Motives and Values to Achieve: Different Constructs With Different Effects

ABSTRACT Motives to achieve and values associated with achievement were conceptualized as distinct and independent personality constructs, one nonconscious, the other conscious, each predictive of a different type of achievement-related behavior It was hypothesized that (a) motive and value measures would be uncorrelated, (b) motives would predict “operant” or spontaneous behaviors while values would predict “respondent” or stimulus-driven behaviors, and (c) motives and values would interact such that subjects with high values relating to achievement would perform better than those with low values, but only when their motives were also high Hypotheses (a) and (b) were strongly supported m two studies, and Hypothesis (c) was supported in Study 2 In that study, the motive for achievement was a particularly strong predictor of operant math performance among those subjects who valued achievement as opposed to affiliation The findings suggest that nonconscious (motive) and conscious (value) measures are both useful in different cases–the former for predicting “real” (doing) activity, the latter for predicting self-report (thinking) responses Questions concerning how motives and values might combine to predict different kinds of behavior are addressed     

THE STRUCTURE OF ABILITIES IN THE RETARDED

The ability structure in retarded women was studied on the same lines as with men (Kebbon, 1965). The women, 89 in number, were between 17 and 54, their IQ's between 40 and 90. Factor analysis was done of their scores on 16 tests measuring four factors—verbal, spatial-inductive, numerical and psychomotor. Comparison with the corresponding scores from 89 matched men and 92 normal men indicated that, in terms of these factors, retarded women have the same ability structure as retarded men, and that both have a similar structure to that of persons of average and superior intelligence.     

Cross-Sectional Analysis of Longitudinal Mediation Processes

Statistical mediation analysis can help to identify and explain the mechanisms behind psychological processes. Examining a set of variables for mediation effects is a ubiquitous process in the social sciences literature; however, despite evidence suggesting that cross-sectional data can misrepresent the mediation of longitudinal processes, cross-sectional analyses continue to be used in this manner. Alternative longitudinal mediation models, including those rooted in a structural equation modeling framework (cross-lagged panel, latent growth curve, and latent difference score models) are currently available and may provide a better representation of mediation processes for longitudinal data. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, we provide a comparison of cross-sectional and longitudinal mediation models; second, we advocate using models to evaluate mediation effects that capture the temporal sequence of the process under study. Two separate empirical examples are presented to illustrate differences in the conclusions drawn from cross-sectional and longitudinal mediation analyses. Findings from these examples yielded substantial differences in interpretations between the cross-sectional and longitudinal mediation models considered here. Based on these observations, researchers should use caution when attempting to use cross-sectional data in place of longitudinal data for mediation analyses.     

Double Voicing and Personhood in Collaborative Life Writing about Autism: the Transformative Narrative of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Carly’s Voice</Emphasis>

Collaborative memoirs by co-writers with and without autism can enable the productive interaction of the voices of the writers in ways that can empower rather than exploit the disabled subject. Carly's Voice, co-written by Arthur Fleischmann and his autistic daughter Carly, demonstrates the capacity for such life narratives to facilitate the relational interaction between writers in the negotiation of understandings of disability. Though the text begins by focusing on the limitations of life with autism, it develops into a collaboration which helps both writers move toward new ways of understanding disability and their own and one another's life stories.     

Influence of time-of-day on joint Navon effect

The shared attention theory suggests that people devote greater cognitive resources to those features co-attended simultaneously with others, determining better performance in several types of tasks. When co-actors performed a go/no-go Navon task attending different features of target letters, the performance was impaired, reflecting a joint Navon effect (the representation of a co-actor’s attentional focus made it more difficult to select and apply one’s own focus of attention), probably due to asynchronous co-attention with a decrease in cognitive resources involved. Researches in chronobiology and chronopsychology demonstrated that not only selective attention (involved in a Navon task), but also cognitive resources have a daily fluctuations, mainly paralleling the circadian rhythm of body temperature (i.e. increasing values from the morning to evening with a subsequent decline in the night). The study was conducted to assess whether the presence of joint attention, as measured by the joint Navon effect, was influenced by the time-of-day. Sixteen pairs of participants sitting next to each other were required to respond to the identity letters in a go/no-go Navon task twice: in the morning (09:00–10:00) and early afternoon (13:00–14:00). The results showed a joint Navon effect in the morning session only, suggesting that joint attention was affected by the time-of-day effect on cognitive resources.     

