The impact of manipulating personal standards on eating attitudes and behaviour

The relationship between perfectionism and eating disorders is well established and is of theoretical interest. This study used an experimental design to test the hypothesis that manipulating personal standards, a central feature of perfectionism, would influence eating attitudes and behaviour. Forty-one healthy women were randomly assigned either to a high personal standards condition (n = 18) or to a low personal standards condition for 24 h (n = 23). Measures of personal standards, perfectionism, and eating attitudes and behaviour were taken before and after the experimental manipulation. The manipulation was successful. After the manipulation, participants in the high personal standards condition ate fewer high calorie foods, made more attempts to restrict the overall amount of food eaten, and had significantly more regret after eating than those in the low personal standards condition. Other variables remained unchanged. It is concluded that experimental analyses can be of value in elucidating causal connections between perfectionism and eating attitudes and behaviour.     

Mental reinstatement of context and return of fear in spider-fearful participants

Extant findings in the animal and human conditioning literature demonstrate that renewal, termed return of fear in studies with humans, occurs when reexposure to a previously feared phobic stimulus occurs in a context different than the one present during extinction. The present study investigated whether mental reinstatement of the treatment context at follow-up could attenuate context-based return of fear. Forty-eight spider-fearful individuals received exposure therapy in one of two contexts, and were followed-up 1 week later in the treatment or a new context. Half of the participants received instructions to mentally reinstate the treatment context before the follow-up test. Self-report data replicated previous research on contextually driven return of fear. Furthermore, participants who mentally reinstated the treatment context, before encountering the phobic stimulus in a new context at follow-up, had less return of fear than those who did not. Limitations of the current study, as well as implications for phobia treatment, are discussed.     

Workplace aggression in teenage part-time employees

Among adult employees, interpersonal injustice and abusive supervision predict aggression toward supervisors at work. The aim of this study was to assess whether similar relationships exist among teenage employees and, further, whether teenagers' reasons for working moderate these relationships. Multiple regression analyses on data from 119 teenage employees showed that financial and personal fulfillment reasons for working moderate the impact of interpersonal injustice and abusive supervision on aggression directed at workplace supervisors. These findings contribute to the understanding of workplace aggression by demonstrating that (a) teenagers engage in this workplace behavior, (b) the predictors are similar to those of adult aggression, and (c) reasons for working play a moderating role among this particular cohort. The possible long-term consequences of teenagers' use of aggression at work are discussed.     

Stability and change in children's division strategies

Age-related changes in children's performance on simple division problems (e.g., 6/2, 72/9) were investigated by asking children in Grades 4 through 7 to solve 32 simple division problems. Differences in performance were found across grade, with younger children performing more slowly and less accurately than older children. Problem size effects were also found in that children were faster and more accurate on small problems than on large problems. Two strategies changed across age, with children in Grade 4 relying heavily on the strategy of "addition" (adding the divisor until the dividend was reached) to solve the problems and children in Grades 5 through 7 relying primarily on the strategy of "multiplication" (recasting the division problem as a multiplication problem) to solve the problems. Surprisingly, the frequency of direct retrieval (retrieving the answer directly from memory) did not increase across grade and never became the dominant strategy of choice. Reasons for why retrieval use remains infrequent and age invariant are discussed. Overall, the results suggest that division is a unique operation and that the continued study of division may have implications for further understanding of how procedural and conceptual knowledge of arithmetic develops.     

Stagnation and generativity: structure, validity, and differential relationships with adaptive and maladaptive personality

Erikson's concepts of stagnation and generativity were investigated in two studies. Study 1 (N=457) yields two important results. First, it revealed that a model in which stagnation and generativity load on a separate dimension showed a significantly better fit to the data than a one-dimensional model. Second, the stagnation and generativity measures were valid predictors of parental behavior. In Study 2 (N=191), the relationships between stagnation and generativity and the dimensions underlying comprehensive measures of personality were investigated. It was found that stagnation was strongly related to Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness to Experience, whereas generativity bore strong relationships with Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. In the discussion, stagnation is distinguished from several related variables and a profile of the stagnant individual is constructed and compared with the generative individual. Finally, the interaction between stagnation and generativity in producing specific outcomes is discussed.     

