Normative data on the Missouri Children's Picture Series and the Missouri Children's Behavior Checklist with southern black children

Normative data are presented for Southern black children on two objective personality inventories for children: the Missouri Children's Picture Series (MCPS), a child picture-sorting task, and the Missouri Children's Behavior Checklist (MBCL), a parent rating scale. The MCPS was administered to 615 black children attending public schools in a low socioeconomic area of the southeast United States. Parents returned the MBCL on 437 of the children. Means and standard deviations on eight MCPS personality scales and six MCBL behavior rating scales are presented for black males and females at ages 5 through 16, and effects of age, sex, and various scale intercorrelations are discussed. Results suggest systematic age and sex differences on the various scales for black children that are quite atypical when compared with the MCPS in other samples. Various empirical questions regarding the validity of these instruments when used with Southern black children are raised.     

Marital disturbance and child problems: A cautionary note regarding hyperactive children

In previous work, investigators have found a relationship between marital discord and childhood conduct problems (aggression) in clinic samples. Given the wide variability of aggression found among hyperactive children,it would follow from previous work that child aggression may be associated with marital discord in a hyperactive population. This hypothesis was tested in a sample of 23 boys (ages 5 to 8) diagnosed as attention deficit with hyperactivity. Aggressive behaviors were tracked by the children's teachers for 12 school days. Parental and teacher ratings of conduct problems were also obtained. Additionally, the auditory version of the laboratory Continuous Performance Test was administered. Marital adjustment, overt hostility, and conflict tactics, as reported by the mothers, were not significantly correlated with any of the measures of aggression or conduct problems. In other words, marital discord in families with a hyperactive boy did not explain differential rates of aggressive behavior despite definite variability in both the marital and child behavioral measures. Marital discord was marginally related to severity of attentional deficit on the Continuous Performance Test. The results underscore the need for caution in attempting to extend findings from a general population (i.e., undifferentiated clinicreferred children) to a specific diagnostic subgroup (i.e., attention-deficit hyperactive children).     

Psychologists' role in family-centered approach to practice, training, and research with young children

Family-centered, community-based, coordinated care for children with special needs is presented as the best practice model for providing services to children and families. Psychologists must learn to play an active role in this frame-work that both integrates psychology with other health and education disciplines and uses the broad spectrum of psychological knowledge about families, development, community organization, and intervention strategies. Key principles of family-centered child psychology affect practice research and training. The psychologist becomes part of a team created to support families as the primary care-givers of their children. Training programs must reorganize the types of experiences both in the classroom and the field to train new psychologists within this model. As mandates for family-centered care affect policies at the state and federal levels, research will remain a critical factor in understanding the effects of these policy shifts on child and family functioning and the delivery of services.     

Gender and the influence of evaluations on self-assessments in achievement settings

This article reviews evidence for a gender difference in responsiveness to others' evaluations in achievement situations. Studies show that women's self-evaluations are more responsive to the valence of the evaluative feedback they receive than are men's. A number of possible explanations for this effect are then discussed, with the best evidence pointing to men's and women's differing construals of the informational value of others' evaluations in such situations. Research on the behavioral consequences of women's lower status as well as on children's experiences with evaluative feedback provides potential explanations for this effect. A more proximal explanation, however, lies in men's and women's different approaches to evaluative achievement situations. Men may be particularly likely to respond to the competitive nature of evaluative achievement and hence to adopt a self-confident approach that leads them to deny the informational value of others' evaluations. Women may be particularly likely to approach such situations as opportunities to gain information about their abilities.     

Behaviorally-based decision-making training for children

A seven-step, behaviorally based, decision-making process was taught to 17 children, age 9–10 years. Each child's decision-making ability was measured before and after training, using two audiotaped stories that described problem situations typically encountered in the school or home. The children were asked to identify the problem, generate alternative solutions, think of positive and negative consequences for each solution, and offer a personal value supporting their decision. As compared to a no-treatment control group, the children receiving the decision-making training obtained significantly greater scores on four of five dependent measures. Implications for teaching decision-making as a self-management skill are offered.     

Rapid educational rehabilitation for prison inmates

One of the major goals of prisons has been the educational rehabilitation of inmates. Studies have shown that predelinquents as well as delinquents could be motivated to achieve in academic areas through the use of an incentive system. The present study attempted to extend the behavioral yield of such a system with prison inmates. The academic performance of two inmates in math and English were compared when two levels of incentives were made contingent on that performance. The results showed that the two inmates passed academic tests as much as nine times faster under an enriched schedule of incentives than under a standard one. This increase in rate of performance was translated into actual academic achievement as one of the inmates passed 9th through 12th grade algebra in only 14 days. A standardized test confirmed this academic advancement for both inmates. These high rates of performance and academic achievement are even more dramatic in view of the fact that five months prior to this procedure, both inmates had been tested as being below average in intelligence.     

A comparison of frequency, interval, and time-sampling methods of data collection

Data representing high, medium, and low response rates in constant and nonconstant patterns were generated by electromechanical equipment to determine whether the same data collected by time-sampling, interval recording, and frequency recording would be represented similarly by each method. Results indicated: (1) that time-sampling provided an extremely inaccurate estimate of responding, and (2) that interval recording accurately represented responding of low and medium rates, but grossly underestimated high-rate responding.     

Startbox-goalbox confinement durations as determinants of self-punitive behavior

Two levels of confinement duration (5 or 60 sec) in either startbox or goalbox were factorially combined with presence or absence of shock during extinction of a runway escape response in a self-punitive paradigm under a spaced-trials procedure. All groups were equated for amount and temporal spacing of handling before and after each trial. Shocked rats were more resistant to extinction than nonshocked rats only when startbox confinement was short. When startbox confinement was long, shock facilitated extinction. Long goalbox confinement enhanced running speed for shocked rats, but only in the presence of shock. It was suggested that duration of startbox confinement affects strength of conditioned fear, with long confinement leading to its extinction.     

Noise,Economy, and the Emergence of Information Structure in a Laboratory Language

The acceptability of sentences in natural language is constrained not only grammaticality, but also by the relationship between what is being conveyed and such factors as context and the beliefs of interlocutors. In many languages the critical element in a sentence (its focus) must be given grammatical prominence. There are different accounts of the nature of focus marking. Some researchers treat it as the grammatical realization of a potentially arbitrary feature of universal grammar and do not provide an explicit account of its origins; others have argued, however, that focus marking is a (grammaticalized) functional solution to the problem of efficiently transmitting information via a noisy channel. By adding redundancy to highlight critical elements in particular, focus protects key parts of the message from noise. If this information‐theoretic account is true, then we should expect focus‐like behavior to emerge even in non‐linguistic communication systems given sufficient noise and pressures for efficiency. We tested this in an experiment in which participants played a simple communication game in which they had to click cells on a grid to communicate one of two line figures drawn across the grid. We manipulated the noise, available time, and required effort, and measured patterns of redundancy. Because the lines in many cases overlapped, meaning that only some parts of each line could be used to distinguish it from the other, we were able to compare the extent to which effort was expended on adding redundancy to critical (non‐overlapping) and non‐critical (overlapping) parts of the message. The results supported the information‐theoretic account of focus and shed light on the emergence of information structure in language.