Gender differences,mediation, and disciplinary styles in children's responses to television

A sample of kindergarten and first-grade children was studied in a research center and at school to determine the extent to which family communication mediated their comprehension of television, as well as a series of cognitive skills necessary for such comprehension. Separate analyses were conducted for boys and girls, and results indicated that certain styles of family mediation facilitated comprehension more effectively for boys than for girls. Additionally, differential effects of two styles of discipline were found for each sex.This research was funded by a grant to Jerome and Dorothy Singer from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation entitled Television and Family Living Patterns.     

Parallel processing in visual same-different decisions

Two to 13 geometrical shapes were exposed simultaneously to S who decided whether all shapes were the same or whether one was different from the rest. Correct different decisions were usually faster than correct same decisions, but latency was independent of the number of shapes presented. We conclude that input from all the shapes was simultaneously processed into either one or two shape categories, and that a decision-theory choice was made between “same” (one shape category) and “different” (two shape categories) independent of the total number of shapes. This parallel processing is thought to be a characteristic of codable stimuli. Some observed same-different latency reversals were probably caused by a shift in the same-different criterion on the continuum for one- vs two-category decisions.     

Bargaining Strategies with Asymmetric Initiation and Termination

Two experimental studies of bilateral bargaining were conducted, and this paper reports findings related to differences in the conditions under which bargaining began and ended. Asymmetric initiation affected the way the subjects bargained, but not, on the average, the deals they struck. Asymmetric termination affected both bargaining behavior and deals. One surprising conclusion was that following a relatively simple configuration of bargaining strategies increased both one's probability of making a deal and one's benefits from the deal itself.     

COUNSELING THE EMOTIONALLY TROUBLED CLIENT FOR PSYCHIATRIC REFERRAL

From time to time the employment counselor encounters applicants who need referral for psychiatric assistance in order to increase their employability and potential work adjustment. In many instances the client may feel that he has neither an emotional problem nor a need for psychiatric evaluation. The counselor can help the applicant to recognize his problem and to accept a psychiatric referral by using communication alternatives such as reflection of feeling, reflection of experience, sharing of the process experience, interpretation, and confrontation with maintenance of tension. The client can be assisted in evaluating community mental health resources and in arranging for the initial psychiatric evaluation appointment.     

Memory storage and retrieval within and across modalities in children

Twenty-four kindergarten and fourth grade children were asked to locate a display card which had been visually or verbally presented. A probe, which identified the card to be located, was presented verbally and visually equally often. The children's ability to recall the location of an item did not differ as a function of the modality to which the material was presented. Nor was recall significantly affected when the presentation modality differed from the probe modality, suggesting that children as young as 5 can cross these sensory modalities to retrieve material with no loss in accuracy. Serial position curves suggest that the verbal and visual material is not stored in a common intersensory store. The primacy effect is found to be stronger with visually presented material and the recency effect strongest with auditorily presented material. Probe modality did not influence the serial position curves.     

Clustering by aphasics in free recall

Aphasic performance was compared to normal and left hemiplegic controls in the use of clustering to aid recall of a list of words in a multitrial free recall experiment. Use of clustering correlated with increased recall scores. Left hemiplegic performance was superior to aphasic and inferior to normal suggesting that the presence of brain damage decreased clustering but that this decrease was greater in the presence of aphasia. A second experiment examined the possibility of remediating aphasic clustering behavior by providing cues as a training device. Cues, which aided normals, did not benefit the majority of aphasics. Results are interpreted in terms of their relationship to cognitive functioning.     

Subjective estimates of shock probability following classical aversive conditioning with visual and gustatory conditioned stimuli

In two recent studies (Evans and Busch, 1974; Busch and Evans, in press) designed to explore the relevance of “cue appropriateness” concepts to aversion therapy, it was found that taste was a less effective CS than color. The major limitations of these studies were that conditioning was inferred from subjective ratings (although cross-validated by an unobtrusive but equally inferential performance measure), and the taste stimuli were rated more negatively in the pre-test than the color stimuli, thus creating possible ceiling effects.Quite apart from limitations in these particular studies, almost all cue appropriateness research contains methodological flaws; obvious ones are the failure to equate stimuli in different sense modalities for subjective intensity, or salience, and the failure to equate the ISIs when visual and gustatory elements of ingestible substances are the cues of interest. One of our studies (Busch and Evans, in press) partially resolved the timing problem, but in studies of visually-oriented college students the salience problem remains acute. It therefore seemed worthwhile to investigate whether, in the paradigm used in our laboratory, subjects simply attend less to taste cues than to color cues.In order to determine cue salience, a measure other than the development of CRs must be used. If an organism comes to give a CR to a certain stimulus, that is prima facie evidence of attention to, or if one prefers it, reception of, that stimulus, although generalization studies show the elements of the stimulus actually controlling the CR may not necessarily be the ones expected by the experimenter. Animal conditioning studies have shown, however, that the failure of CRs to emerge does not inevitably mean that the stimulus was ignored and an appropriate CR may appear if performance-related variables are manipulated. Similarly, humans may or may not show a CR and yet be able to verbalize correctly the contingency experienced during the conditioning. Thus for human Ss a cognitive expectancy measure should be able to reveal cue salience independent of the actual elaboration of a CR. We therefore repeated the Evans and Busch (1974) procedure and measured, instead of attitudinal changes to the CS, the Ss' perception of the contingency they had experienced.     

Change and stability in sexism among college students: A three-year panel study

Results are reported of a 3-year panel study of sex-role attitude changes among Ball State University students. Two questions were posed: (1) To what extent do students change their sex-role attitudes? (2) What types of students are more likely to change their attitudes? Contrary to expectations, students did not become progressively less sexist each year they were in college. Apparently, changes in student sex-role attitudes were more reflective of changes in local public opinion rather than following the Bennington College pattern. An important finding of the study is that those who were initially the most sexist displayed the greatest degree of change in their attitudes. A mixed pattern prevails with regard to relationships between changes in attitudes and background characteristics, personal orientations, and political orientations.     

EM algorithms for ML factor analysis

The details of EM algorithms for maximum likelihood factor analysis are presented for both the exploratory and confirmatory models. The algorithm is essentially the same for both cases and involves only simple least squares regression operations; the largest matrix inversion required is for aq ×q symmetric matrix whereq is the matrix of factors. The example that is used demonstrates that the likelihood for the factor analysis model may have multiple modes that are not simply rotations of each other; such behavior should concern users of maximum likelihood factor analysis and certainly should cast doubt on the general utility of second derivatives of the log likelihood as measures of precision of estimation.     

Talking about unemployment with school-leavers

Research is reported concerning the views of a variety of professionals as to appropriate ways of talking about unemployment with 16-year-old school-leavers. Preparation in schools for the possibility of unemployment is discussed, as well as issues for those in contact with young people without a job after they leave school. The ways in which professionals talk to young people about unemployment appear to vary substantially. The findings suggest that in adopting a particular approach a professional will be influenced by his beliefs about the labour economy, by his perceptions of young people's wants and needs, and by his own capacity to cope with the feelings involved in re-examining his role in relation to unemployed young people.