Whiting's "status envy" theory is also relevant to the same data, but is not as consistent with this data as is Freud's theory.

The hypothesis that increased behavioral commitment causes increased utilization of information about a communicator was tested. Commitment to a position (public or private speech), communicator's situational description (mand or tact), and communication discrepancy (consonant or discrepant) were varied factorially. The situational description of the communicator significantly influenced attributions of causality with high but not with low commitment.

Urban areas are no longer sharply defined, and local administrators cannot ignore neighboring areas. Trained professionals are necessary today. They are employed by half of all cities in the United States with populations between ten thousand and fifty thousand. The professional's functions include planning and coordination of city and intergovernment agencies. His characteristics must include sound training, tact, patience, self-confidence, and communicative skill; also imagination and courage. More and more, the professional local administrator is called upon to be a pace-setter in city planning and operation.

If comprehensive schools are to give appropriate provision for intellectually very able pupils it has to be done with tact, sensitivity and the awareness that probably all children could benefit from increased teacher time. A strategy being adopted in the county of Avon uses ideas developed in the U.S.A. to assist very able pupils to develop their potential in whatever areas their stengths lie. It is a strategy which relies less on teacher time and more on pupil initiative.

The Competition Knowledge Test is a reliable measure of the ability to distinguish differences between competition and constructs often associated with competition, Statistical data support that conclusion. Need for this test arose from analysis of data of a pilot study conducted with 382 subjects similar to those of the present study. Oo a 5-point, self-rating scale of competltlveness, 93% of the subjects rated themselves as highly competitive while only 20% of those subjects scored above 69% on understanding of the construct (measured by the Pilot Competition Knowledge Test). The pronounced disparity on the psychological dimension of competitiveness and the concep~alization of competition prompted the attempt to estimate test reliability. The Competition Knowledge Test is a 60-item multiple-choice instrument designed to assess distinctions between varying theories and definitions of competition in the literature. More specifically, the test items discriminate between behaviors of five categories: Competitive Attitude, Competition in Tact, Competition Negated, the Pursuit of Excellence and a Non-competition Situation. Each of the six groups (N = 178) was pretested with the Pilot Competition Knowledge Test. Instruction time for the groups varied from 3.41 to 4 hr. On completion of instruction the Competition Knowledge Test was administered. Retest was conducted for each group (n = 130) after an interval ranging from 3 to 7 days. All instruction and data collection were conducted by the same person. The Pearson productmoment procedure was used to estimate reliability and the Spearman-Brown formula was applied to the internal consistency coefficients. To overcome the deficiencies of splithalf reliability the Kuder-Richardson Equation 20 was applied (Roscoe, 1969). Data in Table 1 indicate that the consistency within the test is acceptable for pedagogical and research purposes. Internal consistency for six different groups instructed under similar conditions over a 1M-yr. period ranged from .78 to .92. The lowest r (.78) may reflect relative homogeneity of the group (SD = 4.37). All other coefficients consistently indicate suitable internal consistency. The Kuder-Richardson Equation 20 gave a coefficient of .91. Stability (test-retest) was acceptable as subjects performed consistently over an interval of 3 to 7 days. Based upon the pilot study which indicated a pronounced difference in conceptualization of competition prior to instruction, the range of correlations

Those who knew General A. G. L. McNaughton best would not naturally have thought of him in association with the art and skills of diplomacy. Forthrightness in speech rather than tact; vigour and tenacity in pressing for what he believed to be right rather than compromise; a born fighter, a vigorous champion of causes, and controversialist: these are the qualities which make the study of McNaughton's contribution to Canadian diplomacy so challenging in retrospect. For there is no doubt that General McNaughton left an indelible mark on contemporary Canadian diplomacy, in its most formative and exciting years between 1946 and 1950. Those were the years when policies had to be adjusted to the post-war world undergoing ferment and rapid change, following the most destructive war in recorded history. Canada was fortunate to have the combination of Louis S. St. Laurent and L. B. Pearson to lead in that process of adjustment and General McNaughton to present its ideas in the newly founded United Nations.

A prediction is defined as a tact whose object increases the probability that a verbal operant will be topographically arranged to describe subsequent events. Skinner (1957) defined tact as a ". . . verbal operant in which a response of given form is evoked (or at least strengthened) by a particular object or event or property of an object or event" (Skinner, 1957, pp. 81-82). A logical interpretation of predictions is illustrated by Nagel (1961) who attempted to show that suicidal predictions and self-fulfilling prophecies do not represent insurmountable barriers in the quest for the derivation of socially relevant principles in the logic of scientific explanation. Predictions ace suicidal when they are "soundly grounded at the time they are made, and hence most likely to be confirmed by future events, but which are nevertheless falsified because of actions undertaken as a consequence of announcing the predictions" (Nagel, 1961, p. 468). Predictions are self-fulfilling when they are "false to the actual facts at the time the predictions are made, but nevertheless turn out to be true because of the actions taken as a consequence of belief in the predictions" (Nagel, 1961, p. 469). The present analysis attempts to clarify a distinction that is often confounded. An operant approach to the evaluation of predictions is empirical. It relies upon procedures arranged to observe and measure the frequency of classes of responses controlled by the emitted predictions. A logical approach to the evaluation of predictions is intra-verbal. It relies upon a set of rules relating premises and predictive derivations. A conclusion to be drawn from the above analysis is that once an investigator sets out to describe, explain, and understand predictive operant behavior, then bipolar adjecrives such as logical-illogical, rational-irrational, and reasonable-unreasonable have no meaning; they are not wrong, they are meaningless. They are meaningless under the aforementioned purposes because their allegeable meaning resides upon the tendency to confuse the formal, internal consistency of statement forms with the discriminative properties of terms contained in the context of statements systematically arranged as predictions.