Competitiveness: relations with GPA, locus of control, sex, and athletic status

A sample of college students and college athletes completed measures of competitiveness and locus of control. In addition, self-reports of GPA and sex were provided. Negative correlations among scores on competitiveness, GPA, and scores on internal locus of control were significant. Also, there were sex and athletic status differences in competitiveness.     

Measurement of supernatural belief: sex differences and locus of control

Although we live in an age dominated by science and technology, there exists an increasingly popular anti-science sentiment. This study describes the development of a scale to assess the degree of personal acceptance of supernatural causality versus acceptance of scientific explanation. In addition to the psychometric data concerning validity and reliability of the scale, data are presented which showed the personality factor of supernaturalism to be independent of orthodox religious attitudes. Results indicated a significantly greater supernatural acceptance for women, and a positive relation of supernaturalism with external locus of control.     

Birth order and locus of control revisited: sex of siblings as a moderating factor

Rotter's Locus of Control scale was administered to 64 first-born and 157 other undergraduate students, and data on the sex of participants' siblings were also obtained. The sex of participants' siblings was significantly correlated with locus of control among first-borns but not among other participants.     

Sex as a status characteristic: An examination of sex differences in locus of control

The conceptualization of sex as a status characteristic has been recently advanced (Meeker & Weitzel-O'Neill, 1977) as an explanatory principle for the apparently inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between sex and role specialization (e.g., the task/expressive distinction). This study is concerned with the validity of sex-as-status hypothesis and its potential generality examined in the context of research on locus of control. It is argued that sex differences in this variable may represent a special case of a more general pattern of relationships between status differentiations and locus of control. Conceived as realistic responses to position in the social hierarchy, beliefs in internal control are expected of higher status persons, while an external orientation is anticipated for individuals of lower status. This proposition has been empirically tested in a sample of Israeli college students. The findings lend support to the hypothesis, showing that females' tendency to external orientation is reinforced if they come from lower-class families; correspondingly, males' a priori internal orientation is more sharply pronounced if they come from the higher social classes. The theoretical appeal of the sex-as-status hypothesis vis-à-vis some alternative perspectives is discussed.     

Toward a theoretical model to understand teacher emotions and teacher burnout in the context of student misbehavior: Appraisal, regulation and coping

Compared with other professions, teachers in P-12 schools appear to experience a higher level of emotional exhaustion (see review in Maslach et al. in Ann Rev Psychol 52(1):397, 2001; Schaufeli and Enzmann in The burnout companion to study and practice: a critical analysis, Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia, 1998). The purpose of this study is to examine teacher emotions within the context of teachers’ appraisals and the ways they regulate and cope with their emotions. The study explores teachers’ appraisals of disruptive classroom behavior situations and investigates the adaptive coping and emotion regulation strategies that ease teacher burnout. Data were collected from 492 teachers in the US Midwest and subjected to hypothesis testing using structural equation modeling. The model provides evidence supporting a pathway between teachers’ antecedent judgments and their experience of emotion, as well as providing evidence for how the consequent emotions contribute to teachers’ feelings of burnout. This study further validates the relationships between the appraisals teachers make about an incident and the correlative intensity of emotions. Several hypotheses are either supported or partially supported after testing alternate models. Discussion and implications regarding teacher emotion regulation and coping are provided.     

Nonsexist curricula,sex of teacher,and children's sex-role learning

This study examined the impact of nonsexist curricula and teacher's sex on children's sex role learning. Thirty-two boys and 32 girls, aged three to five, were equally divided among four programs: nonsexist curriculum, female director; nonsexist curriculum, male director; control curriculum, female director; and control curriculum, male director. Sex role discrimination and preference were measured at the beginning and end of a six-month period. Exposure to the nonsexist curriculum produced significantly greater reductions in sex stereotyping on all measures than exposure to the control curriculum. Moreover, children in the male-directed nonsexist program displayed greater decreases in stereotypic knowledge and preference for sex-typed children's activities than those in the female-directed nonsexist program, while children in the male-directed control program showed more stereotypic increases on these measures than their counterparts in the female-directed control program. Finally, children under the direction of an opposite-sex teacher exhibited less stereotypic changes in preference for adult activities than children under the direction of a same-sex teacher. Implications for early childhood programs are discussed.This research was partially supported by an Oregon State University Foundation grant from the Shell Foundation and a grant from the Milne Computer Center.     

Association of country, sex, social class, and life cycle to locus of control in western European countries

Relatively few studies have focused on causal factors in the development of locus of control. Here nine western European countries are studied to assess the hypothesis that the society in which one lives is important in the scores on locus of control. The data indicate greater variation resulting from country of residence on locus of control than that from the variables of life cycle, sex, and social class. Findings regarding these latter variables are congruent with previous research. In addition, being single was related to having an external locus of control.     

