Motivations for parenthood among young adult college students

Two hundred and sixty three young adult college students responded to openended questions assessing their specific intentions, motives, and plans for having children. The most commonly stated motives for childbearing reflected a strong interest in establishing an identity and social network. Financial, marital, and emotional stability were identified as important factors influencing the timing of parenthood. Several significant sex differences were found for both motives and the timing of parenthood. These findings are discussed in terms of changing social norms regarding parenthood and changing sex role expectations.Portions of this research were presented at the Eastern Regional Psychological Association Convention in New York, April 1986. This research was funded by a grant from Trenton State College, Committee for Faculty and Institutional Research and Sabbatical Leave.     

Morning and evening people: Examination of an identifying scale and of social- and self-perceptions of personality differences

An experiment was conducted aimed first at establishing the reliability and validity of a measure of individual differences in sleeping schedules. Two samples of subjects completed a questionnaire concerning their sleeping behavior which was scored according to the diurnal or nocturnal pattern of their responses. The scores were then used to classify subjects as morning people or evening people. Both the internal reliability and cross-time reliability of the scale were assessed and found to be high. In addition, three indices of construct validity, obtained 4 months after the administration of the scale, supported its validity. In a second part of the experiment, subjects classified as either morning or evening people rated themselves on a set of behavioral and personality dimensions. Another sample of subjects indicated their perceptions of morning people and evening people in general, along the same dimensions. It was found that subjects did have strong beliefs about personality and behavioral differences between morning people and evening people. However, the self-perceptions of the actual morning and evening people did not differ, thereby casting doubt on the validity of popular stereotypic perceptions about the two groups.     

Does code-switching influence novel word learning?

Code-switching occurs regularly in the input to bilingual children. Yet, the effect of code-switched input on language development is unclear. To test whether word learning would be affected by code-switching, Spanish–English bilingual children (N = 45, 19 boys, Mean_Age = 5.05 years; ethnicity: 37 Hispanic/Latino, six Non-Hispanic/Latino, two unreported) were taught English-like novel words in two conditions. In the English-only condition, definitions for novel words were provided entirely in English. In the code-switch condition, definitions for novel words were provided in English and Spanish, incorporating code-switches. Children required fewer exposures to retain novel words in the code-switch than the English-only condition and this effect was not moderated by children's language ability or exposure to code-switching, suggesting that code-switched input does not pose word-learning risks to bilingual children, including children with lower levels of language ability.     

An explanation of conservatism in the bookbag-and-pokerchips situation

An experiment is described in which subjective probability revisions were obtained in a standard probability estimation task, the ‘bookbag-and-pokerchips’situation. Three aspects of probability revision were examined: conservatism, sequential effects, and coherence. Under two experimental conditions, the conservatism effect obtained was closely related to subjects' use of a simple strategy. A recency effect was also obtained. Coherence of the probability estimates was excellent. Conditions under which the observed strategy leads to conservatism are explored and previously published results are reconsidered in the light of this strategy. Conservatism in the bookbag- and-pokerchips situation is explained as an artefact of subjects' strategies     

The nature of adaptation in distance perception based on oculomotor cues

In previous work by the senior authors, brief adaptation to glasses that changed the accommodation and convergence with which objects were seen resulted in large alterations in size perception. Here, two further effects of such adaptation are reported: alterations in stereoscopic depth perception and a change when distance is represented by a response of S’s arm. We believe that the three effects are manifestations of one primary effect, an alteration of the relation between accommodation and convergence on the one hand and the distance they represent in the nervous system (registered distance) on the other. This view was supported by the results of two experiments, each of which demonstrated that the alterations in stereoscopic depth perception could be obtained after adaptation periods which had provided no opportunity to use stereoscopic vision, and that the adaptation effect was larger for depth perception than for size perception when it was obtained under the same conditions; the latter finding was expected if both effects resulted from the same change in registered distance. In three of the five experiments here reported, the variety of cues that could represent veridical distance during the adaptation period was limited. In one condition of adaptation, only the pattern of growth of the retinal images of objects that S approached and the kinesthetic cues for S’s locomotion served as cues to veridical distance. In two other conditions S remained immobile. In one of these, only the perspective distortion in the projection of the scene that S viewed mediated veridical distance, and in the other one familiar objects of normal size were successively illuminated in an otherwise totally dark field, conditions from which opportunities to use stereoscopic vision were again absent. After exposure to each of these adaptation conditions, adaptive changes in perceived size and larger ones in perceived stereoscopic depth were obtained. Because we found that familiar size may serve as the sole indicator of veridical distance in an adaptation process, we concluded that it can function as a perceptual as distinguished from an inferential cue to distance.     

Increased eating in rats deprived of running

Daily food intake in rats was temporarily reduced by the introduction of an activity wheel and temporarily increased by the subsequent removal of the wheel. When this outcome is coupled with the positive relation between food deprivation and running—and food deprivation is seen as a loss of eating rather than as a physiological state—there is the suggestion that the total behavior output of the organism may be regulated as such. Specifically, when the rat is deprived of a behavior that recurrently comprises a large part of its total daily activity, an increase may occur in some other behavior.     

Anxiety and the spelling and use in sentences of threat/neutral homophones

The disambiguation of threat/neutral homophones was investigated in high- and low-trait anxiety subjects who had been exposed to either a positive or a negative mood manipulation procedure. Subjects were required first to spell each auditorily presented word and second, to generate and speak a sentence using the word. Difference indices were calculated for the spelling and the sentence usage data, i.e. the number of threat minus neutral interpretations. Examination of these indices revealed that subjects exposed to the negative mood manipulation procedure produced relatively more threat than neutral interpretations (for both spelling and sentence usage) than did subjects exposed to the positive mood manipulation procedure. Multiple regression analyses revealed that both the trait anxiety and mood manipulation variables contributed significantly to the prediction of the difference index on the spelling task. In the analysis of the use of homophones in sentences, only the mood manipulation variable contributed significantly to the prediction of the difference index on the sentence usage task.     

Range and regression, loudness scales, and loudness processing: toward a context-bound psychophysics

How does context affect basic processes of sensory integration and the implicit psychophysical scales that underlie those processes? Five experiments examined how stimulus range and response regression determine characteristics of (a) psychophysical scales for loudness and (b) 3 kinds of intensity summation: binaural loudness summation, summation of loudness between tones widely spaced in frequency, and temporal loudness summation. Context affected the overt loudness scales in that smaller power-function exponents characterized larger versus smaller range of stimulation and characterized magnitude estimation versus magnitude production. More important, however, context simultaneously affected the degree of loudness integration as measured in terms of matching stimulus levels. Thus, stimulus range and scaling procedure influence not only overt response scales, but measures of underlying intensity processing.