The empirical study of teenage work: A behavioral code for the assessment of adolescent job environments

Policy recommendations that adolescents supplement their experience in school with experience in the workplace have been made in the absence of objective data on the nature of most adolescents' activity on the job. This paper presents a coding system for chronicling a variety of microbehaviors in sequence, as they occur, in adolescent job environments. Three elements of each of approximately 100 behaviors performed by a targeted teenage worker are recorded by an on-site observer who enters appropriate code numbers into a portable event recorder: (1) the social context of the behavior; (2) the character of the behavior; and (3) the duration and concomitants of the behavior, when appropriate. Each of 97 working teenagers was observed continuously over a two hour period on the job. Interobserver agreement on the coding of worker behaviors and the social contexts in which they occurred averaged .86 and .97, respectively. In addition to its applicability in research on the effects of working on adolescent development, information obtained using the code can be helpful in the evaluation of youth employment programs, the vocational counseling of adolescents, and the validation of subjective worker reports of job attributes.     

Classes,collections, and distinctive features: Alternative strategies for solving inclusion problems

This study analyzed the strategies that children ages 5 through 8 years used on two modified versions of Inhelder and Piaget's (The early growth of logic in the child. New York: Norton, 1964) class inclusion task. In two experiments, children were tested on Wilkinson's (Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 64–85) “percept” inclusion task in which distinctive features marked both supraordinate and subclasses. It was hypothesized that children who fail standard Piagetian inclusion tasks succeed on the “percept” task by counting and comparing mutually exclusive features rather than using features as markers for classes and subclasses. The hypothesis was supported by children's performances on “percept” tasks in which solutions based on feature counting conflicted with solutions based on consideration of class inclusion relations. In two other experiments, children answered part-whole and part-part comparison questions in which both terms were described as classes and/or subclasses, or in which one of the two terms was described as a collection (e.g., a bunch of grapes). These experiments contrasted Markman and Seibert's (Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 561–577) “organization” hypothesis that the greater psychological integrity of collections facilitates reasoning on part-whole comparison problems with the hypothesis that the faciltative effect results from the “large number” connotation of collective nouns. Results on collection problems in which parts were described as collections supported the “large number” hypothesis. Results were discussed in terms of their implications for Piaget's theory.     

Exercise, changes in aerobic capacity, and changes in self-perceptions: An experimental investigation

Subjects in an exercise training condition participated in a 10-week aerobic exercise class, whereas subjects in waiting-list control and independent control conditions did not. The results indicated that subjects in the training condition evidenced reliably greater improvements in physical fitness (aerobic capacity) and reported reliably greater improvements in their abilities and confidence in both the physical area (e.g., ability to run distances) and nonphysical area (e.g., frustration tolerance) than did subjects in the control conditions. On the other hand, improvements in physical fitness were not related to reported improvements in abilities and confidence. These findings are of interest because they indicate that some of the important personal changes that are associated with physical fitness training are not due to changes in fitness, but appear to be due to other factors (e.g., group participation and expectancies).     

Kanji reading by a prekindergarten language-disabled child: A pilot study

A , severely language-disabled boy was taught 250 words made up of one, two, three, or four Japanese/Chinese kanji. Many kanji words were learned and some ability to process these in simple sentences was observed. Acquisition of a word for meaning was not dependent on its visual complexity, but on the child's ability to grasp the meaning of the word. Results suggest that a whole-word method may facilitate very early reading acquisition and a possible neurophysiological correlate of this is proposed. Kanji or whole words may prove useful for language-handicapped individuals unable to process words phonetically.     

Sexual preference,feminism, and women's perceptions of their parents

In an attempt to clarify the relation between parental variables, sexual preference, and sex-role attitudes, three groups of women were studied: lesbian feminists, heterosexual feminists, and heterosexual traditional women. The women were asked about their perceptions of their parents when they were in high school. The groups differed more from each other with respect to their perceptions of their fathers than their mothers. The perceived attitudes of the father were much more important in differentiating lesbian feminists from heterosexuals than in differentiating heterosexual feminists from heterosexual traditionals. Both the heterosexual groups (feminist and traditionals) reported having a more affectionate and involved father who also encouraged them more in the expression of anger than the lesbian feminists reported. The results suggest women's father relationships must not be obscured in research and support Johnson's hypothesis that the father relationship is more central than the mother relationship in sex typing and especially in the specifically sexual aspects of sex typing.     