Morphological knowledge as revealed in children's spelling accuracy and reports of spelling strategies

The goal of the current research was to assess whether children can make strategic use of morphological relations among words to spell. French-speaking children in Grade 4 spelled three word types: (a) phonological words that had regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences, (b) morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a derivative revealed the silent ending, and (c) lexical words that had silent consonant endings for which no familiar derivative revealed the ending. Children were also asked to provide immediate retrospective reports of the strategies used to spell each word. Two experiments (Ns = 46 and 39) were conducted. As expected, children in Grade 4 spelled phonological words more accurately than they did words with silent consonant endings. In addition, children spelled morphological words more accurately than they did lexical words. Reports of using retrieval were associated with accurate performance across word types. Importantly, reports of using morphological strategies to spell morphological words were associated with a similar level of accuracy, as were reports of using retrieval. Even though children reported using a phonological strategy frequently across all word types, this strategy was associated with accurate performance only for spelling phonological words. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 with another set of stimuli and also showed that children's morphological awareness predicted their spelling accuracy for morphological words as well as the reported frequency of morphological strategy use. In sum, the findings revealed that most children showed evidence of adaptive strategy use.     

The costs and benefits of writing, talking, and thinking about life's triumphs and defeats

Three studies considered the consequences of writing, talking, and thinking about significant events. In Studies 1 and 2, students wrote, talked into a tape recorder, or thought privately about their worst (N = 96) or happiest experience (N = 111) for 15 min each during 3 consecutive days. In Study 3 (N = 112), students wrote or thought about their happiest day; half systematically analyzed, and half repetitively replayed this day. Well-being and health measures were administered before each study's manipulation and 4 weeks after. As predicted, in Study 1, participants who processed a negative experience through writing or talking reported improved life satisfaction and enhanced mental and physical health relative to those who thought about it. The reverse effect for life satisfaction was observed in Study 2, which focused on positive experiences. Study 3 examined possible mechanisms underlying these effects. Students who wrote about their happiest moments--especially when analyzing them--experienced reduced well-being and physical health relative to those who replayed these moments. Results are discussed in light of current understanding of the effects of processing life events.     

Validity of self-efficacy scale scores for a Spanish sample

This study analyzed the validity of the Sherer, et al. Self-efficacy Scale for a Spanish sample of 555 subjects, 257 men and 298 women. 415 were from the general population; 34 schizophrenics and 45 with eating disorders were from a clinic, plus 61 drug addicts from two centers. All met DSM-IV-R criteria. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Assertiveness Inventory, and the Self-control Questionnaire were administered. The reliability for total scores, general factor were high even when social self-efficacy was low. A bidimensional factor structure seemed more acceptable. The Self-efficacy scale scores correlated with those on the Self-control Questionnaire and the Assertiveness Inventory. Extraversion scores on the Sincerity dimension of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire correlated with scores on the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and Eysenck's Neuroticism and Psychoticism scales. Significant mean differences appeared between the general population group and the three clinical groups. These analyses support the usefulness of the scale for clinical practice and research with Spanish samples.     

Dimensionality of the Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire: a validation study in Belgium

This study examined the underlying dimensions of the Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire to test whether the robust 4-factor structure (Pay Level, Benefits, Raises, and Structure or Administration) often established in the United States can be generalized to other countries and cultures as well. Data of 4 samples (for-profit employees, nonprofit nurses, cultural centre employees, and nonprofit teachers) were analysed with confirmatory factor analyses. The results for the first 3 samples yielded support for the original 4-factor structure of the Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire. In the teachers' sample, the irrelevant Benefits items were excluded from the analysis, resulting in a 3-factor structure of pay satisfaction.