Self-evaluation,self-reinforcement,and locus of control

Two verbal recognition memory tests were administered to 24 internals and 24 externals. Subjects were required to self-evaluate (SE) their responses on the first test and both SE and self-reinforce (SR) on the second. There were no internal-external differences in performance accuracy on either task, but internals gave themselves consistently higher self-evaluations, administered more positive SR and less negative SR. There were no differences in the criteria used by the two groups for SR. SR differences appeared to be a function of the differential SE. It was suggested that external locus of control could be viewed as a self-regulation deficit. Externals are hypothesized to be unable to evaluate their own behavior adequately in the absence of external input and therefore do not make effective use of self-reinforcement. Discussion also made reference to the process of self-regulation.     

Alertness and cognitive control: Toward a spatial grouping hypothesis

A puzzling interaction involving alertness and cognitive control is indicated by the finding of faster performance but larger congruency effects on alert trials (on which alerting cues are presented before the task stimuli) than on no-alert trials in selective attention tasks. In the present study, the author conducted four experiments to test hypotheses about the interaction. Manipulation of stimulus spacing revealed a difference in congruency effects between alert and no-alert trials for narrowly spaced stimuli but not for widely spaced stimuli, inconsistent with the hypothesis that increased alertness is associated with more diffuse attention. Manipulation of color grouping revealed similar differences in congruency effects between alert and no-alert trials for same-color and different-color groupings of targets and distractors, inconsistent with the general hypothesis that increased alertness is associated with more perceptual grouping. To explain the results, the author proposes that increased alertness is associated specifically with more spatial grouping of stimuli, possibly by modulating the threshold for parsing stimulus displays into distinct objects.     

Levels, hierarchies, and the locus of control

The Bartlett--Craik view of human performance is restated; and particularly that it is organised at different levels. On that view, the lower levels are controlled by the upper but capable of functioning independently. Modern views of memory, language, and problem-solving are compared with this doctrine, and found to embody some of its virtues but not all. Fresh experiments are described, in which people take decisions about the running of a transportation system. The simplest control mechanism which will model their behaviour is a two-level adaptive controller.     

Desire for control, locus of control, and proneness to depression

Two personality constructs, desire for control and locus of control, were related to depression among college students. Measures of levels of depression, desire for control, and locus of control were taken from subjects. Approximately six months later 71% of these subjects returned a questionnaire concerning their experiences with depression during that six-month period. It was found that locus of control scores, particularly the extent to which subjects perceived that their lives were controlled by chance, were significantly related to the depression levels. It was also found that high desire for control subjects who held external perceptions of control were most likely to seek nonprofessional help for depression. In addition, high desire for control subjects who perceived their lives as generally controlled by chance were most likely to have suicidal thoughts. The results are interpreted in terms of a general style that may promote a proneness to depression for certain individuals.     

Similarity and Social Interaction: When Similarity Fosters Implicit Behavior Toward a Stranger

ABSTRACT

People interact more readily with someone whom they think they have something in common with. At a pedestrian crossing, confederates asked participants for the time and, in one condition, said she/he had the same watch as the participant. The amount of time that participants lingered near a confederate was used as the dependent variable. Participants in the similarity condition spent significantly more time near the confederate than when no similarity was manipulated. The results showed that similarity fosters implicit behavior, adding to the growing body of data on the positive effects of similarity and its role in social interaction.     

Coping, locus of control, social support, and combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder: a prospective study

We examined the relations between coping, locus of control, and social support and combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The sample consisted of 262 Israeli soldiers who suffered a combat stress reaction episode during the 1982 Lebanon war and were followed 2 and 3 years after their participation in combat. Cross-sectional analyses revealed significant relations between locus of control, coping, and social support and PTSD at the two points of assessment. Changes in PTSD from Time 1 to Time 2 were also associated with changes in coping. We discuss theoretical and methodological implications of the findings.     

Toward understanding sex differences in pay allocation: Agency,communion, and reward distribution behavior

This research examined the extent to which the personality characteristics of agency and communion are sex linked, and the extent to which differences in these orientations can account for sex differences in reward distribution behavior. In two studies, the agency and communion level of large samples of male and female undergraduates were assessed. As expected, males were more agentic and females were more communal. Moreover, when subjects who scored high or low on agency and high or low on communion were asked to allocate rewards between themselves and a co-worker, these personality differences were related to their allocation decisions. These results were used as the basis for discussing the role that sex-linked personality differences might play in distributive justice judgments.This article is an adaptation of a colloquium presentation at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, August 1981. The research reported here was supported by NIMH grant MH29987-1, Goals, Motives, and Norms of Reward Distribution, and by NIMH Biomedical Research Support Grant from the College of Social Science, Michigan State University. The authors wish to thank Andrea Doughty for her valuable advice, and to gratefully acknowledge the help of Mark Teicher, Julie B. Klein, Sue Schnelbach, Pat Loepp, Barb Allen, Gavin Goodrich, Bob O'Hara, Kelly Bowen, Rod Hollenstein, Steve Schultz, and Mary Hurst.