A positive effect of iron supplementation on the IQS of iron deficient children

To examine possible effects of iron supplementation on the intelligence of young adolescents, iron supplements and placebos were given daily for 16 weeks to two matched groups of 208 and 205 12–15-year-olds. Iron status before the trial began was assessed by the measurement of serum ferritin and haemoglobin levels. In the sample considered as a whole, the iron supplementation had a small but nonsignificant effect on IQ, but those who were iron deficient, with serum ferritin levels of 12 ng/ml and below, showed a statistically significant IQ gain of 5.8 IQ points, as compared with a matched control group given placebos.     

Evaluating the efficacy of short-term counseling on adolescents in a school setting.

This study evaluated the efficacy of short-term school-based counseling with forty-two high school adolescents (twenty-seven males, fifteen females) by measuring pre- and posttest scores on a self-report, self-esteem measure. While there was a significant decline in self-esteem ratings after counseling in the areas of social acceptance, job competence, and close friendship, counseled students showed a significant improvement in the consistency between their adequacy ratings and their judgments about what competencies they valued. Specific gender differences emerged, as females appeared to have benefited more from the counseling experience than did males.     

Psycholinguistics discovers the operant: a review of Roger Brown's A first language: the early stages

Brown's book is selectively reviewed with the aim of noting points of similarity between Brown's psycholinguistic analysis of language acquisition and a functional analysis of verbal behavior. Brown divides early language acquisition into five stages, based on mean length of utterance in samples of child speech. His book concentrates on Stage I, when mean length of utterance first rises above 1.0, indicating that children are beginning to speak in multi-morphemic utterances, and Stage II, when mean length of utterance in morphemes is about 2.25. Multi-morphemic utterances in Stage I consist mainly of ordered sequences of uninflected nouns and verbs, the order being that of the simple declarative sentence (agent-action-indirect object-direct object-locative). The review attempts a theoretical analysis of the functional stimulus control of Stage I syntactic order, concluding that the control must originate partly in relations among events in the environment and partly in covert autoclitic verbal behavior. Increases in mean length of utterance in Stage II are mainly due to the appearance of several “grammatical morphemes” such as the progressive -ing inflection on verbs and the plural -s inflection on nouns. The review attempts a behavioral paraphrase, again in terms of tacts and autoclitics, of Brown's psycholinguistic analysis of grammatical morphemes, concluding that Stage II displays the further development, building on Stage I, of the combined control of verbal behavior by relations in the environment and covert self-generated verbal stimuli. Similarities between Brown's psycholinguistic analysis and a functional analysis of language acquisition suggest that the two viewpoints are converging on a common concern with the stimulus control of verbal behavior.     

The effect of directed forgetting on the time to remember

A recognition memory task was used to determine whether the search set is reduced by cueing subject to forget a part of the input. Correct recognition reaction time was used to infer the size of the search set. The principal results were that RT on forget trials was faster than RT on remember trials and that RT was fastest when the forget cue was presented at the outset of the trial rather than after the material had been presented. These findings are generally consistent with the hypothesis that selective search is responsible for the enhancement of recall produced by forget instructions in earlier studies.     

The time required to prepare for a rotated stimulus

Average time required to determine whether an alphanumeric character was presented in its normal version or as its mirror image increased from 500 msec to 1,000 msec as its angular departure from upright increased from 0 to 180 deg. However, when Ss already knew the identity of the upcoming character and when advance information as to its orientation was available for 1,000 msec, this reaction time was reduced to about 400 msec regardless of the orientation of the test stimulus. In this case, Ss claimed that they could prepare for the rotated stimulus by imagining the normal version of the designated character rotated into the indicated orientation and that they could then rapidly test for a match against the ensuing stimulus.     

Sex differences in the occupational choices of second graders

A questionnaire was administered to 61 second graders. Sexual differences in occupational choices were apparent. Boys chose twice as many occupations as girls. Of 29 occupations selected as “most desirable,” only one was mentioned by both boys and girls. Of 37 occupations selected as “least desirable,” only two were mentioned by both sexes. More boys than girls knew their father's occupation. Although 76% of the girls knew their father's occupation, they did not select that occupation for themselves. A series of hypotheses based on the above data was generated.     

Control of responding by location of auditory stimuli: rapid acquisition in monkey and rat

Monkeys require a considerably larger number of trials to bring responding under the control of the location of an auditory stimulus than cats, rats, and bats with the same experimental procedures. The present experiment sought to determine the conditions necessary for rapid acquisition of control of responding by location of noise and tone bursts in the monkey. Monkeys were run in an enclosure that contained four loudspeakers and four manipulanda. Two conditions were used in training. In the adjacent condition, a stimulus (noise or tone burst) was presented through one or other of two speakers and a response on the manipulandum adjacent to the speaker was reinforced with food. In the nonadjacent condition, a stimulus was presented through one of two speakers and a response on a manipulandum remote from the speaker was reinforced with food. Acquisition of control was measured by change in the percentage of reinforced responses during training. In the adjacent condition, responding came under control of location within zero to three sessions. In nonadjacent conditions, the animals required 14 to 20 sessions to come under control of location. These latter numbers are comparable to those reported in the literature for localization discrimination in monkeys.     

Set and temporal integration

An experiment was conducted to explore the temporal structure of set formation in a complex reaction time (RT) task. On each trial an instruction [I-event] was given telling Ss whether identity of color or form on a separately presented alternative display (A-event) was the dimension relevant on that trial. The A-event consisted of a pattern of four colored forms. The two forms on one side were matched for color and on the other side for form. S’s task was to depress one of two keys. The correct key was homolateral to the matched relevant dimension. The basic independent variable was the time interval separating the I- and A-events (ISI). At short ISIs, RT wasa linear function oflSI with slope equal to -0.5. RT was independent of the order in which the events occurred at short ISIs, although at longer ISIs (3 sec) RT was longer when the A-event followed the I-event. Also, RT was shorter at short ISIs when color was the relevant dimension rather than form. although this difference disappearedat longer ISIs. The results were discussed in relation to information processing models and previous research dealing with partialadvance information.     

Dyadic Examination of the Influence of Family Relationships on Life Satisfaction at the Empty-Nest Stage

The aim of this study on determinants of life satisfaction in adulthood was to test actor–partner interdependence models among couples in the phase of the family life cycle following the departure of their children from the parental home. Using structural equation modeling, measures of family relationships, such as a person’s own and his/her partner’s marital adjustment, the amount of contact with children (and grandchildren, if applicable), and being a grandparent or not, served as independent variables to predict each partner’s satisfaction with life. A sample comprising 102 couples (of which 58 couples had grandchildren), all at the empty-nest stage, participated in the study. Results revealed that, for both husbands and wives, the effects of their own marital adjustment and the amount of contact with their adult children on their satisfaction with life were significant. A partner effect was also confirmed between wives’ marital adjustment and their husbands’ satisfaction with life. Furthermore, although being a grandparent did not predict higher life satisfaction for the whole sample of couples, the path between the amount of contact with grandchildren and life satisfaction was significant for the subsample of women who were grandmothers. Results are discussed in terms of the needs filled by these family relationships.