Sensory discrimination and intelligence: testing Spearman's other hypothesis

At the centenary of Spearman's seminal 1904 article, his general intelligence hypothesis remains one of the most influential in psychology. Less well known is the article's other hypothesis that there is "a correspondence between what may provisionally be called 'General Discrimination' and 'General Intelligence' which works out with great approximation to one or absoluteness" (Spearman, 1904, p. 284). Studies that do not find high correlations between psychometric intelligence and single sensory discrimination tests do not falsify this hypothesis. This study is the first directly to address Spearman's general intelligence-general sensory discrimination hypothesis. It attempts to replicate his findings with a similar sample of schoolchildren. In a well-fitting structural equation model of the data, general intelligence and general discrimination correlated .92. In a reanalysis of data published byActon and Schroeder (2001), general intelligence and general sensory ability correlated .68 in men and women. One hundred years after its conception, Spearman's other hypothesis achieves some confirmation. The association between general intelligence and general sensory ability remains to be replicated and explained.     

Project Trust: breaking down barriers between middle school children

This paper analyzes the success of a camp retreat weekend called Project Trust involving middle school students and teachers. The goal of the camp is to break down barriers between cliques identified as active in the school. The camp focuses on building team relationships across clique membership and incorporates elements of peace education and conflict resolution. A treatment group (campers) and comparison group (noncampers) were administered an adaptation of the Bogardus Social Distance Test and the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale before and after the camp. Attendance was found to lower social distance scores for nine of the ten groups/cliques. Campers also had higher self-concept scores after the retreat.     

Personality factors in older women's perceived susceptibility to diseases of aging

Personality correlates of older women's perceived susceptibility to breast cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis were examined in a community sample of 312 women aged 40-86. A latent factor of general perceived susceptibility to disease was shown to underlie disease-specific perceptions of susceptibility. Affect-related personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, optimism, worry, and self-deceptive enhancement) and internal and chance health locus of control predicted general perceived susceptibility. Perceived disease characteristics (e.g., perceived controllability, severity) and the use of cognitive heuristics (i.e., perceived similarity to those who contract each disease) also displayed marked consistency across the three distinct diseases. Finally, our results suggested that general beliefs about the characteristics of health threats and the use of cognitive heuristics may mediate the link between personality traits and perceived risk.     

Emotions, personality, and health: introduction to the special issue

Our intent in this introduction to the special issue on Emotions, Personality, and Health is to alert readers to the logic underlying the editors' choices of topics for the issue and to provide a brief summary of its contents. We discuss how the 10 articles fit together to provide a mosaic of diverse approaches to the study of emotion. Collectively, these articles show ways that emotion research may be integrated with personality theory to inform us about the psychological dimensions of health and illness.     

Crossed Wernicke's aphasia: a case report

Crossed aphasia is a phenomenon in which an individual sustains a lesion in the right hemisphere (typically non-language dominant), but who exhibits an aphasic syndrome. The authors present a case study of an individual with crossed aphasia (CA) in an attempt to provide anecdotal information for four questions posed by : (a). Is CA a reversal of the normal cerebral hemisphere pattern of language function? (b). Does the presence of aphasia following a right cerebral hemisphere lesion indicate that typical right hemisphere functions (e.g., visual perception) are intact? (c). How may the aphasia's presentation differ from typical left hemisphere aphasias? And (d). is the pattern of improvement following CA similar to that of typical left hemisphere aphasias? We longitudinally examined the communicative-cognitive performance of an adult man with crossed aphasia of the Wernicke's type following a cerebrovascular accident. A 21-week follow-up evaluation indicated improvements in his language functioning from our initial evaluation, but he continued to exhibit a classic, moderately severe Wernicke's aphasia.     

Reducing the drop-out rates of at-risk high school students: the Effective Learning Program (ELP)

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Effective Learning Program (ELP) with students who are at high risk for dropping out of high school. The intervention sought to change external control expectancies to more internal ones, improve students' skills in building relationships with peers and adults, and increase graduation rates. Thirty-eight students considered at risk for dropping out of high school received the intervention. In addition, ELP-eligible students who did not receive the ELP intervention (n = 36) and regular education students (n = 50) from the same high school were compared with the students who received the ELP. A significantly greater percentage of ELP students graduated, became more internally controlled, achieved more as shown by standardized tests, and developed greater social skills and better relationships than their ELP-eligible but nonparticipating peers. The authors suggest that researchers identify which aspects of the ELP are responsible for the improvement in retention, achievement, and personal attributes.     

Resisting body dissatisfaction: fat women who endorse fat acceptance

Fat women who endorsed fat acceptance (N=128) were recruited from Radiance Magazine. Relationships between objectified body consciousness (OBC), body esteem, and psychological well-being for the mostly European American sample were similar to those found in other samples. OBC was independently related to body esteem when weight dissatisfaction was controlled. Those who endorsed the need for social change in attitudes towards fat people had higher body esteem and self-acceptance, and lower body shame, than those who endorsed personal acceptance of body size only.     

College student risk-taking from three perspectives

This study addressed college student risk-taking from three perspectives: dispositional trait, decision-making, and environmental. One hundred ninety-six college students provided information on sensation-seeking, locus of control, perceived risks, perceived benefits, risk involvement, peer influence, perceived peer participation, and social desirability, and responded to risky behavior scenarios. Results showed that sensation-seeking, perceived peer participation, and perceived benefits were associated with risk involvement. In the risk-taking decision-making process, the certainty of the decision was related to participation. In addition, the likelihood of consequences occurring influenced students' responses regarding participation in unprotected sex. Further, students most frequently considered consequences that affect them personally when considering risk-taking.     

Directed forgetting of related words: evidence for the inefficient inhibition hypothesis

Fifth-grade children and college students were asked to remember some words and to forget others in an item-cued-directed-forgetting task. Taxonomically related pairs of words and control pairs that were unrelated in meaning were used as stimuli. Children found it more difficult than did adults to ignore forget-cued words that followed associatively related words that were remember-cued. The results provide support for D. F. Bjorklund and K. K. Harnishfeger's (1990) inefficient inhibition hypothesis (i.e., that the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms improves as children develop). The results also suggest that the inhibition is occurring primarily in the early stages of processing.