Church Attendance and Marital Commitment Beliefs of Undergraduate Women

Marital commitment between spouses has been found to be an important predictor of successful marriages. Beliefs about marital commitment among never-married young adults are of interest because of their probable influence on subsequent marital behaviors. The current study examined social-cognitive processes; specifically, religiousness, locus-of-control beliefs, and gender role attitudes, in the prediction of marital commitment beliefs among 294 undergraduate never-married women. We found that higher religiousness and lower chance locus of control were significantly correlated with stronger marital commitment beliefs. Multiple regression analyses revealed that religiousness was the best predictor of marital commitment beliefs in this sample. Social learning processes are implicated in the development of marital commitment beliefs. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed.     

A comparative test of work-family conflict models and critical examination of work-family linkages

This paper is a comprehensive meta-analysis of over 20 years of work-family conflict research. A series of path analyses were conducted to compare and contrast existing work-family conflict models, as well as a new model we developed which integrates and synthesizes current work-family theory and research. This new model accounted for 40% of the variance in job satisfaction, 38% of the variance in family satisfaction, and 35% of the variance in life satisfaction. In a critical examination of work-family linkages, a series of analyses excluding work-family conflict constructs and pathways resulted in a well-fitting and more parsimonious model that still accounted for 39% of the variance in job satisfaction, 37% of the variance in family satisfaction, and 33% of the variance in life satisfaction. Results indicate that direct effects drive work-family conflict models while indirect effects provide little incremental explanation in regards to satisfaction outcomes.     

Protection,payback, or both? Emotional and motivational mechanisms underlying avoidance by victims of transgressions

In the wake of an interpersonal offense, victims often feel motivated to avoid their perpetrators, and the more severe the offense, the more pronounced this motivation is. On the surface, avoidance appears to serve a self-protective function such that victims, compelled by a sense of fear and apprehension, withdraw from their wrongdoers to prevent further harm. However, avoidance might also serve a retaliatory purpose in which victims shun their offenders out of anger and hostility, using interpersonal aloofness as a means of payback. In the present pair of studies, we examined victims’ self-reports of recent offense experiences and tested the mediating roles of fear and anger in the relationship between offense severity and avoidance motivations. Study 1 revealed that anger, not fear, was the emotion that mediated this relationship. Study 2 replicated this finding and also showed that the link between anger and avoidance was mediated both by revenge and self-protection motives, which demonstrates the complex nature of avoidance following a transgression.     

Health Status and Peer Relationships in Early Adolescence: The Role of Peer Contact, Self-esteem, and Social Anxiety

We examined associations between children’s health status and the quality of their peer relationships, as well as factors that may account for individual variation in the quality of chronically ill and healthy children’s peer relationships. Our sample included 268 children (138 boys; 130 girls) with 149 European-Americans and 119 African-Americans. There were 91 children with a chronic illness; 35 with asthma, 26 with diabetes, and 30 with obesity. Chronically ill children were characterized by teachers as displaying less prosocial behavior, less overt aggression, and less relational aggression with peers than healthy children. Chronically ill children reported lower levels of peer contact and higher levels of social anxiety than healthy children. Among chronically ill children those with high self-esteem were more prosocial and less aggressive than those with low self-esteem. Our findings suggest that chronically ill children are at risk for peer relationship difficulties, but that self-esteem may serve as a protective factor against poor peer relationships for some chronically ill children.     

Development of the positive–negative asymmetry effect: in‐group exclusion norm as a mediator of children's evaluations on negative attributes

Two studies were conducted that go beyond previous research by examining when and why children might show intergroup bias in the attribution of positive, but not negative traits (PNAE: the positive–negative asymmetry effect, Mummendey & Otten, 1998, European review of social psychology, Vol. 9). In Study 1 (n = 107) children completed a ‘mixed’ trait attribution task in a dichotomous group context. As predicted there was a developmental trend between 7 and 12 years of age in the PNAE. The 7‐year olds were the only age group not to show the effect. Study 1 also found a quadratic developmental trend in children's national intergroup bias. Study 2 (n = 62) replicated the developmental path of the PNAE found in Study 1 using a wider age range of 6–16 years. This study used a ‘mixed’ list of traits which were not only antonyms and a procedure that made the positive and negative trait dimensions explicitly independent. Significantly, Study 2 found in‐group exclusion norm partially mediated the development of the PNAE. These findings support an account of the positive–negative asymmetry effect based upon normative processes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of instruction with relational and item-specific elaborative strategies on young children's organization and free recall

One hundred and sixty second-grade children were assigned on the basis of a free recall pretest to four instruction conditions and were given a series of lists of pictures for free recall. For three groups, the instructions were directed at encoding either (a) list organizational information, (b) item-specific semantic information, or (c) organizational and individual item information, while the fourth group constituted a “No-training” control with standard free recall instructions. The subjects received either related or unrelated lists during the training phase and related or unrelated lists during two post-tests, immediately following and 1 week after training. For both types of lists, instructions emphasizing list organization were more effective than those emphasizing item-specific elaboration. Subjects given individual item elaborative instructions showed levels of recall which were comparable to those of the control subjects. While the combined effect of organizational and individual item processing did not exceed the performance produced by organizational instructions alone, the degree of generalization was greater for subjects processing both kinds of information, especially when subjects received related lists during training.     

Voice change in the stimulus suffix effect: Are the effects structural or strategic?

The literature on the stimulus suffix effect shows that if the suffix is presented in a voice different from that in which the list items are presented, there is less of a decrement in list recall than if the suffix is presented in the same voice. This experiment attempted to answer the question of whether this variable diminishes the suffix effect because of attentional factors or because of structural properties of echoic memory. Subjects received lists of digits in a male voice and either a tone, same-voice suffix, or different-voice suffix. Subjects received either the same suffix for all lists or two different suffixes. Those subjects given two suffixes and those given two tones were either forced to discriminate between them or had no discrimination requirement. The results demonstrated that voice change has both attentions] and structural consequences on the suffix effect, with the attentional factors being confined to the preterminal positions and the structural factors being confined to the last position or two.     

The influence of concurrent load on mouthed and vocalized modality effects

A visual search task was coupled with the serial recall of words to assess the extent to which modality effects mediated by vocalizing and silent mouthing reflect an automatically activated preattentive process. Overall, serial position functions systematically changed as concurrent task demands increased, but the magnitude of the modality effect associated with both mouthing and vocalizing was not altered, regardless of whether or not subjects simultaneously searched for digits. These results support the notion that modality effects index a preattentive process that can be activated automatically by either spoken input or gestural cues associated with speech.     

Polysemy and memory

The degree of ambiguity of words with multiple meanings was estimated by the semantic uncertainty (U) of a word as measured by word association and sentence generation tasks. Ambiguous words defined in this way were as well remembered in a recognition memory test as control words. When words were first presented in sentences that would determine their encoded sense, it was found that successive encodings of an ambiguous word converged more when the word appeared in its primary sense than when it appeared in its secondary sense. However, given convergent encodings, recognition was more likely if the word had first occurred in its secondary sense. An explanation in terms of semantic focus is offered and related to the general relationship between recognition and frequency.The research reported in this paper was supported by the Learning Research and Development Center, which is supported in part by the U.S. Office of Education.