Locus of control and control perceptions and the relationship between life stress and psychological disorder

Conclusion The deleterious effects of negative life events were demonstrated, even with a relatively restricted range of negative experiences and the inclusion of a number of statistical controls. Employing a conservative multivariate regression model and a prospective design, the present study found that negative life events were consistently positively related to measures of psychological disorder. There was, however, no evidence for the moderating effects of dispositional locus of control beliefs and control perceptions of experienced life events, and it seems that the field awaits more refined conceptualization and measurement of life experiences and hypothesized moderator variables before explanatory and predictive models will yield significant and consistent returns.The authors thank David M. Kuhlman who provided invaluable statistical consultation and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Susan Stout and Joani Wendell assisted in the collection and coding of the data.     

The effects of special education labels on teachers' behavioral observations,checklist scores,and grading of academic work

This study addressed the question: Do special education labels bias teachers' evaluations of children? Thirty primary level teachers were given different labels for the same child: learning disabled, educable mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, normal, or no label. Teachers made behavioral observations from the same video-tape, completed a checklist, and graded the same academic work purportedly completed by the target child. Teachers' behavioral observations and grading of the academic work were not influenced by the special education labels, but the checklist scores were. Implications for the philosophical debate about the effects of labeling and for methods of classroom data collection by teachers are discussed.     

Sensory features and the reduction of imaginal interference

Interference generated among the sensory features of PA stimulus words is not eliminated by processing at the imaginal level. This experiment was planned to test the reverse possibility. Will interference generated by similar imaginal referents be eliminated by sensory overlap between the stimuli and their responses? Thus, stimulus words did or did not evoke similar images, pairs did or did not share initial letters, and lists were acquired either under an instructional set t o form interacting images or to repeat the items aloud. The results indicated that the imagery strategy was superior to the repetition strategy in all conditions, and that stimulus interference was statistically eliminated when pairs shared the same initial letters. The findings were interpreted as consistent with a levels of processing conceptualization.     

Visual and semantic factors in recognition from long-term memory

In recognition tests, physical and semantic relationships between targets and distractors have been shown, in separate manipulations, to affect the latency of subject's decision. Recognition was tested for distractors which were visually similar or dissimilar to targets and which belonged to the target categories or to nontarget categories in order to examine the interaction of these dimensions. Rejection latency was longer for target category than for nontarget category distractors. Latency was also longer for visually similar than visually dissimilar distractors, but only when combined with target category probes. This interaction can be explained by the hypothesis that word recognition depends on the analysis of several dimensions of the probe stimulus, and rejection can occur before all such analyses have been completed.     

An expanded scope for behavior modification in school settings

Behavior modification in the school setting has consisted primarily of the manipulation of consequent conditions to vary children's social and academic behaviors within classrooms. The scope of behavior modification within school settings may fruitfully be expanded by furthering the investigation and application of these additional areas: the interaction between the modification of social and academic behaviors, the manipulation of antecedent conditions in order to evoke reinforceable responses, the use of controlling variables on a school-system-wide basis, and the use of standardized tests as an additional dependent measure.