Menarche: A crossroads that previews developmental change

In recent years the developmental implications of menarche have garnered particular attention. Investigators have determined that this developmental event tends to affect three significant domains of the adolescent girl's function: psychological status, relationships with peers, and role in the family. This paper explores these issues and introduces a new technique, referred to as previewing, that may help the teenage girl acclimate to the status of sexual maturity. Derived from the early life interactions of caregiver and infant, previewing promotes representational skills and enhances self-esteem as the adolescent confronts developmental challenges.     

Genetic and Environmental Effects on Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness: An Adoption/Twin Study

ABSTRACT Previous research has indicated that extraversion and neuroticism are substantially affected both by genotype and environment. This study assesses genetic and environmental influences on the other three components of the five-factor model of personality: Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. An abbreviated version of the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) was administered to 82 pairs of identical twins and 171 pairs of fraternal twins reared apart and 132 pairs of identical twins and 167 pairs of fraternal twins reared together. Estimates of genetic and environmental effects for Openness and Conscientiousness were similar to those found in other studies of personality: Genetic influence was substantial and there was little evidence of shared rearing environment. Results for Agreeableness were different: Genetic influence accounted for only 12% of the variance and shared rearing environment accounted for 21% of the variance. Few significant gender or age differences for genetic and environmental parameters were found in model-fitting analyses.     

Social context and perceived task difficulty as mediators of depressive self-evaluation

This study examined two separate, but potentially interactive, influences on depressive self-evaluation: social context and perceptions of task difficulty. First, it was hypothesized that, if negative self-evaluations of depressed individuals are motivated by a desire to elicit attention and sympathy from others, depressed subjects should evaluate themselves more negatively than nondepressed subjects in a public setting, but not when they make self-evaluative judgments in private. Second, it was hypothesized that negative self-evaluation results from a bias to perceive tasks as being intrinsically easy, i.e., if a task is easy, a given score would be evaluated more poorly than if the task were difficult. It was found that the self-evaluations of depressed subjects were influenced by the social context, but not always in a negative direction. Depressed subjects did not differ from nondepressed subjects when performance evaluations were made in private. In a public condition, depressed subjects evaluated themselves more negatively than nondepressed subjects following an easy task, but evaluated themselves more positively following a difficult task. Depressed subjects did not evidence a bias to perceive tasks as being intrinsically easy. Depressed subjects did rate the tasks to be more difficult for themselves than they thought they would be for others and this expectancy was predictive of negative self-evaluation. These results were discussed in terms of alternative self-presentation motives and theories of social cognition. Self-evaluation often involves social comparison and researchers need to attend to the potentially complex interactions among social and cognitive processes.I would like to thank Deborah Davis and Paul Westerholm for their help in data collection, Ruth Maki for her statistical expertise, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. Portions of this paper were presented at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, 1989.     

“That man’s father is my father’s son”: The roles of structure,strategy, and working memory in solving convoluted verbal problems

Normative data (N=896) collected on solutions to the traditional reasoning problem “Brothers and sisters have I none,/That man’s father is my father’s son” was the platform for a set of experiments to investigate the roles of problem structure, subject strategy, and working memory in error making in a class of verbal problems. The normative data revealed that the modal, but incorrect response to the brothers and sisters problem was “himself,” whereas the correct response of “son” was given by only 17% of subjects for the traditional version above, rising to 40% for a reordered novel version. This problem’s structure, identified as adouble-modifier structure, was found to produce similar response patterns across a range of verbal problems. Results from (1) syntactical structure manipulations (e.g., “My father’s son is the father of that man”), and (2) efforts to teach subjects to use a linear strategy (a sequence of steps), interpreted within a framework of Just and Carpenter’s (1992) capacity theory of comprehension, suggested that working memory overload varies across within-structure modifications and subjects. Further-more, this overload may be compounded by subjects’ choices of strategy.     

