Oral Interaction in Cooperative Learning Groups: Speaking,Listening, and the Nature of Statements Made by High-, Medium-, and Low-Achieving Students

Oral interaction within cooperative learning groups was observed for high-, medium-, and low-achieving students. Initially, cooperative and individualistic learning situations were compared on achievement and attitudes. Forty-eight 4th- grade American students were assigned to learning situations on a stratified random basis controlling for ability and sex. They participated in the study for 55 min a day for 15 instructional days. Two observation schemes were used. The results for the cooperative situation were factor analyzed to determine the basic dimensions of oral interaction within cooperative learning groups. Five orthogonal factors were identified: Exchanging Task-Related Information, Elaborating on the Information, Encouraging Each Other to Learn, Disagreeing With Each Other's Conclusions, and Making Nontask Comments and Sharing Personal Feelings. The oral participation of students from different achievement levels was differentially related to achievement. Vocalizing was found to be more strongly related to achievement than was listening to other group members vocalize. Medium and low achievers especially benefited from cooperative learning experiences.     

Memory bias for negative emotional words in recognition memory is driven by effects of category membership

Recognition memory studies often find that emotional items are more likely than neutral items to be labelled as studied. Previous work suggests this bias is driven by increased memory strength/familiarity for emotional items. We explored strength and bias interpretations of this effect with the conjecture that emotional stimuli might seem more familiar because they share features with studied items from the same category. Categorical effects were manipulated in a recognition task by presenting lists with a small, medium or large proportion of emotional words. The liberal memory bias for emotional words was only observed when a medium or large proportion of categorised words were presented in the lists. Similar, though weaker, effects were observed with categorised words that were not emotional (animal names). These results suggest that liberal memory bias for emotional items may be largely driven by effects of category membership.     

Perceptions of causes of performance-related injuries by music health experts and injured violinists

Skilled violin and viola players, all of whom had a current performance-related musculoskeletal injury, were asked to report their perceptions of contributing risk factors, consistent with a participatory ergonomics approach. The 26 players, age 18 to 60 years, had been playing for a minimum of 10 years and averaged three hours of practice per day. In addition, 7 music health experts, all with more than 10 years of clinical experience in treating musicians, were asked to report on the risk factors for musicians' performance-related injuries. A high correlation between the perceptions of these two groups was found, with the same top five factors in terms of severity indicated by both groups. Factors rated as high risk were primarily intrinsic and related to the manner in which respondents practiced, to playing posture, and to flaws in skill technique.     

Episodic memory change in late adulthood: Generalizability across samples and performance indices

Younger adults recall more information from episodic memory tasks than do older adults. Because longitudinal studies are rare and often incompatible, the extent of actual late-life memory change is not well established. We assemble two different longitudinal samples of normal older adults, each of which is tested twice at a 3-year interval, using a large battery of episodic memory indicators. Together, two-wave data from both the Victoria Longitudinal Study in Canada (n = 400) and the Kungsholmen Project in Sweden (n = 168) cover a 40-year span of adulthood, ranging from 54 to 94 years of age. Principal memory tasks include categorizable word lists, story recall, and random word lists, as well as indicators of cognitive support. Overall, an examination of performance on sets of common and complementary episodic tasks reveals that, for both samples, actual 3-year changes are modest and that, when decline occurs, it is gradual. The exception-greater decline for more supported tasks-suggests that these may be especially sensitive to late-life changes.     

Comparing categorization models

Four experiments are presented that competitively test rule- and exemplar-based models of human categorization behavior. Participants classified stimuli that varied on a unidimensional axis into 2 categories. The stimuli did not consistently belong to a category; instead, they were probabilistically assigned. By manipulating these assignment probabilities, it was possible to produce stimuli for which exemplar- and rule-based explanations made qualitatively different predictions. F. G. Ashby and J. T. Townsend's (1986) rule-based general recognition theory provided a better account of the data than R. M. Nosofsky's (1986) exemplar-based generalized context model in conditions in which the to-be-classified stimuli were relatively confusable. However, generalized context model provided a better account when the stimuli were relatively few and distinct. These findings are consistent with multiple process accounts of categorization and demonstrate that stimulus confusion is a determining factor as 10 which process mediates categorization.     

Stretch reflexes in the human masticatory muscles: a brief review and a new functional role

Stretch reflexes play a vital role in fine-tuning movements and in automatically maintaining posture. This article briefly reviews the operation of the stretch reflex in the human masticatory system. The conventional approach of stretching muscles in an open-loop manner has yielded much valuable information on the operation of this reflex. In particular, it has revealed that stretching the jaw-closing muscles evokes a reflex response with two major components. The short-latency reflex is favoured when stretches are brisk, but slower stretches evoke an additional long-latency component. In the hand muscles, the long-latency response is transcortical: in the masticatory muscles, it is not. In addition to its role in servo-control of muscle length during chewing, the stretch reflex in the jaw-closing muscles maintains the vertical position of the mandible during vigorous head movements such as those that occur during running, jumping, hopping and other vigorous whole-body movements in which the head moves briskly up and down. This is an interesting model system in which to investigate stretch reflexes with natural stimuli under unrestrained, physiological conditions.     

A new approach to assessing optimism: the development of a german version of the positive and negative expectancies questionnaire (paneq-g)

This study describes the construction and validation of a German version of the Positive and Negative Expectancies Scale, PANEQ-G, which is based on the original English version of the PANEQ. The German version showed the same factor structure as the original, comprising the three subscales of Negative Affectivity/Pessimism, Positive Affectivity/Optimism, and Fighting Spirit. The reliability data for the new scale were acceptable, and the factor structure was confirmed by means of a confirmatory factor analysis in an independent sample. As expected, concurrent validation uncovered substantial correlations of the three established scales. Negative Affectivity/Pessimism was related to Neuroticism and Positive Affectivity/Optimism was related to Extraversion. Fighting Spirit, the third scale, was related to Self-Efficacy and Conscientiousness. The PANEQ-G provides a reliable and valid instrument that can be used in conjunction with the original PANEQ for cross-cultural studies on Optimism and Pessimism. It also offers a new third component, Fighting Spirit, which can enrich research in this area.     

The meeting of meditative disciplines and Western psychology: a mutually enriching dialogue

Meditation is now one of the most enduring, widespread, and researched of all psychotherapeutic methods. However, to date the meeting of the meditative disciplines and Western psychology has been marred by significant misunderstandings and by an assimilative integration in which much of the richness and uniqueness of meditation and its psychologies and philosophies have been overlooked. Also overlooked have been their major implications for an understanding of such central psychological issues as cognition and attention, mental training and development, health and pathology, and psychological capacities and potentials. Investigating meditative traditions with greater cultural and conceptual sensitivity opens the possibility of a mutual enrichment of both the meditative traditions and Western psychology, with far-reaching benefits for both.