Attachment, Friendship, and Psychosocial Functioning in Early Adolescence

Fifth-graders' (N = 162; 93 girls) relationships with parents and friends were examined with respect to their main and interactive effects on psychosocial functioning. Participants reported on parental support, the quality of their best friendships, self-worth, and perceptions of social competence. Peers reported on aggression, shyness and withdrawal, and rejection and victimization. Mothers reported on psychological adjustment. Perceived parental support and friendship quality predicted higher global self-worth and social competence and less internalizing problems. Perceived parental support predicted fewer externalizing problems, and paternal (not maternal) support predicted lower rejection and victimization. Friendship quality predicted lower rejection and victimization for only girls. Having a supportive mother protected boys from the effects of low-quality friendships on their perceived social competence. High friendship quality buffered the effects of low maternal support on girls' internalizing difficulties.     

The determination of the factor loadings of a given test from the known factor loadings of other tests

A technique is indicated by which approximations to the factor loadings of a new test may be obtained if factor loadings of a given group of tests and the correlations of the new test with the other tests are known. The technique is applicable to any orthogonal system and is especially adapted to cases in which a _ji a _jk = 0 wheni k. Application is also made to the simultaneous determination of the factor weights of a group of tests in which no additional common factor is present. The technique is useful in adding tests to a completed factorial solution and in using factorial solutions involving errors to give results which are approximately correct.     

Civil commitment laws in nineteenth-century New York

The roots of nineteenth-century American civil commitment law lay in English common law, in particular poor law, with its mixed motives of helping lunatics and of protecting the community from them. As state institutions assumed an increasingly large share of the burden of restraint in the 1840s and 1850s, such confinement decisions became subject to greater public scrutiny. This can be seen particularly clearly in New York State, which in 1842 passed a law requiring that two physicians examine each alleged lunatic and report their findings to a judge who then made the final commitment decision. After the Civil War, a number of legal decisions limited the state's power to initiate civil commitments to cases of clear social danger, though families were not so confined. An 1874 statute further tightened procedural guidelines for civil commitments. A State Commissioner in Lunacy was appointed to oversee the internal workings of lunatic asylums. Yet such legal “reforms” failed to slow the increasing tendency of both families and communities to use such institutions as long-term holding places for the socially marginal or threatening.     

The left: lateral eye movements and ideology.

The lateral eye movements of 24 college students were videotaped as they reflected on spatial and analytical questions. As predicted, participants with more initial movements to the left had significantly higher scores on the leftist (or humanistic) index of the Tomkin's Polarity Scale. The direction of this relationship was reversed for the rightist index (right movers scoring higher) but this difference was not significant. Results are interpreted as additions to evidence which suggests a connection between the left and right sides of the human body and more global dichotomies of ideology or personality.     

The detailed method of optimal regions

The detailed method of optimal regions is an extended form of the method of optimal regions which has been found effective in solving the personnel classification problem when the number of job categories is small. The automatic determination of the successive values of thev _i , made possible by the more exact techniques of the detailed method, provide easier solutions for the more complex problems and provide solutions, which, for the most part, can be mechanized. In a sense the detailed method of optimal regions is more than a detailed form of the method of optimal regions. It is essentially a method of transformations by which the original matrix is reduced to a matrix from which the solution is easily obtained.Much of the basic research covered in this paper was carried out while the author was working on the problem of personnel classification in his capacity as Consultant, Personnel Research Branch, Department of the Army. The author wishes to express his appreciation to the Department of the Army for permission to use these materials in this paper. The opinions expressed are those of the author and are not to be construed as official or as those of the Department of the Army.     

Accuracy of memories from childhood and adolescence related to growth and size

The ability of middle-aged adults to recall their body size and events occurring up to 40 years earlier was assessed. Ninety-one subjects recalled their relative height, weight, and fatness during childhood, early adolescence and late adolescence. Accuracy of these memories was compared with the accuracy of current reports. The ability to accurately date benchmarks of their maturation such as menarche and year of maximal growth in height was also examined. Accuracy of reports did not decline uniformly over time. In general, reports of childhood physical characteristics were at least as accurate as reports of current characteristics; that is, they did not differ significantly from current reports. Males were less accurate in their reports of relative height and fatness during early adolescence and childhood. This project has been funded at least in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service under contract number 53-3K06-5-10. The contents of this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.     

Context conditional flavor preferences in the rat based on fructose and maltodextrin reinforcers

In three experiments, rats were exposed to a flavor preference procedure in which flavor A was paired with the reinforcer and flavor B presented alone in Context 1, while in Context 2 flavor A was presented alone and flavor B with the reinforcer. With fructose as the reinforcer both two- and one-bottle training procedures produced a context-dependent preference (Experiments 1 and 2). With maltodextrin as the reinforcer two-bottle training produced a context-dependent preference (Experiment 1). Following one-bottle training with maltodextrin reinforcement rats demonstrated a context-dependent preference when the conditioned stimulus (CS)- was presented with a dilute solution of the reinforcer during training (Experiment 3B) but not when the CS- was presented alone (Experiments 2 and 3A). The pattern of results with maltodextrin reinforcement suggests that there was competition between the cue flavors and the taste of the maltodextrin as predictors of the postingestive consequences of the maltodextrin reinforcer. The fact that rats were able to display context-dependent flavor preferences is consistent with the idea that learned flavor preferences rely on the sort of cue-consequence associations that underpin other forms of conditioning which produce accurate performance on biconditional tasks. The differences between fructose- and maltodextrin-based preferences are discussed in terms of configural and elemental learning processes.