Prevalence and constituency of behavioral disturbance taxonomies in the regular school population

The Bristol Social Adjustment Guides (BSAG) are widely employed in research and in the identification of maladjustment in school children. The BSAG provides scores on several indices including five homogeneous behavioral syndromes and one associated grouping. Field experience suggests that maladjusted children frequently manifest problems in more than one syndrome. In order to discover what patterns of syndromic profiles may commonly exist among children, the data for the most recent revision of the BSAG are reanalyzed. The syndrome scores for all 2,527 5- to 15-year-old regular school children in the standardization sample were grouped into similar profile patterns by hierarchical cluster analysis. Sixteen homogeneous syndromic profile types emerged. The resultant profile types were described on the basis of their component behaviors and examined for membership trends by sex and age groups. Multiple syndromic profiles represented 60% of all maladjusted children.The author wishes to thank Dr. Denis H. Stott, former professor of psychology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, for kindly making the Bristol Social Adjustment Guides data available for this study.     

Completion norms for 329 sentence contexts

Completion responses were collected for two sets of sentence contexts, which were designed to produce different distributions of probabilities for the primary responses. The subject population consisted of undergraduate college students. For each context, responses and their respective probability of occurrence are listed, and an index of the primary responses is provided. It is hoped that these normative materials will facilitate comparison among future studies of the effects of sentence contexts on word processing.     

Mimicry versus imitative modeling: Facilitating sentence production in the speech of the retarded

Two methods of language instruction administered to mentally retarded subjects at the two-word stage of language development were investigated. Subjects of the mimicry training group imitated Agent-Action-Object (AAO) constructions immediately after presentation, while subjects of the imitative modeling group first heard the AAO presentation and later produced the AAO construction in response to a verb question. Imitative modeling subjects achieved as many correct AAO responses during training and more correct responses on a generalization task and in a free play setting. They also displayed more novel response behavior (selective imitations) and spontaneously corrected productions. The results support the use of modeling procedures for inducing language production in the retarded.     

Auditory processing of brain-damaged adults under competitive listening conditions

Right CVAs, mild left CVAs, and non-brain-damaged adults received the Token Test under three conditions: quiet, white noise, and speech babble. Left CVAs performed most poorly of all groups in all conditions experiencing difficulty with subtests III, IV, and V. Right CVAs were inferior to controls on each of these three subtests in the speech babble condition only. Thus, right CVA difficulty with both memory and syntactic tasks was demonstrated in speech babble. These results are explained by the hypothesis that both hemispheres are necessary to process auditory information under complex listening conditions. Total brain capacity of right CVA patients may be overloaded if either memory load or linguistic complexity is increased in the presence of certain types of listening competition.     

Individual and organizational correlates of promotion refusal

Individual and organizational correlates of employees who refuse seniority-based promotions in union lines of progression are examined. The sample consisted of 313 production employees of a large manufacturing complex. Correlational and discriminant analyses revealed that age, being female, and number of employees in the department related positively to promotion refusal, while years of education and pay showed a negative relationship. Of these variables, years of education was the strongest predictor. Potential explanations for the results relate to stress avoidance, perceived inabilities, and equity theory. Areas for future research are suggested.