Completion norms for 40 three-letter word stems

This is a report of the completion responses for 40 three-letter word stems (e.g., ABO) produced by 100 undergraduate students at the University of California at San Diego. The report includes a list of the different words that were written as stem completions, their frequency of occurrence as completions, and their frequency of occurrence in English according to published norms. This list of materials is useful for the construction of completion tests for future investigations of direct priming phenomena, and it may provide an important covariate in the analysis of performance on completion tests. Preliminary analyses of the results reveal three primary factors that determine overall performance on a stem-completion test: word frequency, word length, and meanings per word. Analyses of the completions produced for each individual word stem, however, reveal that usually only one of these factors makes a significant contribution to performance.     

Adolescent alcoholism in Benin City, Nigeria

The consumption of alcohol by Nigerian adolescents is investigated. Adolescence and alcoholism as applied in this study are defined, and the financial costs and physical and mental effects of alcohol use are described. The author used unobtrusive methods to gather data, visiting three nightclubs and an amusement park where alcohol is served in order to observe and interview adolescents. The findings show that adolescents begin drinking at an early age and consume large quantities of beer. The findings are consistent with those of other epidemiological studies. Finally, recommendations for controlling adolescent alcohol use are made.     

THE EFFECTS OF A CLASSROOM MANAGER ROLE ON THE SOCIAL INTERACTION PATTERNS AND SOCIAL STATUS OF WITHDRAWN KINDERGARTEN STUDENTS

We examined the effects of assigning a classroom manager's role on the frequency of social interactions and the sociometric standing of three withdrawn kindergarten students. Results showed that when the three socially withdrawn students were placed in the manager's role they substantially increased the frequency of their positive social initiations during free-play time, were the recipients of many more positive and significantly fewer negative social bids from their peers, were rated more favorably by their classmates on a sociometric rating scale, and were selected more frequently as best friends by their peers. In addition, follow-up data suggested partial maintenance of treatment effects when students no longer occupied manager positions.     

Belief systems and attitudes toward the death penalty and other punishments

This study focused on the relationship of belief systems as a configural construct and conservatism-liberalism to attitudes toward the death penalty and other punishments for offenses of varying severity Extrapersonalists, the most concretely functioning of the four conceptual or belief systems posited by Harvey, Hunt, and Schroder (1961), were most in favor of the death penalty They also endorsed the most severe punishment for a variety of crimes, to a particularly greater extent than did representatives of either of the two more abstractly functioning systems The belief dimensions of Openness, Evaluativeness, and Complexity, as well as the frequency of church attendance, correlated more highly and consistently with attitudes toward punishment than did either Conservatism-Liberalism or gender Both of the latter variables failed to correlate with a number of the outcome variables and related at only low levels to the others The greater predictive power of a configural conception of personality or belief systems over a unidimensional conception seems to have been demonstrated Configural concepts may additionally be generally superior to multidimensional concepts treated linearly     

The relations between type A behavior, clinically relevant behavior, academic achievement, and IQ in children

The relation of Type A behavior to IQ, academic achievement, and several clinically relevant dimensions of behavior in children was assessed in 873 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders by means of the Matthews Youth Test for Health (MYTH), the Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT), the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITED), and the teachers' form of the Missouri Children's Behavior Checklist (MCBC-T). The MYTH and its competitiveness and impatience-aggression subscales were found to be differentially related to academic achievement and to account for a small but significant portion of the variance in achievement not accounted for by IQ. The subscales of the MYTH were found to be highly correlated with several clinically familiar dimensions of children's behavior. The significance of these findings for the construct validity of the MYTH is discussed.