Intrinsic enjoyment and boredom coping scales: Validation with personality,evoked potential and attention measures

This paper reports the validation of brief, self-report measures of intrinsic enjoyment and boredom coping. Intrinsic enjoyment is characterized by intense involvement, interest and absorbed concentration; boredom coping is designed to reflect the disposition to restructure one's perceptions and participation in potentially boring activities so as to decrease boredom. Both traits are hypothesized to reflect the capacity for good attentional control across a variety of situations. Reliability was established by test-retest correlation and by an inter-item consistency measurement. Construct validity was established by comparison with previously-validated personality tests, real-life measures (such as Random Activities Experiential Sampling, which involves repeated self-report measures in daily life), as well as with laboratory measures of attention (including the averaged visual evoked potential (EP) and the Continuous Performance Test). Intrinsic enjoyment is significantly correlated with an independent measure of intrinsic involvement (low wish to be elsewhere in one's daily life), the affective experience of potency, self-reports of concentrating well with ease, high ego development, an internal locus of control, lack of boredom susceptibility and certain EP indices of attentional change and ‘cortical’ augmenting. Boredom coping is associated with a higher percent of time actually spent alone, high continuous performance task measures of attentional capacity, and low MMPI and Research Diagnostic Criteria indices of psychopathology.     

Age norms for impulsiveness,venturesomeness and empathy in children

A total of 1505 children (633 boys and 872 girls) completed the I₆ Impulsiveness Questionnaire. Reliabilities, scale intercorrelations and means and standard deviations are given after slight modifications were made to the original scoring key on the basis of factor analyses. Age means for both sexes are also given.     

Why Reading? Because it's there

Three papers (V. A. Mann, Reading skill and language skill. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 1–15; G. Wolford & C. A. Fowler, Differential use of partial information by good and poor readers. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 16–35; F. J. Morrison, Reading disability: A problem in rule learning and word decoding. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 36–47) are critiqued from the standpoint of their adequacy in advancing our understanding of a problem as complex as reading disability. Experimenters should be explicit about their guiding theoretical assumptions, and should think through the relations, if any, between their laboratory tasks and the actual processes of reading. The reading protocol of a dyslexic child is provided, and is interpreted within the frameworks of the Mann, Wolford and Fowler, and Morrison viewpoints.     

The effects of empathic instructions upon donating behavior: Sex differences in young children

First-grade children were given either empathy instructions (in which they were told to imagine themselves in the target person's place) or neutral instructions (in which they were told to listen to what the target person did). For half the subjects, the target person was of the same sex; for the other half, the target person was of the opposite sex. Subjects were then given a chance to anonymously donate money to the target child, who was presented as being in need. Liking for the target child, subject's perceptions of the target child's emotional state, and subjects' report of their own emotional states were also assessed. Empathic instructions increased donating behavior for males, but not for females. Accuracy of perception of the target person's state was generally high. Self-reports of emotional states congruent with that of the target tended to be associated with increased donating behavior only for males, but these self-reports were greater for females than males, and greater for both sexes with same-sex target persons. Liking also was enhanced by gender similarity. These results are discussed in terms of a proposed relationship among empathy, prosocial behavior, sex, and age.We wish to express our gratitude to the staff and students of Wannamaker and North Fairview Elementary Schools of Topeka, Kansas, for their assistance in carrying out this research, and also thank C. Daniel Batson for his helpful suggestions and comments.     

Odor recognition: familiarity, identifiability, and encoding consistency

The investigation examined the association between the perceived identity of odorous stimuli and the ability to recognize the previous occurrence of them. The stimuli comprised 20 relatively familiar odorous objects such as chocolate, leather, popcorn, and soy sauce. Participants rated the familiarity of the odors and sought to identify them. At various intervals up to 7 days after initial inspection, the participants sought to recognize the odors among sets of distractor odors that included such items as soap, cloves, pipe tobacco, and so on. The recognition response entailed a confidence rating as to whether or not an item had appeared in the original set. At the time of testing, the participants also sought to identify the stimuli again. The results upheld previous findings of excellent initial recognition memory for environmentally relevant odors and slow forgetting. The results also uncovered, for the first time, a strong association between recognition memory and identifiability, rated familiarity, and the ability to use an odor label consistently at inspection and subsequent testing. Encodability seems to enhance rather than to permit recognizability. Even items identified incorrectly or inconsistently were recognized at levels above chance.     

