How Generalizable Are Adolescents' Beliefs About Pro-Drug Pressures and Resistance Self-Efficacy?1

Based on three waves of data from 1261 adolescents, this study examines the nature of resistance self-efficacy vis-a-vis different drugs and social situations, as well as its relationship to perceived pressure to use drugs. We found that both self-efficacy and perceived pressure to use drugs appear to be generalizable across substances (alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana), but adolescents do tend to distinguish between their capacity to resist drugs in different social situations. Adolescents also discriminate between how much pressure they feel and their ability to resist that pressure, but the great majority report lower levels of self-efficacy in higher pressure situations. This relationship is strongest for alcohol and weakest for marijuana. These results suggest the following implications for prevention programs: (a) adolescents can be taught to resist one or more of the commonly used drugs with a reasonable expectation that the skills will generalize to other drugs; (b) resistance self-efficacy learned in one situation can be expected to have some generalizability to other situations, but it may be important to link resistance training with a range of situations to insure the greatest effectiveness; (c) to be maximally effective, prevention programs may need to help adolescents reduce the amount of pressure experienced as well as develop resistance skills; such efforts are likely to be particularly important for situations involving alcohol.     

The effect of a supervisory development program on leadership style

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a supervisory development program on leadership style, conceptualized as the amount of consideration and structure demonstrated by supervisors. One hundred male supervisors of a government railways department were randomly selected and then assigned randomly to either receive training (n=50) or not to be trained (n=50). The program was a 22-week residential course, training participants in human relations and structuring skills. Measures of the supervisors' consideration and structure were obtained from 100 male subordinates of the supervisors 4 weeks prior to, and 2 months after, training. At pre- and post-test, supervisors in the experimental and control groups rated the amount of consideration and structure they felt they should use. Analysis of variance with significant interaction effects revealed that the training program enhanced self and subordinate-rated consideration and structure.     

Attributional processing style differences in depressed and nondepressed individuals

A series of four studies used different measures to assess the amount of attributional processing following failure and success. It was found that, from an actor's point of view, relatively depressed students consistently differed from relatively nondepressed students in the amount of their attributional processing. The depressed individuals reported more attributions for both hypothetical and real failure, compared to the nondepressed individuals. They also reported fewer attributions for hypothetical success than the nondepressed individuals. In line with previous findings, depressed individuals took less personal credit for their successes and ascribed their failures more pronouncedly to their lack of ability. The findings reflect a depressive attributional processing style that encompasses individual differences, both in the content and in the amount of causal thinking following failure and success. Integration of this style into the attributional helplessness model of depression is suggested. The findings are compatible with a differential self-esteem view of depression and with aspects of Kuhl's functional helplessness model of depression. Implications for depression therapy are briefly discussed.Financial support for the studies was obtained from the University of Bielefeld (Grants 0Z 2760/2774). I wish to thank Karola Bettmer, Thomas Feld, and Stefan Wächter for their participation in the collection and the preparation of the data, as well as Friedrich Försterling, Jonathan Harrow, Wulf-Uwe Meyer, and two unknown reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.     

Sex differences in attraction to infants: When do they occur?

Harlow (1971) observed that all-female college audiences responded to a pictured infant rhesus monkey with an “ecstasy response,” while males were “completely unresponsive,” and females in coeducational audiences “inhibited the ecstasy response,” explaining these differences in terms of innate sex differences. The present study compared college students' self-reported attraction to pictures of 15 infant and adult nonhuman primates under several conditions. Infant pictures were of two types: infants which were engaged in typical infant behaviors (Infant Behavior), and those which were not (Infant). Subjects made judgments in same- or mixed-sex groups and reported degree of attraction publicly or privately. Ratio scores were used to represent each subject's attraction to infant or infant-behavior pictures compared with his or her attraction to pictures of adults. There were no significant sex differences in attraction to infant or infant-behavior pictures, and sex did not interact with any other variable. However, situational variables significantly affected the response. Males as well as females reported greater attraction to infant and infant-behavior pictures when they viewed the pictures in same-sex compared with mixed-sex groups. Both sexes reported greater attraction to infant and infant-behavior pictures privately than publicly.     

Stimulus probability and prediction outcome as determinants of choice reaction time: Some procedural considerations

Effects of stimulus probability and prediction outcome on two-choice reaction speed (CRS) were determined when a frequency imbalance was reversed half-way through 300 samples of a 70/30 stimulus distribution and when the same 70/30 distribution was sampled for 1200 trials. Prior to each presentation Ss made a prediction; following each presentation Ss identified the stimulus by pressing a right-hand or left-hand trigger. CRS was faster to correctly predicted stimuli, and faster to the more probable stimulus. Ss who were informed of the frequency imbalance reacted significantly faster than Ss who were not. Both practice and boredom effects were demonstrated by using the extended number of trials. CRS was faster during the second session of 300 trials than during the first; after two sessions, CRS was slower during the second half of two additional sessions.     

Emotional arousal and persuasion effects in flooding

The effects of a single session of imaginal flooding were studied in female students unable to touch a harmless spider. All combinations of continuous vs. discontinuous presentation and highly arousing vs. less arousing material were used in a factorial design, to test the hypothesis that highly arousing material is beneficial only when presented under massed conditions. Results were clearly against prediction and suggested that immediate attitude change was maximal following less arousing material, irrespective of method of presentation; while behaviour change was greatest when less arousing material was presented continuously.

In a second experiment, subjects were exposed to both types of theme material in either a low-high or a high-low order. Some evidence was found for the postulated attitude changes and contrast effects, which favoured the use of a high-low order. Possible explanations for earlier contradictory evidence, and implications for clinical treatment are discussed.     

Effects of musically evoked affect on women's interpersonal attraction toward and perceptual judgments of physical attractiveness of men

In a between-subjects design, female subjects evaluated photographs of attractive and unattractive stimulus males while listening to positive affect-evoking rock music, negative affect-evoking avant-garde music, or no music at all. Consistent with previous research, subjects evaluated attractive stimulus males more positively than unattractive males on a variety of interpersonal judgment dimensions. Furthermore, subjects responded with more positive evaluations of personal character of, and attraction toward, stimulus persons in the rock music as compared to the avant-garde music condition. Finally, assessments of physical attractiveness were influenced by the music conditions, with stimulus persons judged of greater physical attractiveness in the rock as compared with the avant-garde music condition. The results are discussed in terms of extending the Byrne-Clore reinforcement-affect model of interpersonal attraction.     

Information available In brief tactile presentations

Two experiments investigated characteristics of Immediate recall for brief tactile stimuli applied to the 24 interjoint regions of the fingers of both hands (thumbs excluded) The obtained Immediate-memory span varied from 35 to 7,5 stimulus positions correct after correction for guessing, similar to the results In analogous visual studies, Properties of any hypothetical tactile short-term memory were studied by requiring subjects to report only a specified portion of the stimuli presented, and by varying the time of occurrence of the marker specifying which portion of the stimuli to report, In this partial-report condition, subjects had more stimulus information available at the time of reporting than their immediate memory spans indicated, provided that the stimulus marker occurred within 0.8 sec after stimulus termination, The data suggest that at least for the amount of training employed here, any tactile short-term memory has much less capacity than an analogous visual short-term memory.