How quickly do children forget events? A systematic study of children's event reports as a function of delay

Sixty‐six children aged between 5 and 7 years participated in the event, ‘Visiting the Pirate’, and were interviewed about it at one of five delays, namely, no delay (immediate interview), or at a 1‐week, 1‐day, 1‐month or 6‐month delay. For open‐ended recall, a significant decrease in the amount of information reported was detected only at the 6‐month delay, although forgetting functions indicated forgetting was most rapid at the shorter delays. Accuracy of open‐ended recall was maintained over all delays. In contrast, in response to specific, leading and misleading questions, accuracy had decreased significantly by the 6‐month delay. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings regarding the effects of delays on children's event reports are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

how organizations should respond to rape in the workplace

Each year, approximately 51,000 incidents of rape and sexual assault occur in the workplace. If an incident of rape occurs in the workplace, management can adopt several procedures for both the assaulted victim and the organization. First, encourage coworkers to show support for the victim. Second, plan the employee's return to work. Third, provide career and other forms of counseling and assistance for the victim. Fourth, and most important, show concern for the employee. An organization can use a variety of administrative controls and environmental designs as preventive measures to help protect employees from being raped or sexually assaulted in the workplace.     

Language and the ability to evaluate contradictions and tautologies

Children were found to experience difficulty evaluating contradictions of the form p & -p, and tautologies of the form p v -p. It was hypothesized that (a) the difficulty of these statements was not due solely to the logical words occuring in them, (b) part of the difficulty is due to the fact that their truth value derives from their linguistic form rather than from empirical considerations, and (c) the ability to examine language in an objective manner, apart from events and objects to which it refers, is necessary but not sufficient for correct evaluation of contradictions and tautologies. The results of two experiments support the hypothesis.     

Effects of prefeeding on the DRL preformance of rats with septal lesions.

Two experiments reported the effects of prefeeding normal and septal rats prior to their daily sessions on a differential reinforcement of low rates (DRL-20) schedule. Prefeeding reduced responses and increased reinforcements in the case of septal animals, regardless of the level of body weight. In the case of normal animals, prefeeding led to a decrease in responding and an increase in the number of reinforcements obtained only when the animals were at 85% of ad-lib levels, prefeeding, although it decreased responding, also decreased the frequency of obtained reinforcements. These results implied an impairment in normal animals in the discrimination of response feedback by stimulation arising from stomach distention.     

Child judgments of sentences varying in grammatical complexity

This study is another contribution to the development of a satisfactory child version of the linguistic task of judging grammaticality. With a nondifferentially reinforced forced-choice procedure, it was found that responses of 24 5- and 24 7-yr-old children did vary as a function of the grammatical complexity of stimulus sentences. The children judged sentence stimuli of two types (negatives and wh-word questions) each having three levels of grammatical complexity (two primitive and one well-formed). After each stimulus presentation, the subject pointed to the adult or the child in a photograph, depending on who was judged to have produced that utterance. Performance of the two age groups did not differ for the question stimuli, for which subjects pointed to the adult more frequently as the grammatical complexity of wh-word questions increased. In response to the negative sentences, the older group attributed more well-formed stimuli to the adult than primitive ones. While the younger group pointed to the adult more frequently for well-formed negatives than for the middle level negatives, they made more adult responses than expected to the least complex negatives. It was concluded that, with this procedure, 5- and 7-yr-olds demonstrate ability to distinguish grammatically well-formed from primitive sentences. Procedural improvements for future research may allow children this age and younger to demonstrate more adult-like discrimination between a variety of primitive and well-formed sentences.     

Women's reactions to discrimination from members of the same or opposite sex

The effects upon women's self-evaluations of experiencing varying severity of failure in interpersonal competition against male vs. female opponents were explored. The results supported the hypothesis that self-esteem in women is more vulnerable to interpersonal rejection from men as opposed to other women. Specifically, subjects reported lower self-esteem when severe failure was due to the actions of alleged, male opponents rather than female ones. Also, severe failure elicited less favorable self-evaluations than mild failure only when the female subjects confronted male opponents. Finally, contrary to a defensive self-presentation hypothesis, subjects did not respond to discrimination from men by presenting themselves as being discrepant from the stereotype of women. Instead, subjects who interpreted their failure as reflecting prejudice on the part of men evaluated themselves more favorably on positive traits underlying the female stereotype.     

Productivity and uniqueness in continued word association as a function of subject creativity and stimulus properties

Ninety-six male and 44 female college students gave written continued associations for 2 minutes to each of 24 stimulus words and then completed the Remote Associates Test and the Revised Art Scale No significant relationship was found between the creativity measures for either sex Few relationships, differing for males and females, were found between the creativity measures and associative productivity or uniqueness Productivity and uniqueness were found to be substantially related, and common responses occurred earlier in time than unique responses The properties of the stimulus words (frequency, form class, and slope of associative hierarchy) had marked effects on response productivity and uniqueness The study confirms the strong impact of stimulus properties on associative productivity and demonstrates similar effects on uniqueness The creativity data, yielding weaker and less consistent relationships, are in keeping with a specificity theory but lend only limited support to Mednick's associative hypotheses.