Mood and prospective memory

This study considered the relationship between mood states, prospective memory, and retrospective memory among a non-clinical sample of undergraduate students. Multiple regression analyses with simultaneous entry of variables were undertaken to examine the unique contributions of the alternate memory test and the emotional states to memory test performance. As expected, retrospective free recall performance and anxiety made unique and significant contributions to performance on the prospective memory task. However, only prospective memory performance emerged as a significant predictor of retrospective free recall. It is suggested that none of the mood measures emerged as a significant predictor of retrospective memory performance because they do not account for unique variance. In contrast, the relationship between anxiety and prospective memory appears to be due to factors uniquely associated with anxiety, and unrelated to depression.     

The concept of the person and the value of life

The concept of the person has come to be intimately connected with questions about the value of life. It is applied to those sorts of beings who have some special value or moral importance and where we need to prioritize the needs or claims of different sorts of individuals. "Person" is a concept designating individuals like us in some important respects, but possibly including individuals who are very unlike us in other respects. What are these respects and why are they important? This paper sets out to answer these questions and to develop a coherent and useful concept of the person.     

Memory Consolidation for Contextual and Auditory Fear Conditioning Is Dependent on Protein Synthesis, PKA, and MAP Kinase

Fear conditioning has received extensive experimental attention. However, little is known about the molecular mechanisms that underlie fear memory consolidation. Previous studies have shown that long-term potentiation (LTP) exists in pathways known to be relevant to fear conditioning and that fear conditioning modifies neural processing in these pathways in a manner similar to LTP induction. The present experiments examined whether inhibition of protein synthesis, PKA, and MAP kinase activity, treatments that block LTP, also interfere with the consolidation of fear conditioning. Rats were injected intraventricularly with Anisomycin (100 or 300 μg), Rp-cAMPS (90 or 180 μg), or PD098059 (1 or 3 μg) prior to conditioning and assessed for retention of contextual and auditory fear memory both within an hour and 24 hr later. Results indicated that injection of these compounds selectively interfered with long-term memory for contextual and auditory fear, while leaving short-term memory intact. Additional control groups indicated that this effect was likely due to impaired memory consolidation rather than to nonspecific effects of the drugs on fear expression. Results suggest that fear conditioning and LTP may share common molecular mechanisms.     

Homework and achievement: Explaining the different strengths of relation at the elementary and secondary school levels

Four explanations were tested for why the correlation between homework and achievement is weaker in elementary school than secondary school. Eighty-two teachers answered questions about their homework practices, and their responses were related to their students' achievement test scores. No evidence was found to suggest the weaker correlation in elementary school associated with a restricted variation in amounts of homework in early grades nor that teachers assigned more homework to poor-performing classes. Evidence did suggest that teachers in early grades assigned homework more often to develop young students' management of time, a skill rarely measured on standardized achievement tests. Also consistent with this hypothesis, elementary school teachers were more likely to use homework to review class material and to go over homework in class, while secondary school teachers more often used homework to prepare for and enrich class lessons. Finally, there was weak evidence that young students who were struggling in school took more time to complete homework assignments.     

The Induction of Self-Reliance: An Experimental Study of Independence in the Face of Failure*

The development of dependency, rather than autonomy, in professional and paraprofessional helping relationships represents a practical and theoretical problem. In the present research an attempt is made experimentally to examine this issue from the viewpoint of the self-perception hypothesis. From this perspective, immersion in the successful helping dyad was expected to foster an increased belief in self as other-reliant, and, through cognitive balance, a lessened belief in self as self-reliant. The fiidings indicate that such different dimensions of help as intensity, duration, and choice variously affect these attributions to self, and that these attributions in turn affect the strength of behavioral independence when failure is encountered outside the helping dyad. Some practical and theoretical implications are discussed concerning the role of induction from self-performance in mapping self-related beliefs.     

An investigation of relationships between teachers' ratings of behavior and children's personality traits

This study examined the relationships between teachers' ratings of children's behavior on the Behavior Problem Checklist and children's selfreported personality source traits on ageappropriate Personality Questionnaires. The sample consisted of 254 children from first through eighth grades and 13 teachers in a rural Maine elementary school. Analysis of the data revealed that teachers' ratings and children's self-reports in grades four through six agreed more frequently about problematic behavior than did children's self-reports and teachers self-ratings in grades one through three and seven and eight. In general, the study (1) supported the validity of teacher judgments made with the Behavior Problem Checklist, (2) demonstrated the ckitical need for more than one perspective when identifying and defining maladaptive behaviors potentially indicative of emotional disturbance, and (3) suggested the need to increase the accuracy of teachers' perceptions and evaluations of children's behavior.     

The uncertain connection between verbal theories and research hypotheses in social psychology

Examples spanning 20 years and various areas of social psychology illustrate the great difficulty of knowing what implications do or do not follow the postulates of verbally stated theories. Reliance on verbally stated theories in preference to mathematical or computer-simulation models thus severs a vital link in the hypothetico-deductive chain.