Programming time as a function of number of movement parts and changes in movement direction

The question of whether changes seen in simple reaction time (SRT) as a function of response complexity (i.e., number of movement parts) should be considered as differences in the time needed to centrally program a motor response was addressed. Using a large-scale tapping response, 14 subjects contacted from one to five targets positioned in a straight line, while a second group of 14 subjects executed 90 degrees changes in direction in striking the targets. Results revealed that mean SRT and mean premotor time increased linearly as the number of movement parts increased, regardless of whether changes in movement direction had to be programmed, with the greatest increase occurring between one-, and two-part responses. Increases in motor time were not sufficient to account for the sizeable SRT effect. These findings support the position of increased central programming time for more complex responses, and also help establish some of the boundaries of the complexity effect.     

On the measurement of storage and retrieval contributions to memory development

We report two free recall experiments and a cued recall experiment in which a new two-stage model was used to obtain numerical measurements of age changes in various aspects of storage and retrieval. The subjects in all three experiments were 7-year-olds (second graders) and 11-year-olds (sixth graders). The major findings in the free recall experiment were that getting a trace into storage posed less of a problem for elementary schoolers than learning how to get it out on test trials, that retrieval development is more rapid during the elementary school years than storage development, and that the superiority of older children's storage and retrieval abilities tends to become more pronounced as learning progresses. A similar pattern of results was obtained under different conditions in the cued recall experiment.     

Context effects on the perceived physical attractiveness of faces

Four experiments were conducted to study the nature of context effects on the perceived physical attractiveness of faces. In Experiment 1, photos of faces scaled on attractiveness were presented in sets of three, with target faces appearing in the middle flanked by two context faces. The target faces were of average attractiveness, with the context faces being either high, average, or low in attractiveness. The effect of the context was one of assimilation, rather than contrast, regardless of whether the persons in the photos were portrayed to be associated. This result was interpreted in terms of a “generalized halo effect” for judgments of the physical attractiveness of stimuli within a group. Presenting the persons of a set as friends enhanced the perceived attractiveness of the target face but only when the context did not contain a face of low attractiveness. In Experiment 2, the assimilation effect was observed to carry over to influence ratings of the target faces several minutes after the context faces had been removed. Experiment 3 showed the assimilation effect to be robust regardless of whether the context was composed of two faces or one, but Experiment 4 showed the assimilation effect to be evident only when the context faces were presented simultaneously with the target.     

Self-efficacy,nicotine-fading/self-monitoring and cigarette-smoking behaviour

An attempt to replicate and extend the successful results of Foxx and Brown's (1979) nicotine-fading, self-monitoring procedure for smoking abstinence or controlled smoking was undertaken using a combination of their procedure and cognitive-behavioural interventions. The latter consisted of: (1) a variation of Meichenbaum's (1977) self-instructional training and (2) a simple, direct manipulation of Bandura's (1977) concept of self-efficacy. Evidence was found to support Foxx and Brown's (1979) procedure with respect to reduced smoking rate and nicotine/tar intake. Combinations of treatments did not result in an enhancement of these effects. However, with respect to smoking abstinence, comparable results were only found in groups receiving specific training in self-efficacy. It was suggested that the variability of findings in this study as well as those in the literature subsequent and relating to Foxx and Brown's (1979) procedure might be accounted for using Bandura's (1977) self-efficacy concept.     

Integration of melody and text in memory for songs

Two experiments examined whether the memory representation for songs consists of independent or integrated components (melody and text). Subjects heard a serial presentation of excerpts from largely unfamiliar folksongs, followed by a recognition test. The test required subjects to recognize songs, melodies, or texts and consisted of five types of items: (a) exact songs heard in the presentation; (b) new songs; (c) old tunes with new words; (d) new tunes with old words; and (e) old tunes with old words of a different song from the same presentation (‘mismatch songs’). Experiment 1 supported the integration hypothesis: Subjects' recognition of components was higher in exact songs (a) than in songs with familiar but mismatched components (e). Melody recognition, in particular, was near chance unless the original words were present. Experiment 2 showed that this integration of melody and text occurred also across different performance renditions of a song and that it could not be eliminated by voluntary attention to the melody.