Contextual potentiation of acquired behavior after devaluing direct context-US associations

In two experiments, water-deprived rats were exposed to tone-footshock pairings in a particular conditioning context. In Experiment 1, the training parameters were selected on the basis of parametric pilot data so as not to produce direct associations between the conditioning context and footshock. Despite independent evidence of no appreciable direct association between the conditioning context and footshock, animals tested in the conditioning context exhibited more lick suppression to the tone than other animals tested with the tone outside of the conditioning context. Thus, the conditioning context potentiated suppression to the tone in the absence of appreciable fear of the conditioning context. In Experiment 2, training parameters were used that permitted the formation of direct associations between the conditioning context and footshock; however, for half the animals, these associations to the context were then extinguished. With the tone absent, a comparison of extinguished animals tested either in the conditioning context or outside the conditioning context detected no differences in suppression, demonstrating the effectiveness of the extinction manipulation. However, other animals also subjected to extinction of direct context-footshock associations displayed greater suppression to the tone within the conditioning context than comparable animals tested outside the context. Collectively the data indicate that the superior retention-test performance seen within the training context can arise both from the commonly assumed direct associations between the training context and the unconditioned stimulus and from the potentiation by the training context of the associations between the nominal conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus.     

The effects of distributed training on retention of operant conditioning in human infants

Long-term retention of operant footkicking acquired in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm was assessed as a function of the distribution of training time. In the first study, 3-month-old infants were trained for either one 18-min session or for two 9-min or three 6-min sessions separated by 24-hr intervals. All infants exhibited retention during a test administered immediately after training, but only those trained in a single session continued to perform the conditioned response during cued-recall tests 7 or 14 days later. Infants trained in three sessions showed no evidence of remembering the contingency even after a week. A warm-up decrement, seen in the day-to-day performance of infants in the distributed conditions, was eliminated in the second study by the interpolation of a nonreinforcement period at the outset of daily sessions. This procedure also enhanced long-term retention such that infants trained in three 6-min session now remembered the contingency for 14 days and did not differ from infants who had received a single 18-min session. Whether distributed training facilitates or impairs long-term retention appears to depend on the opportunity for infants to acquire a sufficient number (or kind) of effective retrieval cues during original learning.     

Discrimination and generalization by rats of temporal stimuli lasting for minutes

In three experiments, rats learned to respond differentially to reinforced and nonreinforced trials when the length of the intertrial interval (ITI) predicted the trial outcome (reinforcement or nonreinforcement). Rats in control groups, for whom the length of the ITI did not predict the outcome, did not show differential performance on nonreinforced and reinforced trials. Generalization gradients obtained following discrimination training were comparable to those obtained following discrimination training with other types of discriminative stimuli. That is, groups which had shown differential performance in discrimination training yielded generalization gradients with fastest speeds at the previously reinforced ITIs, slowest speeds at the previously nonreinforced ITIs, and intermediate speeds at ITIs of intermediate length. Control groups yielded flat gradients across all ITIs tested. These effects were shown for relative time discrimination (short time = reinforcement, long time = nonreinforcement, or the reverse) and also for an absolute time discrimination (long and short time = reinforcement, middle time = nonreinforcement or the reverse). This method was effective for time duration measured in minutes rather than seconds, as is more commonly the case.     

Task-specific strategies of mental “rotation” of facial representations

The effects of task demands on the visual comparison of facial patterns and of comparable nonfacial patterns were explored in two studies. The studies yielded two primary findings. First, faces, despite their holistic properties, are not rotated faster than comparable non-face-like patterns, although subjects’ judgments of them were uniformly more rapid than judgments for nonfaces. Second, the nature of the same-different judgment task required of subjects had a large effect on the pattern of results obtained: When stimuli were compared to their mirror images, results indicative of mental “rotation” were obtained. When stimuli were compared on the basis of similarity of individual features, the pattern of results was very different. This one manipulation produced effects that exceeded those of all of the other manipulations, including that of rotation.