The efficient assessment of need for cognition

A short form for assessing individual differences in need for cognition is described.     

Challenge seeking and the type A coronary-prone behavior pattern

The present investigation sought to further delineate the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern and to elucidate the psychophysiological process through which this behavioral disposition is translated into heart disease. Type A and Type B male subjects engaged in tasks that required varying degrees of activity before an assessment of challenge-seeking tendencies. Type A participants sought greater degrees of challenge than did their Type B counterparts. In addition, the more active the person with Pattern A had been immediately before the challenge-seeking opportunity, the greater the degree of challenge sought. Precedent activity level did not significantly influence challenge seeking in the Type B population. The Type A subjects also had significantly faster heart rates during performance of a challenging task. Pattern A behavior may be translated into heart disease through the cumulative deleterious effects of chronic and excessive challenge-induced cardiovascular excitation.     

Beliefs about and experiences with battering: Women and men in two populations

A questionnaire was developed to measure beliefs about and experiences with violence in the family. Two groups of persons in two different states who had attended conferences on battered women participated in this research. Of the 177 subjects (84% women, 16% men), none of the men had been battered, yet over one-third of the women had been; more older women reported having been adult battering victims than did younger women; the women had less formal education than the men; the women in the lower educational groups were more likely to have been battered and to report fear of becoming victims; and the social service workers reported little fear of battering.     

Sexism and beautyism in women's evaluations of peer performance

The purpose of this study was to investigate independent and interactive effects of physical attractiveness (PA), sex, and task sex-typing on performance evaluations. Subjects were 216 college women who read poorquality essays written on masculine, feminine, or neutral topics. Essays supposedly were written by a male or a female student who was either attractive, unattractive, or physically unidentified. Results indicated that PA enhanced evaluations of both male and female essayists, except for the predicted effect that female attractiveness is less beneficial for masculine than feminine task performances. Women did not evaluate the sexes differently, and sexism was largely restricted to the interactive effects of PA. PA stereotypes also affected causal attributions of performers' outcomes in a manner consistent with attribution theory. These data are considered in the context of the existing literature and the directions for further research on sexism and beautyism.     

A process recording for evaluating group psychotherapy training methods

This paper discusses an exploratory investigation concerned with the long range questions: How does group psychotherapy help patients? and How can psychiatry residency programs best train residents to treat patients in therapeutic groups? Group psychotherapy has come to be accepted in its own right as a decisive contribution to the study of and relief of emotional disorders. As a component of comprehensive psychiatric services it is indispensable. However, while its clinical value has been demonstrated, its scientific validity has not. A Group Process Inventory has been developed by the author and has been utilized for the past two years by psychiatric residents in recording the process of their therapeutic groups in a teaching hospital mental hygiene clinic. The preliminary use of this recording as a clinical-teaching instrument has proven effective. This inventory is being revised to serve as a research instrument.     

Behavioral consequences of song learning: Discrimination of song types by male white-crowned sparrows

The functional significance of learned population differences in male song in the white-crowned sparrow was explored in natural populations using playback tests. Laboratory results have shown that learning of the population-specific song seems to take place in early life and is strongly dependent upon the nature of the auditory experience at that time. However, the varied results of recent studies make it difficult to reach a confident conclusion about the ecological functions of song learning. The present research took advantage of naturally occurring variation in the differences between songs of adjacent populations to determine a function relating degree of difference in song to intensity of territorial singing elicited. Applying a typological evaluation of syllable structure to the four segments of the song allowed a crude quantitative ranking of the differences between local songs and playback stimuli. These results, together with those of other studies, suggest a unimodal aggressive response function of males to songs of other males. A maximum response to songs slightly different from the local song environment suggests that male exclusion based upon acquired song components may contribute to the maintenance of discrete and stable song dialects.     

Experiences with the indirect Clausen Test using NTA as an antigen in multiple sclerosis and other neurologic diseases

The present study based on the indirect Clausen-test using NTA and PHA as antigens contributed to therapy control and possibly prognosis assessment rather than to immunological differential diagnosis.