Impact of situational legitimacy and assertiveness-related anxiety/discomfort on motivation and ability to generate effective criticism responses

This study compares the motivation and the quality of criticism responses of 697 undergraduates who were divided into three levels of situation legitimacy (high, moderate, and low) and two levels (top versus bottom 40 percent) of anxiety related to previous generalized assertiveness behaviours. The impact of gender was also studied. The results showed the legitimacy of the situation for a critical response (preassessed with peer hold-out groups) significantly affected participants' motivation to criticize as well as the quality of their critical responses, notwithstanding the poor quality of all criticism responses. Anxiety related to previous global assertiveness was related to high motivation but not to quality of criticism responses. There were no gender effects. Results are interpreted within an avoidance learning paradigm wherein the connotative meaning of criticism is incongruent with harmonious long-term relationships so that it is suppressed until virtually forced by the specifics of highly legitimate situations.     

Six Years in the Cognitive and Metacognitive Life of 71 Families

Seventy-one families from a low socio-economic background, each with a son at risk of developing psychosocial problems at the onset of the study, were observed three times over a six-year period while solving a combinatorial task presented on a microcomputer. The permutations task was used to gather information with regard to cognitive functioning and cognitive self-regulation of the families, which were observed as a developmental unit. Cognitive functioning was assessed according to three variables: cognitive strategies, performance, and completion of the task. Six self-regulatory activities were assessed: task definition, planning, supervision, evaluation, parental support, and sharing of responsibilities. Although inefficient strategies were mainly used across the six years, the cognitive level of functioning improved over the years. Cognitive self-regulatory activities most often used across time were supervision and parental support. Differences were observed in the three time periods for supervision, task definition, parental support, and individual involvement. Results indicated a link between cognitive strategies used by the families to solve the task and their self-regulatory activities. Results are interpreted within both the Piagetian and Vygotskian perspectives. Families' cognitive self-regulatory activities observed in this study are an example of parental disengagement and children's growing involvement in a joint activity.     

Responsible gambling tools: pop-up messages and pauses on video lottery terminals

The authors examined the effect of messages and pauses, presented on video lottery terminal screens, on erroneous beliefs and persistence to play. At posttest, the strength of erroneous beliefs was lower for participants who received messages conveying information about randomness in gambling as compared to those who received pauses. Pauses also diminished the strength of erroneous beliefs, and there was no difference between the effects of pauses and messages on the number of games played. The authors discuss these results in terms of the use of messages and pauses on video lottery terminals as a strategy for promoting responsible gambling.     

Determinants of retrieval solutions during cognitive skill training: Source confusions

Diverse outcomes, both facilitative and disruptive, have been reported for the effect of interpolated item recognition tests on the acquisition of a cognitive skill. We collected data from a repeated set of 12 artificial arithmetic problems, soliciting compute/retrieve strategy reports after every trial. In one condition, a recognition test was administered after every three blocks of training. Recognition testing was found to depress retrieve frequencies in both younger and older adults, particularly for newly acquired items. Pairing training items with similar recognition foils mitigated these effects. This pattern of results could be explained by assuming that the participants based compute/retrieve decisions on item familiarity or frequency, tracked across both skill trials and recognition trials, and on a threshold influenced by source confusion. Variations in the threshold parameter could lead to depressed reports of item retrieval (our findings) or to elevated retrieval decisions, as has been shown in some other studies.     

Alfred Binet and higher education

At the beginning of the 20th century, Alfred Binet sought teaching positions at the Collége de France and the Sorbonne. Binet wanted to develop experimental psychology in France, but the strong psychopathological orientation of French psychology blocked his ambition. The 1st part of this article relates the history of the introduction of psychology, via Théodule Ribot, to the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. Ribot's premature retirement from the Collège de France in 1901 triggered a battle that led to Binet's repeated failure to gain access to these institutions of highter education and the success in 1902 of Ribot's students: Pierre Janet at the Collège de France and George Dumas at the Sorbonne.     

Bragging About One's School Grades: Gender Stereotyping and Students' Perception of Their Abilities in Science,Mathematics, and Language

Three studies examined stereotypes about the abilities of women and men and their implications for self-evaluation. All the three studies suggest that women are generally perceived as better than men in language and that men are generally perceived as better than women in science and math. Furthermore, Study 1 reveals that female university students in psychology who believe that men are better than women in science feel significantly less able in science, have lower self-esteem, and report lower school average than students who do not believe that men are better than women in science. Study 2 shows that female high school students in a language career track rate their own ability in science less highly and report lower school grades in math when gender stereotypes are salient than when they are not. Study 3 shows that male university students in science tend to rate their own ability in language less highly and report significantly lower school grades in language when gender stereotypes are activated prior to their self-evaluation than when they are not. Overall, the findings suggest that gender stereotypes can have detrimental consequences for self-concept of ability of both male and female students. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Social Psychology of Academic Achievement: Progress and Prospects

Social Psychology of Education -     

“How good are you in math?” The effect of gender stereotypes on students’ recollection of their school marks

Two studies examined the effect of gender stereotypes on students’ recollection of their school marks in stereotypically feminine (arts) and masculine (mathematics) domains. As predicted, the results of Study 1 indicated that the more students believed in gender stereotypes prior to recall, the more they biased their reported marks, compared to their actual marks, in a stereotype-consistent way (female students underestimated their marks in mathematics and male students underestimated their marks in arts). Study 2, in which the salience of gender stereotypes was manipulated prior to recall, yielded similar findings. The recall of school marks was more stereotype-consistent in a condition of high salience than in a condition of low salience of gender stereotypes. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.     

PSYCHOLOGY IN FRENCH ACADEMIC PUBLISHING IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ALFRED BINET,EDITORIAL DIRECTOR AT THE SCHLEICHER PUBLISHING HOUSE

To date, historians of psychology have largely ignored the role of academic publishing and the editorial policies of the late nineteenth century. This paper analyzes the role played by academic publishing in the history of psychology in the specific case of France, a country that provides a very interesting and unique model. Up until the middle of the 1890s, there was no collection specifically dedicated to psychology. Alfred Binet was the first to found, in 1897, a collection of works specifically dedicated to scientific psychology. He chose to work with Reinwald‐Schleicher. However, Binet was soon confronted with (1) competition from other French publishing houses, and (2) Schleicher's management and editorial problems that were to sound the death knell for Binet's emerging editorial ambitions. The intention of this paper is to encourage the efforts of the pioneers of modern psychology to have their work published and disseminated.     

Grain Size and Parameter Recovery with TIMSS and the General Diagnostic Model

The purpose of this study was to explore the degree of grain size of the attributes and the sample sizes that can support accurate parameter recovery with the General Diagnostic Model (GDM) for a large-scale international assessment. In this resampling study, bootstrap samples were obtained from the 2003 Grade 8 TIMSS in Mathematics at varying sample sizes from 500 to 4000 and grain sizes of the attributes from a unidimensional model to one with ten attributes. The results showed that the eight-attribute model was the one most consistently identified as best fitting. Parameter estimation for more than ten attributes and samples less than 500 failed. Furthermore, the precision of item parameter recovery decreased as the number of attributes measured by an item increased and sample size decreased. On the other hand, the distributions of latent classes were relatively stable across all models and sample sizes.