The Reasons for Living Inventory: psychometric properties

The test-retest reliability, internal consistency reliability, normative, and item analysis data of the Reasons for Living Inventory were investigated in a sample of 116 college students. The inventory has six subscales, each of which assesses a category of adaptive beliefs and expectations considered reasons for not committing suicide. The inventory was administered twice, with a 3-week interval between testings. Test-retest coefficients for the men, women, and total sample were moderate to high. The alpha coefficients and item-total correlations for the subscales and the total inventory provided strong support for internal consistency. 26 items were consistently endorsed by 30% or more of our total sample as "extremely important," while only four were suggested as "not at all important" reasons for not committing suicide.     

Mothers and fathers of young children: comparison of parenting styles

This study compared the developmental expectations and parenting behaviors of 52 mothers and fathers with children between the ages of 1 and 4 years, using the Parenting Inventory: Young Children. While both mothers and fathers were nurturing parents, mothers obtained significantly higher nurturing scores. Possible reasons for this difference were discussed. Developmental expectations and discipline strategies did not differ between mothers and fathers.     

When are AIDS patients to blame for their disease? Effects of patients' sexual orientation and mode of transmission

This study examined three factors affecting college students' attributions of blame for an AIDS patient's disease: sexual orientation of the patient, mode of HIV transmission, and the sex of the subject. 148 subjects read one of six vignettes describing an hypothetical AIDS patient who was described as either an heterosexual or an homosexual man who contracted HIV through one of three avenues: blood transfusion, sexual contact, or IV drug use. The homosexual AIDS patient was considered more to blame for his illness than the heterosexual AIDS patient, but only when mode of transmission was sexual contact. In addition, mode of HIV transmission was a significant factor in attributions of responsibility, as the patient who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion was rated as less responsible than the patient who contracted HIV through sexual behavior or IV drug use. Women consistently rated the AIDS patient as less responsible than did men.     

Attitude, anxiety, and social readjustment toward learning disabilities by student teachers

84 student teachers from undergraduate classes at a western university in Kansas completed a 9-question checklist of learning disabilities before interacting with a behavioral disordered/learning disabilities teacher, a paraprofessional, and a high school learning-disabled student. After the dialog, the student teachers completed a Social Readjustment Rating Scale, Breskin Rigidity Test, the Self-evaluation Questionnaire: State and Trait Anxiety, and the same 9-question checklist with one additional question ("Now that you have seen a learning-disabled student has it affected your opinion of learning disabilities?"). The dialog affected 63% of the students' opinions while 31% stated the presentation did not affect their opinion (6% were missing or not completed). Persons who experienced more life-changes and problems tended to rate or view learning disabilities more negatively. The more trait anxiety experienced by the students, the lower they rated learning disabilities after the presentation.     

Autonomic determinism: the modes of autonomic control, the doctrine of autonomic space, and the laws of autonomic constraint.

Contemporary findings reveal that the multiple modes of autonomic control do not lie along a single continuum extending from parasympathetic to sympathetic dominance but rather distribute within a 2-dimensional space. The physiological origins and empirical documentation for the multiple modes of autonomic control are considered. Then a formal 2-dimensional conception of autonomic space is proposed, and a quantitative model for its translation into a functional output surface is derived. It is shown that this model (a) accounts for much of the error variance that has traditionally plagued psychophysiological studies, (b) subsumes psychophysiological principles such as the law of initial values, (c) gives rise to formal laws of autonomic constraint, and (d) has fundamental implications for the direction and interpretation of a wide array of psychophysiological studies.     

Impression management in behavior toward handicapped patients]

A previous study (Tr?ster, 1989) showed that nonhandicapped persons preferred a physically handicapped interaction partner to a nonhandicapped partner in an attributionally unambiguous situation. In order to test whether this "sympathy effect of physical handicap" is based on tendencies of impression management, 48 female subjects had to choose to sit next to either a physically handicapped or nonhandicapped female interaction partner in order to view a film together. Attributional ambiguity was varied by either confounding the choice of an interaction partner with a second, socially acceptable alternative (attributionally ambiguous situation: a choice between two films) or not confounding it (attributionally unambiguous situation: no choice between films). Public responsibility was manipulated by informing the subjects about their freedom to choose where they wished to sit either in public (public responsibility) or in private (no public responsibility). The results supported the impression management hypothesis: The handicapped interaction partner (in a wheelchair) was only preferred when the subjects had to anticipate that observers would deduce a preference of the chosen partner from the subjects' choices because of the attributionally unambiguous situation and the public announcement of their freedom of choice. Results suggest that the nonhandicapped strive to exhibit positive and nondiscriminative behavior toward the handicapped in order to avoid creating a disadvantageous impression in an observer.     

Determinants of pride and shame: outcome, expected success and attribution

In two experiments we investigated the relationship between subjective probability of success and pride and shame. According to Atkinson (1957), pride (the incentive of success) is an inverse linear function of the probability of success, shame (the incentive of failure) being a negative linear function. Attribution theory predicts an inverse U-shaped relationship between subjective probability of success and pride and shame. The results presented here are at variance with both theories: Pride and shame do not vary with subjective probability of success. However, pride and shame are systematically correlated with internal attributions of action outcome.     

Affect and performance in simple problems

We investigate the effects of emotional mood states on solving simple pattern comparison tasks. It is assumed that the effects of mood are mediated through response biases as well as effort expenditure. Departing from these assumptions, trend hypotheses are derived for the response biases evaluated by means of a signal detection analysis, for the response latencies, and for an adequate index of the underlying ability. The data support the hypotheses, and in particular, a positive mood state is found to improve performance. The assumption of mood-dependent differences in effort expenditure provides a parsimonious and integrative account of our results, while a reduced-capacity view cannot explain the findings obtained under positive mood induction.     

Effects of an intervention program for pregnant adolescents: Educational outcomes at two years postpartum

Examined postpartum effects of a school-based intervention program for pregnant adolescents. Interviews were conducted with 102 innercity black, low-income, school-aged mothers who had attended the program, and their academic and medical records were reviewed. For teenagers who had been poor students prior to becoming pregnant, a strong linear effect was found for duration of program attendance: with sufficient time in the program, poorer students became indistinguishable from better students in educational success. Most of the better students were educationally successful at 2 years postpartum, independent of their length of time in the program. For all students, longer durations of postnatal intervention were predictive of lower likelihood of subsequent childbearing. Numerous academic, medical, social, and demographic variables were ruled out as possible confounding factors that might have produced the positive educational outcomes for poorer students. The results suggest that adolescents who appear to have minimal academic promise prior to their pregnancy are nevertheless very responsive to school-based intervention.