A comparison of depressed and nondepressed disturbed children on measures of attributional style,hopelessness, life stress,and temperament

Upon admission to a hospital treatment program, clinically depressed and nondepressed children (aged 9–17 years) were assessed on measures of attributional style, hopelessness, depression, life stress, and child temperament. The depressed group tended to attribute positive events to specific and unstable factors when compared with the nondepressed sample. Group differences also were found on child temperament measures. However, no differences were reported between the diagnostic groups on self-reported depression, hopelessness, or life stress. The findings suggested that there may not be a unique constellation of cognitive characteristics in depressed children when compared with a nondepressed clinical sample. For both depressed and nondepressed groups, treatment did appear to affect self-reported depression and overall ratings of depressogenic attributional style.     

Holland's theory and non-college-degreed working black and white women

The main concern of this study was to investigate differences between black and white American women employed in traditional female occupations who took the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) and the Self-Directed Search (SDS). The VPI and the SDS were administered to 110 black and white non-college-degreed workers in three occupations (laboratory technicians, sales clerks, and clerk-typists) corresponding to three of Holland's environmental categories (Investigative, Enterprising, and Conventional). In general, the findings for the three VPI and SDS scales and for these six occupational groups are mixed. On the SDS scales, findings indicate that black and white women in the same occupation seem to be far more similar than different. On the scales of the VPI, however, white and black women in the same occupation seem to be more different than similar.     

Positional frequency and versatility of bigrams for two- through nine-letter English words

A comprehensive count of bigram frequencies and versatilities by position was tabulated for two- through nine-letter words recorded by Kucera and Francis (1967). A total of 577 bigrams were found variously distributed throughout words. Such counts should prove useful to workers who wish to determine the orthographic regularity of specific words.     

Observational studies of retarded children with multiple stereotyped movements

Stereotyped movements, such as body rocking and hand gesturing, are common among developmentally delayed children. However, very little is known concerning the naturally occurring circumstances that produce variability in this type of responding. Three relatively long-term observational studies, involving seven preschool children, each of whom exhibited multiple stereotypies, were conducted to determine the extent to which the type of activity or setting had any effect upon the rates of these responses. Repeated observations were made of each child during a variety of school activities. In two studies, adult-child interactions were also recorded. The results showed that, in general, the particular activity greatly affected rates of stereotyped behavior, although there were some marked individual differences. Moreover, in two studies variability was apparent across sessions within a particular setting. For some of the children, there was evidence that their multiple stereotypies were functionally interrelated. Adult interactions, as recorded in one study, appear to be both quantitatively and qualitatively different for stereotyping as contrasted with nonstereotyping children. An environmental analysis employing a sequential model indicated that there were teacher behaviors that affected the frequency and/or conditional probability of the child's aberrant behavior.This research was supported by P.H.S. Grant No. HD-00973.     

Reinforcement effects on intrinsic interest: A classroom analog

The potential undermining effects of a reinforcement program were examined in two studies with kindergarten-first grade children. The procedures were designed to provide an analog to typical classroom incentive programs. In one study, the subjects' initial interest in the target activity (coloring) was low, whereas in the other study it was reasonably high. In neither case was an undermining effect evident in follow-up observations.     

Imageability and distributional typicality measures of nouns and verbs in contemporary English

Dissociations between noun and verb processing are not uncommon after brain injury; yet, precise psycholinguistic comparisons of nouns and verbs are hampered by the underrepresentation of verbs in published semantic word norms and by the absence of contemporary estimates for part-of-speech usage. We report herein imageability ratings and rating response times (RTs) for 1,197 words previously categorized as pure nouns, pure verbs, or words of balanced noun-verb usage on the basis of the Francis and Ku?era (1982) norms. Nouns and verbs differed in rated imageability, and there was a stronger correspondence between imageability rating and RT for nouns than for verbs. For all word types, the image-rating-RT function implied that subjects employed an image generation process to assign ratings. We also report a new measure of noun-verbtypicality that used the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL; Lund & Burgess, 1996) context vectors (derived from a large sample of Usenet text) to compute the mean context distance between each word and all of thepure nouns andpure verbs. For a subset of the items, the resulting HAL noun-verb difference score was compared with part-of-speech usage in a representative sample of the Usenet corpus. It is concluded that this score can be used to estimate the extent to which a given word occurs in typical noun or verb sentence contexts in informal contemporary English discourse. The item statistics given in Appendix B will enable experimenters to select representative examples of nouns and verbs or to compare typical with atypical nouns (or verbs), while holding constant or covarying rated imageability.     

Psychosocial Impact of Tubal Ligation in Alabama Women1

The prevalence of female sterilization has grown rapidly throughout the world, especially in the United States. Yet the psychosocial impact of tubal ligation is incompletely understood. Most previous research has been retrospective and has lacked comparison groups of women using other birth control methods. This study used procedures developed in World Health Organization research to study the impact of voluntary tubal ligation on Alabama women. The design was prospective, included a comparison group, and called for 6- and 12-month follow-ups. Tubal ligation reduced follow-up pregnancy rate and scores on a measure of fear of pregnancy. Sterilization also produced a small increase in menstrual distress but did not affect sexual satisfaction or mental health nor did it increase regrets about contraceptive choice over other methods. These results imply women attained the goals that led them to choose sterilization.     

Launching the post-college career: A study of mentoring antecedents

Drawing upon role-making theory, this study examines which new job market entrants, following college graduation, find informal mentors and how much mentoring they receive from these mentors using a predictive design. Our results suggest that individuals lower in negative affectivity and higher in cognitive ability as well as women, individuals who have previously had a mentor, and those who go to work for organizations with developmental climates are more likely to find informal mentors. In contrast, individuals higher in learning goal orientation and mentoring instrumentality receive more mentoring once a mentoring relationship has been established.