Interactions Between Goal Instability and Social Support on College Freshman Adjustment

The authors examined the moderating effect of goal instability on the benefits of components of perceived social support on entering freshmen's academic and personal adjustment. A significant interaction was identified between goal instability and two components of social support: appraised and belonging. Low goal-directed individuals reporting low appraised social support reported lower levels of personal adjustment than did high goal-directed individuals with the same level of appraised social support. In addition, high goal-directed individuals reporting a high sense of belonging reported greater personal adjustment than did high goal-directed individuals with low reported sense of belonging. Implications for the role of goal directedness and social support on improving college adjustment are discussed.     

Assessment of In-Basket Performance by Quickly-Scored Methods: Development and Psychometric Evaluation

The present research was aimed primarily at establishing and evaluating an In-Basket exercise and scoring procedures that greatly reduce training and scoring time while retaining adequate reliability and validity. In the first of two studies, an optimal subset of In-Basket items was identified for scoring. Their reliability and concurrent validity were then re-evaluated in a second, cross-validation study. No loss in reliability and little in validity resulted from the scoring-item reduction. In addition, results emerged that shed light on attainable In-Basket reliability and criterion-related validity. Implications for In-Basket use are noted.     

The McCollough effect: Dissociating retinal from spatial coordinates

Three experiments were conducted to dissociate the perceived orientation of a stimulus from its orientation on the retina while inducing the McCollough effect. In the first experiment, the typical contingency between color and retinal orientation was eliminated by having subjects tilt their head 90° for half of the induction trials while the stimuli remained the same. The only relation remaining was that between color and the perceived or spatial orientation, which led to only a small contingent aftereffect. In contrast, when the spatial contingency was eliminated in the second experiment, the aftereffect was as large as when both contingencies were present. Finally, a third experiment determined that part of the small spatial effect obtained in the first experiment could be traced to hidden higher order retinal contingencies. The study suggested that even under optimal conditions the McCollough effect is not concerned with real-world properties of objects or events. Implications for several classes of theories are discussed.     

Behavioural knowledge amongst staffing groups for the care of the intellectually disabled

A multiple choice inventory was used to assess the behavioural knowledge of staff providing services to people with an intellectual disability. The relationships between performance on the inventory and other staff related variables were investigated. Results support previous research and indicate a low level of behavioural knowledge amongst direct care staff. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to staff training and selection.     

FACILITATING GENERALIZED REQUESTING BEHAVIOR IN BROCA'S APHASIA: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF A GENERALIZATION TRAINING PROCEDURE

The effects of a generalization training procedure on requesting by 4 subjects with chronic Broca's aphasia were examined using a multiple baseline design across behaviors and subjects. Subjects were trained to request information on three topics sequentially. Generalization across topics and persons was assessed in weekly probe sessions consisting of 5-min conversational interactions with trainers and unfamiliar volunteers in a nontreatment setting. Results revealed generalization effects were greatest when trainers, as opposed to unfamiliar volunteers, served as conversational participants. Nevertheless, subjects' requests increased with all conversational participants to a level comparable to a normal comparison group assessed under conditions identical to the experimental probes. Social validation of treatment effects using a subjective evaluation procedure revealed significant improvement on the parameters of talkativeness, inquisitiveness, and conversational success.     

Superstitious Conditioning: A Replication and Extension of Neuringer (1970)

The Psychological Record - After immediate, response-dependent reinforcers were delivered for the first three key pecks made by experimentally naive pigeons, a variable-time schedule of...     

One step behind: Current stereotypes of women,achievement, and work

This paper describes a series of studies that used projective story cues to elicit the stereotypes held by sixth-form students regarding the likely consequences of males' and females' successes in a variety of academic and occupational settings. Four studies are described. In the first a boyfriend and girlfriend are receiving their advanced level results, in the second a couple are meeting for the first time at a party, in the third a married couple are deciding to start a family, and in the fourth, one member of a couple has been offered promotion that involves a move of 200 miles. Within each of these settings the ratio of the male to female success (academic and/or occupational) was systematically varied. The results, which show that this ratio of male to female success has a more significant influence upon the amount of negative imagery expressed toward the females' than the males' success are discussed, as is the predominance in the students' stories of a female character who was willing to give up her career in order to protect her marriage and family, and her husband's career. These are interpreted as illustrating the strong double standard that still exists for males' and females' successes and careers.This research was conducted in partial fulfillment of the degree of D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.     

Interaction of stimulus and contextual information during reading: Identifying words within sentences

In general, studies on the effects of a sentence context on word identification have focused on how context affects the efficiency of processing a single target word, presented separately from the context. Such studies probably would be incapable of measuring contextual facilitation resulting from cascaded or parallel processing of neighboring words within a sentence. To measure these and other types of facilitation, we presented entire phrases and sentences for subjects to read as fast as possible and to monitor for nonwords. Subjects read at rates representative of natural reading. Experiment 1 demonstrated a large contextual facilitation effect on decision time. Experiment 2 showed that facilitation is caused by specific semantic information and, perhaps to a greater degree, by nonpredictive syntactic information. Experiment 3 showed that the amount of facilitation is greater than could be accounted for by separate contributions from autonomous word level and sentence level processes. These results present difficulties for an autonomous model of reading, but are consistent with interactive models, in which the results of ongoing sentential analyses are combined with stimulus information to identify words.     

Multidimensional scaling of rorschach inkblots: Relationships with structured self-report

This study attempted a replication of previous multidimensional scaling (MDS) results concerning the most salient perceptual features of the Rorschach inkblots. A second purpose was the investigation of the relationships between individual S's relative reliance on these salient features, and personality characteristics as assessed by the Jackson Personality Inventory (JPI). The two-dimension solution obtained in previous research, involving inkblot color and twomess of form, was closely replicated. Only very low correlations between Ss' use of these dimensions, and personality characteristics as measured by the JPI, were obtained. The MDS-Rorschach approach may prove useful in delimiting peculiarities of attention and perception in clinical states. The usefulness of the approach in furthering study of personality constructs assessed through traditional Rorschach administration is currently in question.