Measuring, monitoring and managing the psychological well-being of first year university students

This paper profiles the psychological well-being of students in their initial year of university. There were three aims: to measure the impact of arrival at university on the psychological well-being of first year students, to monitor (i.e. profile) the shape of psychological well-being across the first year, and to investigate how students manage their well-being in relation to the use of university counselling services. Data were collected on four occasions, with 84% of all first year students at a UK university (4,699 students) completing the questionnaire on at least one occasion. Psychological well-being was assessed using the GP-CORE, a general population form of the CORE-OM. Results show that greater strain is placed on well-being once students start university compared to levels preceding entry. This strain rises and falls across the year but does not return to pre-university levels. Items tapping depression and anxiety suggest that the first year of university is a time of heightened anxiety but not a particularly depressive time. The findings are discussed in relation to students' experience of higher education and how to match student needs with university counselling service provision.     

Probability learning and coping in dysphoria and obsessive-compulsive tendencies

The processing of stress-relevant categorical events and their contributions to subsequent probability judgments were examined among subjects who were psychometrically categorized as dysphoric, obsessive-compulsive, or “control.” stress-relevant symptomatology of depression was considered to be characterized by a deficit of active counterstress coping activity and obsessive-compulsiveness by ritualistic efforts which have little or no direct effect on stress occurrence. Subjects were presented with a sequence of stressful (loud white noise) and benign (illumination of a green light) events in association with a series of discrete stimuli (alphabetic letters) in three conditions of counterstress activity. Results generally supported the predicted tendency to learn probability information primarily in conditions which reflected the subjects' characteristic ways of responding to stress. Obsessive-compulsives acquired the information primarily in a “ritualistic” context, controls in an active coping context, and dysphorics in both a coping deficit context and unexpectedly in an active coping context. The role of enhanced stressor predicability in maintaining typical stress response patterns of the three groups was discussed.     

Element pretraining influences the content of appetitive serial compound conditioning in rats

Four experiments with rat subjects in a Pavlovian appetitive conditioning procedure examined the effects of prior pairings of S2 with the unconditioned stimulus (US) on the nature of the associations formed in S1----S2----US serial compound conditioning. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that prior training of S2 prevented the acquisition of stimulus-stimulus (S-S) associations between S1 and stimulus features of S2, but enhanced the acquisition of stimulus-response (S-R) associations between S1 and the emotional conditioned response (CR) evoked by S2. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the effects of S2 pretraining were not due to S2 training itself, but rather to its endowing S2 with the ability to evoke a strong CR during the early stages of serial compound conditioning. In Experiment 3, suppression of the CR to a pretrained S2 during serial compound conditioning permitted the establishment of S-S associations. In Experiment 4, the induction of a CR in the presence of an untrained S2 during serial compound conditioning prevented the acquisition of S-S associations. Implications of these data for our understanding of compound conditioning are discussed.     

A distinction between the effects of sentential speaking rate and semantic congruity on word identification

It is well known that numerous aspects of sentential context can influence the manner in which a word within the sentence is identified. We investigated two such contextual effects, that of the speaking rate of the sentence in which the target word occurs and that of the semantic congruence between the sentence and the target word. We observed that although the two effects are similar on the surface, in that each is realized as a change in the identification of acoustically ambiguous (but not unambiguous) items along a speech series, they are strikingly different in their susceptibility to changes in task demands. Specifically, changes in the task that readily eliminate the semantic congruity effect do not serve to eliminate the rate effect, suggesting that the two effects arise at different stages of analysis. The implications of this finding for models of speech processing are discussed.     

A research note on the new SVIB Holland scales

The Strong Vocational Interest Blanks (SVIB) of 93 management students were scored using six new scales which correspond to Holland's six occupational types. The scores from both the 14-item and the 20-item scales were correlated with actual scores on the Vocational Preference Inventory. The 14-item and the 20-item scales were also correlated with each other. In addition, the SVIB-derived Holland scales were scored using a simplified procedure, and the results were compared with the scoring procedure used by Campbell.     

Eye movements as a function of response contingencies measured by blackout technique

A program may have a low error rate but, at the same time, require little of the student and teach him little. A measure to supplement error rate in evaluating a program has recently been developed. This measure, called the blackout ratio, is the percentage of material that may be deleted without increasing the error rate. In high blackout-ratio programs, obtaining a correct answer is contingent upon only a small portion of the item. The present study determined if such low response-contingent material is read less thoroughly than programmed material that is heavily response-contingent. Eye movements were compared for two versions of the same program that differed only in the choice of the omitted words. The alteration of the required responses resulted in a version with a higher blackout ratio than the original version, which had a low blackout ratio. Eighteen undergraduates received half their material from the high and half their material from the low blackout-ratio version. The order was counterbalanced. Location and duration of all eye fixations in each item were recorded by a Mackworth Eye Marker Camera. On high blackout-ratio material, subjects used fewer fixations, shorter fixation time, and shorter scanning time. High blackout-ratio material failed to evoke the students' attention.     

The effects of cueing and constraint instructions on children's free recall performance

The performance of nursery school children was investigated in two experiments involving cued and constrained free recall. Under constrained instructions, subjects were required to recall items by category. Under cued instructions subjects could recall items in any order they wished but the organized nature of the lists was identified and subjects were told that they would remember more if they recalled things from the same category together. No effects of cueing instructions were obtained in either Experiment I or Experiment II. Constrained recall instructions led to enhanced recall and category clustering. However, the beneficial effects were not maintained on later trials with the same list or on a transfer list when the constraints on recall were dropped. In addition, the introduction of constrained recall instructions had identical effects whether they were introduced early or late in practice. The results were discussed in terms of the influences of variables which affect the subjects' use of retrieval strategies and the development of memory.     

An exploratory study of determinant and indicant beliefs in attitude measurement

In the central equation of Fishbein's attitude theory the overall affect attached to an object is equated with the sum of evaluation × belief strength for the salient beliefs held by the individual concerned. Two previous studies have shown equally good prediction of attitude whether the beliefs used are those spontaneously elicited by each individual (ISB) or those most frequently elicited by the population (MSB). This result is replicated here in the context of an attitude change study. Fishbein's explanation for the efficiency, and occasional superiority, of modal sets of beliefs relative to individuals' own sets of beliefs, i.e., that MSB contain less non-salient items than ISB which result from inaccurate, forced elicitation, cannot account for the results in the present study since it is shown that a large proportion of MSB were non-salient for many of the subjects. Further, certain sets of beliefs known to be inappropriate, i.e., which were neither modally salient nor individually salient, are shown to be good predictors of attitude using the Fishbein equation. The implications of these findings for the theory and the practical use of the Fishbein technique are discussed.     

Empirical derivation of SVIB-Holland scales: A brief report

The Strong Vocational Interest Blank responses of 93 students were used to construct six empirical scales similar to the scales of Holland's Vocational Preference Inventory. Scores on the empirical scales were correlated with actual VPI scores. The resulting correlations were compared to coefficients obtained from correlating the intuitive scales designed by Campbell with actual VPI scores. It was concluded that (1) meaningful estimates of VPI profiles can be obtained by scoring selected items from the SVIB and (2) further work with the empirical scales is needed prior to settling on a SVIB scoring procedure for estimating VPI profiles.