Promoting Safe Driving Behaviors: The Influence of Message Framing and Issue Involvement

This study examined the influence of framing and issue involvement on the intentions of participants to perform safe driving behaviors. It was hypothesized that when participants were involved with the issue, gain messages would increase intentions to perform safe driving behaviors more than would loss messages. To examine this hypothesis, participants were classified as either being high or low in involvement, and then were required to read either a gain or a loss message promoting a particular safe-driving behavior. After reading the message, the participants' agreement with the message, cognitive and affective responses to the message, and intentions to perform the behavior were recorded. The results supported the hypothesis.     

Conventions and Rules in Literature

Views of what role convention plays in the creation and appreciation of art works gravitate towards two extremes. One view holds that works of art can be apprehended and appreciated as well as created with no reference to convention. The other claims that conventions fully determine how works of art are apprehended and are therefore necessary conditions for the creation of works of art as well as constitutive of appreciation. The former is a version of the Romantic view of art as something that appeals spontaneously to man's most profound emotions, to man's sentient nature, without making use of or needing mediating conventions. The conventionalist view denies that it is possible to respond spontaneously to art. All apprehension and appreciation of art are structured by conventions, and the reader/audience cannot go beyond these conventions because they constitute , the experience of the work of art. This paper explains the sense in which the constitutive view may be best understood.     

Gatekeepers and the “Chomskian revolution”

The widely believed folk history of the confrontation between an established neo-Bloomfieldian generation and the revolutionary advances of transformational grammarians bears little relation to the open access to publication that Noam Chomsky encountered in the 1950s. Although a rhetoric of revolutionary conflict appeared, it cannot be attributed to attempts by the established generation to suppress new ideas, as in Thomas Kuhn's morphology of scientific revolutions. The central neo-Bloomfieldian gatekeeper, Bernard Bloch, fostered the diffusion of Chomsky's ideas and promoted the careers of Chomsky and Robert Lees. Other prominent neo-Bloomfieldians, regarding Chomsky as continuing the work of his teacher Zellig Harris, were sympathetic to his ideas and ready to concede his advances in syntactic theory. Nonetheless, Chomsky and his followers adopted an aggressive stance, denying the value of preceding work in structuralist linguistics. Although the case is anomalous for Kuhn's theory, it fits a sociological theory of scientific revolutions.     

Outpatient behavioral management of aggressiveness in adolescents: A response cost paradigm

This study focuses on outpatient behavioral management of oppositional‐defiant teenagers that engage in aggressive behaviors. Sixteen subjects, 13 male and three female, are followed through an alternating treatment, single case design, ABCD: baseline; cognitive therapy coupled with the REST (Real Economy System for Teens) program for parental outpatient behavioral management; combined cognitive, REST, and response cost; and finally REST with response cost to control aggressive behaviors. The response cost was designed to control aggression. Response cost involved the parents identifying seven reinforcers, objects, and activities that are important to the teen. They are rank ordered, with item one being most important and item seven being least important. An aggressive act means the loss of an item for 1 year, beginning with item seven and progressing upward. This study finds that aggressive behaviors do not decrease with cognitive therapy and the REST program. When the more stringent response cost program is implemented in addition to the cognitive and REST techniques, the acts of aggression do respond to treatment. Thus, it is concluded that adding a stringent parent management response cost program offers a tool therapists can use in treating aggressive, oppositional‐defiant teenagers on an outpatient basis without the need for hospitalization. Aggr. Behav. 25:321–330, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Impulsive corporal punishment by mothers and antisocial behavior and impulsiveness of children

This study tested the hypothesis that corporal punishment (CP), such as spanking or slapping a child for purposes of correcting misbehavior, is associated with antisocial behavior (ASB) and impulsiveness by the child. The data were obtained through interviews with a probability sample of 933 mothers of children age 2–14 in two small American cities. Analyses of variance found that the more CP experienced by the child, the greater the tendency for the child to engage in ASB and to act impulsively. These relationships hold even after controlling for family socioeconomic status, the age and sex of the child, nurturance by the mother, and the level of non-corporal interventions by the mother. There were also significant interaction effects of CP with impulsiveness by the mother. When CP was carried out impulsively, it was most strongly related to child impulsiveness and ASB; when CP was done when the mother was under control, the relationship to child behavior problems was reduced but still present. ln view of the fact that there is a high risk of losing control when engaged in CP, even by parents who are not usually impulsive, and the fact that impulsive CP is so strongly associated with child behavior problems, the results of this study suggest that CP is an important risk factor for children developing a pattern of impulsive and antisocial behavior which, in turn, may contribute to the level of violence and other crime in society. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.