Joan and Stephen Baratz examine the underlying assumptions of intervention programs that tacitly label Negro behavior as pathological. They suggest that the failure to recognize and utilize existing cultural forms of the lower-class Negro community to teach new skills not only dooms intervention programs such as Head Start to failure, but also constitutes a form of institutional racism. An illustration of a pathological versus cultural interpretation of Negro behavior is presented when the Baratzes contrast the interventionists' statements that describe Negro children as verbally destitute and linguistically underdeveloped with current sociolinguistic data that indicate that Negro children speak a highly developed but different variety of English from that of the mainstream standard. The cultural difference model is presented as a viable alternative to the existing genetic inferiority and social pathology models, both of which share the view of the Negro as a "sick white man."

2 experiments examined the perceived relative distance produced by relative size in isolation. The hypothesis was that S assumes identity of physical size and interprets the difference in apparent size as a difference in distance. Experiment I examined this hypothesis by observing the effect of experimentally trained size assumptions on subsequent relative distance judgments. Experiment II used pairs of familiar objects which had known, normally invariant physical sizes. By varying the actual physical sizes of the standards it was possible to study the hypothesized effect of size assumptions on relative perceived distance. The results of Experiment I did not agree with the hypothesis. Experiment II did confirm the hypothesis. Both experiments were discussed in the context of the assumptive hypothesis.

The effect of race of examiner, instructions, and comparison population on level of reported anxiety of Negro Ss was investigated. 120 Negro undergraduates were administered the Test Anxiety Questionnaire (TAQ) under 8 experimental conditions. It was found that Negro Ss tested by a Negro examiner report less anxiety than those tested by a white examiner. These results indicate that level of reported anxiety, when measured by the TAQ, is dependent upon the stress characteristics of the immediate social situation.

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