Field independence and performance on ball-handling tasks

Subjects were administered the Children's Embedded Figures Test and four ball-handling tests. Pearson product-moment correlations were low between the measures. Girls scored significantly higher than boys on the embedded figures test while boys scored significantly higher than girls on the striking and throwing tests.     

Counselors and Juvenile Delinquents: Toward a Comprehensive Treatment Approach

The complex problems experienced by juvenile offenders require a multifaceted approach to treatment. Meeting the interwoven psychological and environmental needs of delinquent youngsters involves four differential treatment functions: behaviour adjustment, growth counseling, child advocacy, and social chance. Mental health counselors and juvenile-justice-system workers can coordinate their efforts toward comprehensive treatment by analyzing their roles in terms of these four functions and by keeping their roles clearly understood among themselves and with their clients.     

Prepositional phrases spoken and heard

The relation between verbal and nonverbal behavior with common syntactic properties was investigated, using retarded and nonretarded children. Reinforcement was contingent on either verbal or nonverbal responses whereas responses of the other repertoire had no experimental consequences. Changes sometimes occurred in the unreinforced (collateral) repertoire, but they were always changes in the stimulus control of pre-existing topographies. A contingency involving responses of one repertoire never instated new topographies in the collateral repertoire. This suggested that the problem of “cross-modality generalization” should be reformulated to distinguish explicitly between instating new topographies and changing the stimulus control of pre-existing topographies. The result confirmed Skinner's hypothesis about “the same response spoken and heard” and clarified some anomalies in previous studies.     

Contextual interference in movements of the same class: differential effects on program and parameter learning

Contextual interference effects in motor learning usually were not found when the tasks to be learned presumably required the same generalized motor program (GMP) and differed only with regard to the movement parameters (see Lee, Wulf, & Schmidt, 1992; Magill & Hall, 1990). Thus, tasks requiring different motor programs (e.g., different relative timings) seemed to be a prerequisite for random practice to be more effective than blocked practice. However, the previous studies (that did not find random/blocked differences) used global error measures that confounded errors in relative timing and errors in absolute timing. In the present study, subjects practiced three movement patterns that had the same relative timing (requiring the same GMP) but different overall durations (requiring different parameters). Errors in relative timing and in absolute timing were assessed separately. The results indicate that random practice is more effective for the learning of relative timing (GMP learning) and less effective for the learning of absolute timing (parameter learning) than blocked practice. Preliminary ideas as to the reasons for this effect are discussed.     

Being Polite and Keeping MUM: How Bad News is Communicated in Organizational Hierarchies1

There are many ways to communicate bad news. The MUM effect (Tesser & Rosen, 1975), which is keeping mum and not transmitting the bad news at all, is only one of many possible approaches. Using P. Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory, an experimental study was conducted to address not whether bad news is being transmitted, but how bad news is being transmitted. The results show that most communicators tend to use politeness strategies when communicating bad news. Moreover, using politeness strategies to couch the message did not attenuate the informative value of the message. Focused contrasts revealed two strong interactions between gender and communication direction on strategy use. First, power differences more strongly predicted strategy use for men, whereas distance differences more strongly predicted strategy use for women. Second, men used most politeness strategies when the combined effect of power and distance was the highest (as the politeness theory would predict), but the trend was reversed for women. This finding suggests that politeness theory may not be an accurate model for describing female communicators.     

NEURONAL CODING OF SERIAL ORDER:

Abstract— How does the brain create rule-governed sequences of behavior? An answer to this question may come from a surprising source: the neostriatum (caudate nucleus and putamen), Traditionally, the neostriatum has been considered pun of the brain's motor system, but its contribution to the preparation or execution of movement is recognized generally to concern high-level motor functions. Recent work implicates the neostriatum in disorders of sequential action and thought, as in the repetition of thoughts or habits in human obsessive-compulsive disorder and movements or speech in Tourette's syndrome. Yet there is no direct evidence to support the idea that the neostriatum controls sequences of behavior. Using ethological and neurophysiological techniques to study neural activity in the rat neoslriatum during syntactic grooming sequences, we found that neuronal activity in the anterolateral neostriatum depended on the execution of syntactic sequences of grooming actions. The individual grooming movements themselves did not activate the neoslriatum; activation was determined by the syntactic sequence in which grooming movements were performed. These data provide the first direct evidence that the neoslriatum coordinates the control of rule-governed behavioral sequences.     

Perceived homogeneity and familial loyalty between Chinese and Americans

On the basis of both previous and recent research on intercultural perceptions (Lee & Ottati, 1993; Triandis & Vassiliou, 1967), it is hypothesized that perceived group homogeneity would be intimately related to familial loyalty (or commitment) and stability. A cross-cultural questionnaire study was conducted both in the People’s Republic of China (n=182) and in the United States of America (n=182). The results revealed that both Chinese and American subjects perceived a collectivistic society to have more familial commitment and stability while they perceived an individualistic society to have less familial commitment and stability. The implications for this study have been discussed.