Religious faith and adjustment to long-term hemodialysis

This study examines religious faith as associated with adjustment to end-stage renal failure and its treatment regimen of maintenance hemodialysis. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected initially and after a three-year interval in order to observe changes over time. The variable of the patient's perception of the import of religious faith was found to be positively related to interactional behavior and sick role behavior and to be inversely associated with alienation. Content analysis of qualitative responses for the item of perceived import of religious faith revealed a pattern of increasingly more positive patient attitudes occurring over time.     

Death anxiety, dissent, and competence

A total of 64 male undergraduates were administered a multistage interview which was structured to assess (a) their level of overtly expressed death anxiety, (b) covert (GSR) arousal to death stimuli (c) self-perceived competence, and (d) agreement with or dissent from life threatening national policies. The analyses that followed were concerned with examining the relationships among these variables. In previous studies of this kind it had been typically found that (1) self-perceived competence and magnitude of expressed death concern are inversely related and (2) overt expressions of death concern and covert physiological arousal to death cues are inversely related. Psychodynamic formulations centering on the ego-defensive nature of inhibited expressions of death anxiety have been cited to explain these past data. The current investigation proposed that the magnitude of expressed death concern would bear an inverse relationship to both felt competence and covert death arousal only when the level of overt concern was not contingent upon the individual's attitudes concerning the imminence of real life threatening circumstances in the environment. The rationale behind these predictions inheres in the notion that the neurotic components of strongly expressed death anxiety derive from its lack of anchoring in "real" external threats. Conversely, the expression of low death fear can only be regarded as "defensive" when real threats are perceived and acknowledged. The obtained results strongly support this rationale and the discussion centers on the impact of social conditions on psychodynamic processes.     

Classifying pictures and words: Implications for the dual-coding hypothesis

In deciding that two items come from the same category, subjects were delayed if the items were presented as a word and a picture, as compared with two words or two pictures. Subjects were not delayed if the items were not to be compared. Hence, the delay appears to occur during the retrieval and comparison of know ledge about the items, not during their perceptual analysis. The results suggest that there are two distinct codes involved in the categorization of words and pictures, rather than a single code.     

The development of attitudes toward dialect in Italian children

In the Italian public school system, local dialects are explicitly discouraged and children are pressured to master standard Italian. In this study, 95 southern Italian children were given a series of tasks to determine their level of dialect production and their attitudes toward their local dialect. Production of dialect decreases sharply from the first to the third grade, but then tends to stabilize, with a slight increase in dialect use by fourth and fifth grade boys. Hence the schools have not been entirely successful in eradicating dialect. However, attitude measures indicate that by the third grade children prefer Italian over the dialect at close to the 100% level. The schools have placed many children in a conflict situation, in which they have learned negative attitudes toward their own code but cannot completely master standard Italian. Sex differences may be related to a tendency to view dialect as more masculine. Implications of this study for bidialectical school programs in Italy and the United States are discussed.     

The hydra-headed Mueller-Lyer effect: A theoretical puzzle

Three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of multiple fins on the magnitude of the Mueller-Lyer illusion. All studies showed that the multiple form of the elongation illusion was greater than the average of the components and that the multiple form of the shrinkage illusion was smaller than either of the components. The pattern of results failed to support either simple addition models or more complex averaging theories of illusions. A cross-attribute summation hypothesis and a filled space hypothesis were proposed as possible explanations for the results.     

MODIFICATION OF THE EXCESSIVE INAPPROPRIATE CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR OF TWO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS USING HOME-BASED CONSEQUENCES AND DAILY REPORT-CARD PROCEDURES1

Two experiments investigated home-based reinforcement contingencies to control excessive behavior in normal classrooms. Subjects were, respectively, a 12-yr-old fifth-grade boy and a 9-yr-old fourth-grade boy, each in a separate classroom and with a different teacher. Following baseline observations in which observers recorded several categories of student behavior and teacher-student interaction, separate conferences were held including parents of the two children, the principal, teachers, and experimenters. A daily report-card procedure was agreed on, stipulating a one-day suspension from school following three successive “undesirable” daily report cards as well as the supervision of home-based privileges and other reinforcers usually contingent on satisfactory daily reports. Measurements of daily rates of teacher attention indicated no important change in this variable throughout the various experimental conditions. The daily report procedure significantly reduced disruptive classroom behavior. In a second experiment, a teacher-operated timer cued her own time-sample observations. Reliability measures revealed that the teacher could accurately measure the child's behavior while she was teaching the class. The procedure was ultimately successfully expanded to the teacher's total contact hours each day.     

The effect of Russian versus Hebrew instructions on the reaction to social pressure of Russian-born Israeli children

An experiment on the role of the language of instruction in mediating responses to social pressure was conducted with a sample of 41 Russian-born adolescents who had recently immigrated to Israel. The subjects were asked to respond to a series of conflict situations in which they were told that either the experimenters, their own parents, or their peers would see their answers. Instructions were given once in Russian and once in Hebrew. Contrary to the principal hypothesis, when subjected to pressure from adults the children gave more conventional moral responses under Hebrew than under Russian instructions. The result was interpreted as reflecting the tendency to respond more moralistically to the language of authority, which, for the emigréchildren, shifted from Russian to Hebrew. Regardless of the language of administration, the scores for the emigréchildren fell between those for Soviet and Israeli youngsters, but they were closer to the latter. Within the sample, the longer a child lived in one or the other society, the more his response to social pressure resembled the modal reaction of children in that society. Children from families who had or had not spoken Yiddish in the home showed marked differences in response, with the former resembling the Israeli and the latter the typical Soviet reaction. The results were interpreted as reflecting the capacity of children to adapt to conflicting socialization settings both within and across cultures.     

Effects of expectancies of different reward magnitudes in transfer from noncontingent pairings to instrumental performance

In two experiments, rats received noncontingent pairings of two stimuli with food reward, one paired with small reward and the other with large reward, and received bar press training with large reward or with small reward. When the noncontingent stimuli (NS) were presented for test during subsequent rewarded bar pressing and during early extinction of bar pressing, responding for each group was faster in the presence of the NS which was paired with the same reward magnitude that group received in bar press training than to the NS which had been paired with a different reward magnitude. As extinction progressed, all groups responded more slowly in the presence of the NS which had been paired with the large reward than in the presence of the NS which had been paired with small reward. These results were interpreted as indicating that responding in the presence of an NS depends on: (i) whether the reward expectancy elicited by the NS has been conditioned to the instrumental response, and (ii) the relationship between the reward expected in the presence of the NS and that received in test.     

Information Seeking Within Organizations

In this article, both the literature on employee feedback‐seeking behavior and the literature on information seeking by organizational newcomers are reviewed. This review highlights the various motives that affect the decision of whether or not to seek information, shows how the strength of those motives is affected by both characteristics of the individual and characteristics of the organizational context, and reviews evidence that information seeking has beneficial outcomes. The author then offers an integrated model of antecedents, dynamics, forms, and outcomes of employee information seeking and concludes with suggestions for how future research can extend current understanding of employee information seeking.