Study of a Cognitive Dissonance Intervention to Address High School Students' Cheating Attitudes and Behaviors

This study examined academic dishonesty (AD) of 586 Taiwanese graduate students, the relationship between students' AD and their perceptions of AD of their peers, and their judgments regarding the seriousness of AD. Results showed that female students were more critical of AD than their male counterparts were in the areas of fraudulence, plagiarism, and falsification. Male students demonstrated more awareness of peer involvement in AD in the area of falsification than did female students. Master's students confessed to greater involvement in AD compared with the PhD students. Doctoral students were more judgmental with respect to unethical acts of fraudulence, plagiarism, and falsification.     

Medical Research: A Midcentury Survey

This article proposes an integrative model for stress management groups for women, representing a biopsychosocial point of view and drawing on theories of psychodynamic group psychotherapy, self-psychology, female development, and stress management. The basis of the model is an eight week traditional stress management group. The novel aspects of this integrative model are that it aims to increase the power of stress management groups for women by providing an articulated frame, attending to group process, promoting curiosity regarding resistance to behavior changes, encouraging the elaboration of affect, and giving importance to the role of relationships in each member's quest for self care and healthy entitlement.     

Tests of the Relationship Between Children's Temperament and Asthma and of the Reliability and Validity of the Brief Scale of Temperament

Two studies are reported. One examined the reliability and validity of a brief scale to measure children's temperament; the other tested the relationship of early temperament and the development of asthma. In Study 1, principal caretakers of 46 4- to 7-year-olds, usually the mothers, filled out questionnaires containing the Brief Scale of Temperament (BST) and the Behavioral Style Questionnaire. The caretakers did this twice, about 1 week apart. The first time the children's recent temperament was assessed, and the second time past (> 1 year) temperament was assessed. Internal consistency and correlational analyses revealed substantial reliability and validity for BST assessments of recent and past temperament. Study 2 incorporated the BST in a large-scale survey of 325 families, with parents providing data on their children's asthma and temperament. BST assessments of early (past) temperament were made retrospectively regarding the child's first few years. Comparisons of early temperament revealed no differences between children who developed asthma and those who did not in their overall scores on the BST or for any of the temperament characteristics it measures. In addition, correlational analyses of data for asthmatics showed that early temperament was not related to ratings of the severity of the asthma condition the children developed or the impacts of any of 12 specific asthma triggers, including any involving emotional states, such as stress or worry.     

Book Notes

Abstract

Identification of Book Reviewers for this Number. John H. Wigmore is Dean of the Northwestern University Law School. George F. White is Professor of Chemistry in Clark University. Edward W. Flagg is Professor Emeritus, State Normal School, Potsdam, New York. Carl Murchison is Editor of this journal.

American White Criminal Intelligence. By Carl Murchison. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Vol. 15, No. 2, August, 1924, 77 pages. Vol. 15, No. 3, November, 1924, 60 pages.

Education for Moral Growth. By Henry Neuman, Ph.D. New York: D. Appleton & Company. 1923, 383 pp.

Prisons and Common Sense. By Thomas Mott Osborne. Philadelphia, J. P. Lippincott Co., 1924. pp. 105. $1.25.

Twenty-five Years of American Education. By I. L. Kandel. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1924. pp. 469.

Elements of Educational Psychology. By Lawrence Augustus Averill. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924. pp. 425.

Psychological Principles Applied to Teaching. By William Henry Pyle. Baltimore, Warwick & York, Inc., 1924. pp. 190.

The Education of Handicapped Children. By J. E. Wallace Wallin. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1924. pp. 369. $2.25.

Fundamentals of Vocational Psychology. By Charles H. Griffitts. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1924. pp. 372.

Laboratory Studies in Educational Psychology. By Egbert Milton Turner and George Herbert Betts. New York, D. Appleton & Company, 1924. pp. 217.

Mind as Behavior. By Edgar Arthur Singer, Jr. Columbus, R. G. Adams, 1924. pp. 293.

The Child's Mind and the Common Branches. By Daniel Wolford La Rue. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1924. pp. 479.

An Introduction to Philosophy. By G. T. W. Patrick. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1924. pp. 463. $2.50.

Principles of Psychology. By J. R. Kantor. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1924. pp. 464.

An Intermediale Textbook of Physiological Chemistry with Experiments. By C. J. V. Pettibone, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Physiological Chemistry, Medical School, University of Minnesota. Second edition. C. V. Mosby Co., St. Louis, 1923. pp. 376.     

Contextual Cueing Effects Across the Lifespan

The authors evaluated age-related variations in contextual cueing, which reflects the extent to which visuospatial regularities can facilitate search for a target. Previous research produced inconsistent results regarding contextual cueing effects in young children and in older adults, and no study has investigated the phenomenon across the life span. Three groups (6, 20, and 70 years old) were compared. Participants located a designated target stimulus embedded in a context of distractor stimuli. During exposure, the location of the target could be predicted from the location of the distracters in each display. During test, these predictable displays were intermixed with new displays that did not predict the target location. Response times to locating predictable relative to unpredictable targets were compared. All groups exhibited facilitation effects greater than 0 (95% CIs [.02, .11], d = .4; [.01, .12], d = .4; and [.01, .10], d = .4, for the children, young adults, and older adults, respectively) indicating that contextual cueing is robust across a wide age range. The relative magnitude of contextual cueing effects was essentially identical across the age range tested, F(2, 103) = 1.71, ηρ² = .02. The authors argue that a mechanism that uses environmental covariation is available to all age ranges, but the expression of the contextual cueing may depend on the way it is measured.     

A Simple Test of the Concurrent Validity of the Social Interest Index

To assess the concurrent validity of the Social Interest Index (SII), we examined the relationships between subjects' social interest scores and their number and frequency of social contacts. As hypothesized, subjects' SII scores were related in a positive, significant manner to their reported number of close friends, number of relatives they felt close to, and number of monthly friend/relative contacts (all ps < .01). The results, which showed a positive relationship between social interest and social contacts, support the concurrent validity of the SII.     

Vicissitudes of goal commitment: Satisfaction,investments, and alternatives

Constructs typically used to understand commitment between individuals were used to elucidate individual differences in goal commitment. In Study 1, 299 college students completed assessments of goal satisfaction, investments, alternatives and commitment regarding an academic goal. Structural equation modeling demonstrated confirmatory evidence for satisfaction’s, investments’, and alternatives’ collective impact on people’s goal commitment. In Study 2, the model components were manipulated by having 236 college students considered the goal to learn a new language and read information suggesting they were high or low in satisfaction, investments, and alternatives. Results demonstrated all three factors had a causal impact on people’s level of goal commitment. Both studies found an individual’s level of goal commitment was strongest when satisfaction and investments were high and the impact of alternatives was low.