THE JAPANESE JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

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Despite the 1988 revision of the"Law for Promoting the Employment of the Physically Impaired, "many mentally hndicapped persons who have completed schooling are forced to choose employment at either welfare facilities or at small factories. Such places have the characteristics of occupational training centers, and are based on the principle of wages paid for work done. As a result, guidance programs are prepared by placing emphasis on job performance, disregarding the type or degree of the person's impediments. This has led to certain problematic behaviors among these people. Therefore, it is important to study the readiness of mentally handicapped persons to receive work guidance. Guided by Piaget's theory of development, we focused our study mainly on changes in mental states, rather than on changes in behavior. Using interviews to study these mental states, we reached the following conclusions concerning persons with cognitive abilities below those associated with Piaget's formal operations period : 1)These persons fail to fully grasp the meaning of their own work;2)their recognition of society is confined within the framework of their personal relationships;and 3)they do not have clear ideas of the position of work in their future lives.

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Gelman(1972)showed that young children acquired the number invariance rule, i.e.the concept of conservation before the period of concrete operation, by using the"magic task". This finding in Gelman's experiment has been frequently cited by cognitive psychologists in order to confirm the competence of preschool children and to deny Piaget's theory of developmental stages. In this article, the validity of this evidence and the credibility of these claims were examined. For this purpose, not only the magic task used by Gelman(1972), but also the number conservation task in significant transformation by Ueno et al.(1986)were analyzed. The analisis of these tasks showed that they were intended to remove the"cognitive disturbance"from standard conservation task, and"conservation responses"in these tasks were not based upon conservation schema. As a result of these analysis, it was suggested that the interpretation of experimental data by Gelman and Ueno et al., and the claims of the competence of preschool children and the denying of developmental satges by many cognitive psychologists were not valid or doubtful, and the new interpretation of the results of two experiment was presented from the view of cognitive disturbance.

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135 teachers in day care centers were asked to answer a questionnaire concerning(1)their experiences of caring for mentally retarded young children, (2)their beliefs in whichever traits are characteristic of mental retardation, and(3)their causal attribution and nursery behavioral intention with respect to a fictitious young child's aggressive behavior. Relationships between(1)and(2)and influence of labeling"mentally retarded"on(3)were investigated. As a result, no relationships between(1)and(2)were found, but there was a significant effect of labeling on the self-estimation of severeness of nursery behavioral intention.

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