South African Journal of Psychology

It has become increasingly acknowledged that the social and psychological consequences of leaving epilepsy may be more debilitating than the seizures themselves. Recently these psychosocial aspects of epilepsy have become the emphasis of much research, and different models for understanding psychosocial consequences have become evident. In this article recent research has been reviewed and has been classified as belonging either to a medical model or a sociological model of understanding these psychosocial aspects of epilepsy. Both models have been found to assist in understanding psychosocial aspects of epilepsy, with the ‘newer’ sociological approach acting as a challenge to the hegemony of the older, more traditional medical understanding.

Educational psychology in South Africa has been defined in the past as an interventional and helping profession, mainly focused on the alleviation of educational problems such as learning disability or emotional issues that interfere with the educational process. Educational psychologists, apparently by predeliction, have had little to do with the general processes of learning and schooling, nor have they been concerned with educational policy issues. This may be partly to do with the fact that the training of educational psychologists in South Africa is generally light in the theory of cognitive development, instructional psychology and school psychology. This article invites discussion about the nature of the future roles for educational psychologists in the new South Africa, suggesting that their involvement in ordinary processes of schooling, and in assisting in the planning of educational systems will be primary. Appropriate changes in the nature of the training of educational psychologists require broad consultation. The need for change follows from the facts that: (1) paucity of future financial resources will necessitate the work of professional psychologists becoming more advisory, instructional and research oriented, rather than being individually focused; (2) the nature of the problems to be faced in social reconstruction will demand a more research-oriented approach than in the past; and (3) the present disarray of educational services requires the re-thinking of the most basic principles on which the formal education of children rests.

Discrimination against black minority children was originally viewed as causing them to evaluate their own-group negatively and the white out-group positively, resulting in impaired self-esteem. Research, however, has produced inconsistent findings, possibly because of social change and the black consciousness movement. The present study investigated this issue among black South African children, a social group that has experienced particularly severe racial discrimination. As expected, the findings indicated that self-esteem, own-group racial pride, and overall ethnocentrism were significantly higher amongst older (n = 37; 10 to 12-years old) than among younger black children (n = 41; 6 to 8-years old). The younger children showed a slight though non-significant tendency to out-group favouritism, while the pattern for the older children was non-preference. However, the correlations of self-esteem with in-group pride, out-group prejudice, and overall ethnocentrism were non-significant suggesting that the own-group and out-group attitudes of minority children do not necessarily effect their self-attitudes.

The theory of symbolic racism contends that white resistance to social policies such as affirmative action is rooted in prejudiced attitudes towards black people, and represents a more sophisticated form of racism than traditional or rednecked racism. However, the notion of symbolic racism has been severely criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds. The present study sought to clarify the nature of the empirical relationship between symbolic and traditional racism. The Subtle Racism Scale (Duckitt, 1991) and Heaven and Moerdyk's adaptation of Ray's anti-black scale were administered to 150 school-children. The findings revealed no significant difference in mean scores obtained on the measures of symbolic and traditional racism. A series of factor analyses consistently yielded four factors, accounting for 54% of the variance, suggesting that racism involves hitherto unaccounted for components in addition to traditional and subtle expressions of racial prejudice.

It is argued that socialization is a contradictory process of continuity and transformation. In times of rapid social change and when people have limited access to resources to embrace the change, the contradictions are particularly pronounced. Such circumstances exist for parents and care-givers in rural South Africa. Drawing on the idea of local knowledge — the presuppositions used to interpret immediate experience borne out of action in the local environment — the experiences of black parents living in two different rural scenarios, white farms and rural villages, are examined. Three dilemmas facing parents, emerging from the interpretation of case studies, are identified: maintaining the home and intact family life; providing ontinuity between the past and future; and setting boundaries for children's action. Strategies followed by parents in dealing with these dilemmas are explored. Like the vine of the pumpkin, the local knowledge of parents provides the thread of continuity for bringing up a child in a changing world.

In this article the author aims to highlight or spotlight psychology's subject, that is, who (or perhaps even what) psychology purports to inquire about. I will show how the milestones in modern psychological thinking constitute psychology's subject and note the absence of the lived-body and our historicity in theories of the person.

This article provides additional support for the concerns expressed by Nell (1994) in a recent edition of the South African Journal of Psychology (Volume 24) about outmoded administration procedures and the dated normative sample of the South African Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (SAWAIS). Attention is drawn to the potential for a ceiling effect on the SAWAIS Digit Symbol subtest due to an abbreviated format relative to the WAIS-R, and the potential for diagnostic inaccuracy on this subtest due to the leniency of the SAWAIS norms established on a cohort which is 25 years out of date. Clinicians are advised to use tests which meet international standards. A further suggestion is that clinicians should use normative data which are appropriate to the highly influential variable of educational level, rather than inflating the importance of the geographical location of a test's standardization group.