Television Food Commericals' Effect on Children's Resistance to Temptation1

This study investigated the effect of television food commercials on children's self-control within a resistance to temptation paradigm. Commercial type, food stimulus type, and the child's sex provided the three independent variables in a 4 × 4 × 2 factorial design. Behavioral and self-report indices of temptation and control were measured. Children were significantly more tempted to transgress for the low-nutrition food, regardless of the commercial shown. Sex differences in reported degree of temptation were found. However, the television commercials did not affect the children's latency to transgress.     

Religion,Type A behavior,and health

In a study of air traffic controllers, religious differences are found in the way Type A behavior is associated with several health status indicators. Associations between the Jenkins Activity Survey (JAS) and physical illness incidence, health-promotive behavior, diastolic and systolic blood pressure, subjective distress and impulse control problems, and alcohol consumption are examined by religious attendance, religious affiliation, and change in affiliation. Findings confirm that Type A does not vary significantly by religion. However, there are several significant findings between Type A and various health indicators. Type A is associated with illness incidence, overall and more strongly in several religion, subgroups. Type A and alcohol consumption are related positively in Protestants and converts, and negatively in churchgoing Catholics. Type A is related to impulse control problems in churchgoing Protestants and to subjective distress in churchgoing Catholics. Finally, in individuals with weak or no religious ties, Type A is associated with lower blood pressure. This last finding suggests that in some people (for example, the irreligious or unchurched), the coronary-prone behavior pattern may have cardiovascular effects which are salutary in at least one respect.The authors wish to thank Dr. Kyriakos S. Markides and Laura A. Ray for their assistance with this study. Address requests for reprints to Dr. Levin at the Institute of Gerontology, 300 North Ingalls, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.     

Are indefinite descriptions ambiguous?

I have benefited greatly from discussing the issues addressed in this paper with Michael Liston, John Vickers and Mark Wilson.     

Output and retrieval interference in the missing-number task

Three experiments are reported that represent a reexamination of the missing-number method (Buschke, 1963b) of estimating short-term memory span. The missing-number task involved presenting a random sequence of all but one of the numbers of a known reference set and asking subjects to identify the missing number. Experiment 1 introduced a modified missing-number task that included two missing items and two choices made by the subject. With a large decline in performance for the second choice relative to the first, it is possible that only the second choice was subject to output or retrieval interference. An alternative explanation is that subjects output the number with the weakest memory representation as their first response. By postcuing subjects to report their two choices in a forward or backward sequence, Experiment 2 provided evidence against the importance of output interference and support either for the importance of retrieval interference or for the "weakest-first" hypothesis. However, with a paradigm that replaced only correctly identified missing numbers, a prediction that subjects would select the number with the weakest memory representation as their first response was not confirmed in Experiment 3. Instead, retrieval interference was implicated to explain the first-choice superiority found in Experiments 1 and 3. The results were interpreted in terms of the TODAM model of Murdock (1982, 1987, in press).     

Introduction to the epistemology of the brain: Indeterminacy,micro-specificity,chaos, and openness

Given that the mind is the brain, as materialists insist, those who would understand the mind must understand the brain. Assuming that arrays of neural firing frequencies are highly salient aspects of brain information processing (the vector functional account), four hurdles to an understanding of the brain are identified and inspected: indeterminacy, micro-specificity, chaos, and openness.My thanks to the editor of this issue and an unnamed referee for many pointed comments and helpful suggestions.     

Self-efficacy and depressive affect in college students

In an attempt to extend Bandura's theory of self-efficacy, we investigated the hypothesis that increases in self-efficacy, based on mastery experiences, would lead to improvements in mood and problem solving among dysphoric subjects.College students (N=79), classified as dysphoric or nondysphoric by the Beck Depression Inventory, were randomly assigned to anagram training groups that received bogus bar graphs suggesting either task ease or difficulty. Before and after training, subjects rated themselves on depressive affect (DACL) and self-efficacy. A difficult anagram task and a final DACL rating completed the procedure.Anagram training conditions did not lead to differential self-efficacy. However, multiple regression analyses showed that self-efficacy was related to depressive symptoms. Greater DACL decreases after training were seen in dysphoric subjects who reported higher posttraining self-efficacy. This improved mood is consistent with Bandura's theory. An unexpected finding among dysphoric subjects was that the higher their self-efficacy was, the lower was their final anagram performance. It appears that dysphoric/high self-efficacy subjects may have become more demoralized than dysphoric/low self-efficacy subjects when they encountered a need for much greater effort expenditure on the difficult anagram task.The findings suggest that skills training interventions which raise self-efficacy may be most effective in reducing depressive symptoms. The relevance of effort expenditure to the development of competine in depressed undiriduals appears to merit further investigation.where he served previously as Director of Clinical Psychology and as Chairperson of the Department of Psychology.Jeffrey Schwartz, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, has been a staff member at the Cliffwood Mental Health Center in Englewood, New Jersey for the past five years. He is also engaged in private practice in New York City.Jefferson M. Fish, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at St. John's University in New York City, where he served previously as Director of Clinical Psychology and as Chairperson of the Department of Psychology.This paper is based on the first author's Ph.D. dissertation in Clinical Psychology at St. John's University under the direction of the second author. Both authors wish to thank Jeffrey Nevid and John Hogan for their support and contributions as committee members, and Marc Garcia for his invaluable assistance with data analysis. Requests for reprints should be addressed to the second author, Department of Psychology, St. John's University, Jamaica, New York 11439. All other correspondence should be directed to the first author at the same address.     

A program for constructing SVT tests: An alternative way of assessing text comprehension

The sentence verification technique (SVT), developed by Royer, Hastings, and Hook (1979), provides developmental and educational researchers with an alternative way of assessing text comprehension based on all of the information contained in a passage. Students must decide if test sentences have the same meaning as sentences that appeared in an original passage. The program described here automates the more laborious aspects of constructing SVT tests. The user must create a passage using a word processor. The program will prompt the user for information as needed. Finally, printable text files (SVT test and answer key) are generated. The program is written in BASIC for IBM and IBM-compatible computers.