Expectations,procedural justice,and alternative reactions to being deprived of a desired outcome

People often find that they do not have some positive outcome they once expected to obtain, while others around them have attained that outcome. Two experiments were conducted to assess how four possible responses to such a situation are affected by procedural justice (i.e., the fairness of the procedures by which the object was denied) and by one's expectations about obtaining the outcome in the future. The four possible responses examined were anger responses, achievement strivings, devaluation of the object (X), and self-deprecation. A repeated-measures analysis revealed that the dependent variables were differentially affected in Study 1, but less so in Study 2. Analyses further revealed effects of procedural justice, such that unfair procedures led to more anger, lower achievement strivings, greater devaluation of X, and (in Study 1 only) marginally less self-deprecation. Expectations had only a marginal affect on achievement strivings in Study 1, and an effect on self-deprecation in Study 2, with higher expectations leading to lower achievement strivings and less self-deprecation, respectively. Procedural justice and expectations interacted to affect subjects' derogation of the agent who deprived them (Study 1) and their devaluation of X (Study 2). Implications for future research and for theoretical development are discussed.     

The development of visual and auditory selective attention using the central-incidental paradigm

Analogous auditory and visual central-incidental learning tasks were administered to 24 second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade and college-age subjects to study the effects of modality of presentation on memory for central and incidental stimulus materials. There was no strong evidence to indicate that modality of presentation was an important factor in the development of selective attention. Central task learning increased with age for both auditory and visual presentations; incidental learning declined at the oldest age level for both auditory and visual tasks. The serial position analysis revealed that the observed developmental increase in recall performance was due primarily to differences in the initial serial positions. The use of active strategies for focusing attention on the relevant stimulus materials seemed to be the crucial determinant of level of performance.     

Children and adolescents as producers of their own development

Interest in the historically changing contexts of human life has been associated with the elaboration of a life-span view of human development. This view holds that all levels of the context, including the biological, psychological, and sociocultural, change in reciprocal relation to one another. As a consequence of being embedded in a context which they both influence and are influenced by, children and adolescents may promote their own development. One way this occurs is that as a consequence of their characteristics of physical and behavioral individuality people promote differential reactions in their socializing others (e.g., parents, teachers, or peers); these reactions feed back affecting further development. My colleagues and I have conducted research that describes such child and adolescent contributions to development. We have focused on characteristics of physical individuality, such as body type and physical attractiveness, and on characteristics of behavioral individuality, such as behavioral style or temperament. Findings from these studies are conceptualized in terms of a person-context “goodness-of-fit” model. Adaptive development is associated with congruence, or fit, between a person's attributes of individuality and the demands of his or her setting. Implications of this research for illustrating the use of the life-span perspective, and for theory in and practice of intervention, are discussed.     

The concept of development in contextualism

Contextualism, a world view or paradigm which suggests the role of social, cultural, and historical change in individual development, became the focus of increasing interest throughout the 1970s. Nevertheless, despite the suggestion that contextualism offered a new philosophical position from which to derive concepts and theories of development, criticism occurred because it was believed that the dispersive nature of contextualism obviated the formulation of a useful definition of development. We review the characteristics of the contextual paradigm and argue for a principled integration (as opposed to an eclectic one) between selected features of contextualism and of organicism. The former approach offers a dispersive view of the nature of variables involved in development and the latter provides an integrative one. We attempt to forge a probabilistic epigenetic, or developmental-contextual, paradigm for the study of human development, one which relies on the concept of integrative levels and which conceives of the causal variables of development as interacting in a temporally probabilistic manner.     

“in”, “on”, and “under” revisited

The present study presents evidence that young children's comprehension of the locatives ‘in’, ‘on’, and ‘under’ is, at least in part, contextually determined. Children aged 1;6–3;0 were given tasks with verbal instructions which were either contextually congruent or incongruent. The results were interpreted in terms of the non-linguistic as well as linguistic strategies apparently used to interpret speech. The results and interpretation are in contrast to those of earlier research.     

A test of the X-linked genetic hypothesis for sex differences on Piaget's water-level task

Data from seven studies involving 849 high school and college students were used to test the recessive X-linked genetic model prediction that the square of the proportion of men who perform accurately on the water-level task is equal to the proportion of women who perform accurately. Goodness-of-fit tests showed that this prediction was confirmed for each sample. A model with a single estimate of gene frequency accounted for all the data when a classification error parameter was incorporated into the X-linked model. In both models the gene frequency parameter was about $\text{2}\text{3}$.     

Genetic mediation of sex differences in horizontality: A rejoinder

Neither M. G. McGee (Developmental Review, 1981, 1, 289–295) nor M. J. Allen, M. A. Wittig, and K. Butler (Developmental Review, 1981, 1, 284–288) suggest any alternative explanation for our finding that water-level performance appears to have an X-linked genetic basis. The power calculations of Allen et al. are found to be faulty, and McGee confuses the hypothesis we tested with a weaker hypothesis. Although the X-linked genetic model is not an adequate model of water-level performance the water-level data fit the X-linked model far better than color blindness and HCN data McGee presents as exemplars of X-linked characteristics.