Effect of varying picture-sentence congruence on children's free recall.

70 fourth-grade children were shown objects arbitrarily arranged in an integrated scene. Subjects were randomly assigned to conditions which either presented a sentence that correctly labeled and correctly described the physical arrangement of the objects, presented a sentence containing the correct labels of the objects but not the correct physical arrangement, or presented a sentence which did not contain the correct labels and incorrectly described the physical arrangement. Control conditions either provided subjects with correct labels or omitted presentation of verbal prompts. Congruence between the object display and the sentence produced significantly higher recall and clustering than the incongruence or control conditions. The incongruence conditions did not produce significantly higher recall than the control conditions, suggesting that incongruence interferes with formation of stable grouping of items which appears to be an important factor in facilitating free recall.     

A computer interview language: Programming the on-line interactive computer

Seven computer interview and two disk file commands are executed by a computer program to display multiple-choice questions on a CRT video screen, to record clients’ answers, and to branch to various sets of questions. The program interpreting these commands uses little computer memory and does not require change each time the interview is altered or expanded. It can be written in almost any general-purpose programming language.     

Interest Inventories and the Developmental Framework

Interest inventories are of greatest usefulness for educational and vocational planning when the counselor is satisfied that the student is “ready” to indicate his interests. Since interests develop over time as the adolescent broadens his experiences, counselors are cautioned that more individual counseling is often necessary before interest inventories can be used as the basis of career decision-making. Viewed from this developmental point of view, interest inventories are examined as they are affected by the subject's age, social class, ego-strength, shift in major field, and ability. Judicious counseling could provide experiences to assist in raising career goals.     

Reactions to self-discrepant feedback: Feminist attitude and symbolic self-completion

Reactions to self-discrepant feedback were theoretically and experimentally investigated. The conceptual frame was provided by the theory of symbolic self-completion. Starting from the assumption that attitudes can function as central aspects of self-definition, 81 female subjects were either presented with feedback that their attitudes were unfeminist (treatment, i.e. incompleteness condition) or they received no feedback (control condition) Then they were given the opportunity for self-symbolizing by subscribing to a feminist journal. Subjects with strongly pro-feminist attitudes who were made incomplete with respect to their feminist self-definition subscribed more often and more intensively to the feminist journal than others. The results illustrate that attitudes can take on the character of self-definitions. Furthermore, reactions to self-discrepant feedback concerning a central attitude were as predicted by the theory of symbolic self-completion.     

An evaluation of computer-based driving systems for research,assessment, and advisement

Evaluations are made of three computer-based driving systems presented at the 1993 Society for Computers in Psychology conference. These systems are compared and contrasted on the dimensions of realism, validity, cost, data-output, and application goals. All three systems have positive attributes on each of the five dimensions, but in different ways, yielding systems that complement each other in their usefulness for research, assessment, and advisement. We note that the systems have strong potential for applications with elderly drivers, but that all three systems need expansion for use with high-risk youthful drivers.