Gender roles,computer attitudes,and dyadic computer interaction performance in college students

Females tend to score lower than males on measures of computer aptitude and attitudes. This study examined the potential effects of several mediating factors, sex of experimenter, sex of experimental partner, sex typing (Bem Sex Role Inventory score), and level of past experience, on a computer interaction task involving a dyad. College students, drawn from a primarily white college population, after completing paper-and-pencil measures assessing computer experience, computer attitudes, and gender roles, participated in a computer task involving drawing up to ten prescribed geometric patterns on a computer screen. Research assistants recorded the number of correctly completed patterns and videotaped participant interaction through a one-way mirror. Males reported experiencing more computer involvement than females. For males, past computer experience and masculinity were correlated with more positive computer attitude scores. For females, only past computer experience related to more positive computer attitude scores. Analyses of the computer interaction variable indicated that participants asked male research assistants significantly more questions than female research assistants. Several interaction effects were also found.A previous version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association, New Orleans, April 1991.     

Parental self-esteem and behavior problems in children: Similarities between mothers and fathers

The relationship between parental self-esteem and behavior problems in children was investigated using 1624 married couple's responses from the National Survey of Families and Households. The sample was weighted to be nationally representative in terms of race and ethnicity. It was hypothesized that the existence of behavior problems among children would be associated with low self-esteem among parents and that the parent's gender, child's gender, parents' gender role attitudes, and parental employment would moderate this relationship. The results indicated that parental self-esteem is negatively associated with behavior problems in children. However, none of the moderating variables had a significant impact. This suggests that the relationship between parental self-esteem and behavior problems among children is robust and does not vary appreciably with the gender of the parent, the gender of the child, the attitudes of the parent, or the employment of the parent.     

Demonstrative utterances

Conclusion We have worked out a small part of a program originally devised by Kaplan which included a clarification of the phrase y intends to demonstrate x. The analysis of demonstrative utterances, combined with a theory of deferred ostensive reference, enabled us to account for a much larger class of utterances (accompained by a relevant gesture) than expected. Regrettably, the analysis forces more questions on us than it answers. Although I have used the term gesture quite freely without providing any sort of explication, there is much more to say about gestures and their relation to speech. Especially questions concerning the ontological nature of gestures (What kind of a thing is a gesture anyway?), their epistemological status (How can we tell gestures apart from other actions?), and their semantic status (What makes a gesture have meaning?) have remained largely unexplored. To my knowledge, no philosopher in the analytic tradition has addressed those issues in any systematic manner.     

A dilemma for internal realism

Conclusion Given my dilemma, then, we should think twice before following Putnam away from metaphysical realism. Internal realism can offer only a false sense of philosophical security. And now we may doubt that it can offer even that.     

On the sampling theory roundations of item response theory models

Item response theory (IT) models are now in common use for the analysis of dichotomous item responses. This paper examines the sampling theory foundations for statistical inference in these models. The discussion includes: some history on the stochastic subject versus the random sampling interpretations of the probability in IRT models; the relationship between three versions of maximum likelihood estimation for IRT models; estimating versus estimating -predictors; IRT models and loglinear models; the identifiability of IRT models; and the role of robustness and Bayesian statistics from the sampling theory perspective.A presidential address can serve many different functions. This one is a report of investigations I started at least ten years ago to understand what IRT was all about. It is a decidedly one-sided view, but I hope it stimulates controversy and further research. I have profited from discussions of this material with many people including: Brian Junker, Charles Lewis, Nicholas Longford, Robert Mislevy, Ivo Molenaar, Donald Rock, Donald Rubin, Lynne Steinberg, Martha Stocking, William Stout, Dorothy Thayer, David Thissen, Wim van der Linden, Howard Wainer, and Marilyn Wingersky. Of course, none of them is responsible for any errors or misstatements in this paper. The research was supported in part by the Cognitive Science Program, Office of Naval Research under Contract No. Nooo14-87-K-0730 and by the Program Statistics Research Project of Educational Testing Service.