“I see what you mean”: Oral deaf individuals benefit from speaker's gesturing

Recent studies in the psychological literature reveal that cospeech gestures facilitate the construction of an articulated mental model of an oral discourse by hearing individuals. In particular, they facilitate correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at the expense of memory for discourse verbatim. Do gestures accompanying an oral discourse facilitate the construction of a discourse model also by oral deaf individuals trained to lip-read? The atypical cognitive functioning of oral deaf individuals leads to this prediction. Experiments 1 and 2, each conducted on 16 oral deaf individuals, used a recollection task and confirmed the prediction. Experiment 3, conducted on 36 oral deaf individuals, confirmed the prediction using a recognition task.     

Development and decay of extra-linguistic communication

Cognitive Pragmatics theory is concerned with analyzing the cognitive processes underlying communication. In previous works we have explained the emergence of communication in context, as revealed by very young children, and the communicative deficits shown by closed head injury patients. The aim of the present work is an extension of Cognitive Pragmatics to the emergence and the decay of extra-linguistic communication. In particular, we investigate the performance of 2- to 7-year-old children and that of Alzheimer's patients in standard and nonstandard (irony and deceit) pragmatic tasks. The predictions derived by Cognitive Pragmatics are confirmed. Comprehension of pragmatic phenomena which are more complex according to the theory emerges later in the development (Experiment 1), and their decay is most severe in Alzheimer's patients (Experiment 2). We conclude that the framework provided by Cognitive Pragmatics can accommodate both the development and the decay of extra-linguistic communication.     

The Self-Report Psychopathy Scale and passive avoidance learning: a validation study of race and gender effects

The reliability and validity of the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (SRPS) was examined in a noninstitutionalized offender sample of mixed gender and race. Adequate alpha coefficients were obtained for the total sample and across gender and race. The SRPS was compared to measures of trait anxiety and passive avoidance errors. SRPS total, primary, and secondary scores were positively and significantly correlated with trait anxiety and passive avoidance (commission) errors, but not omission errors. Employing hierarchical regression models, no anxiety, gender, or ethnic effects were found. Intelligence confounded the relationship between psychopathic traits and passive avoidance errors. Findings provide tentative support of the SRPS as a valid measure of psychopathy.     

A test of whether attributions provide for self-enhancement or self-defense

It is well known that people often make attributions in a way that is favorable to their self-concepts (see R. L. Collins, 1996, for a review). However, it is less clear whether the primary effect is to enhance self-esteem or to defend against the possible loss of self-esteem. The authors performed an experiment to test these possibilities against each other. In a completely between-participants design, participants recalled either a positive behavior or a negative behavior that was performed by themselves or others. They then judged the positivity or negativity of the behavior and made trait attributions about the actor (i.e., himself, herself, or others). The results indicated that although judgments and trait attributions for positive behaviors were similar for the self and for others, judgments and trait attributions for negative behaviors were less negative for the self than they were for others. The authors interpreted these and other findings as supporting a defensive strategy rather than an enhancive strategy.     

Recognition accuracy and reaction time of vocal expressions of emotion by African-American and Euro-American college women

This study examined the relationship of racial group membership and vocal expressions of emotion. Recognition accuracy and reaction time were examined using the Diagnostic Assessment of Nonverbal Accuracy 2 Receptive Paralanguage subtests with 18 young Euro-American and African-American women. Participants listened to Euro-American children and adults speaking a neutral sentence, and identified the emotion as happy, sad, angry, or fearful. Analysis identified a significant effect for race on reaction time. Euro-American participants had faster mean RT than the African-American women for the recognition of vocal expression of emotion portrayed by Euro-Americans. However, no significant differences were found in mean accurate identification between the two groups. The finding of a significant difference in recognition RT but not in accuracy between the stimuli spoken by an adult and a child was unexpected. Both racial groups had faster mean RT in response to vocal expression of emotion by children.