The Verbal Summator and a Method for the Study of Latent Speech

Three age groups of children (7-8-, 10-11-, and 13-14-years) were administered a questionnaire dealing with their smoking experiences and attitudes and beliefs about cigarette smoking. The results indicated that the vast majority of children recognized the harmfulness of smoking and most strongly disapproved of smoking. However, experimentation with smoking was found to increase with age, and older children expressed less negative attitudes about smoking. The effects of age were due largely to the differences between the preadolescent groups, on the one hand, and the adolescent group, on the other. In addition, a similar percentage of children in all three age groups perceived strong parental pressure against smoking; however, with increasing age, less opposition from their teachers and friends was perceived. Theories of social influence and moral development are considered in explaining the results.     

Elaborating the relationship between age and adolescent cigarette smoking

Previous research has found that the relationship between variables derived from a social control model of deviant behavior are conditional on the age of adolescents. We examine whether the observed age effect on adolescent cigarette use may be due to a cohort or period effect by using multiple cross‐sections from several cohorts of adolescents. We find that basing conclusions about some social control variables on cross‐sectional results may lead to erroneous interpretations concerning the age‐conditional effects of some of the variables in our model.     

Improving Generalization of Academic Skills: Commentary on the Special Issue

Behavior analysts have long been interested in developing and promoting the use of effective generalization strategies for behavioral interventions. Perhaps because research on academic performance has lagged behind in the field of applied behavior analysis, far less research on this topic has been conducted for academic performance problems. The purpose of this article is to comment on the six reports of experimental studies that make up this special issue. The methods investigated by the authors in this special issue are innovative and raise many intriguing questions that should fuel further research and development of strategies for improving generalized academic skills. The article concludes with thoughts about what we know as a field, and what has yet to be examined through future research.     

Improving sixth-grade students perceptions of high-effort assignments by assigning more work: Interaction of additive interspersal and assignment effort on assignment choice

Sixth-grade students were exposed to two pairs of mathematics assignments. Assignment Pair A included a high-effort and a moderate-effort assignment, each containing 18 three-digit by two-digit (3×2) problems. Assignment Pair B was similar except the high-effort assignment contained six additional one-digit by one-digit (1×1) problems interspersed following every third 3×2 problem. After exposure to each pair of assignments, students ranked assignments and chose a new assignment for homework. Analysis of Assignment Pair A data showed students preferred the moderate-effort assignment. Analysis of interactions showed that interspersing the additional brief problems to the high-effort assignment caused significantly more students to choose the high-effort assignment for homework and rank it as requiring less effort and time to complete and as being less difficult than the moderate-effort assignment. Results support the hypothesis that a discrete task is a reinforcer and suggest that educators can increase the probability of students engaging in more challenging assignments that require more effort to complete by interspersing additional brief tasks. Applied and theoretical implications are discussed along with future research.     

Use of an analogue method to examine children’s appraisals of threat and emotion in response to stressful events

An analogue methodology was used to present a set of realistic, salient stressors to children in grades 3, 5, and 7. Children (N = 146) viewed eight videotaped vignettes depicting interpersonal and non-interpersonal stressors; these were expected to differentially threaten psychological needs for relatedness, competence and autonomy and provoke different emotional reactions. Analyses showed that scenarios portrayed stressors that were commonly experienced by children and evoked a differentiated profile of appraisals and emotions. When tenets of the motivational theory of stress and coping were tested, scenarios more threatening to needs were more distressing, sadness was linked to relatedness and competence threat appraisals, and fear was a more common reaction to parent stressors that involved dyadic conflict. After accounting for threat appraisals and previous experience of stressors, younger children and girls appraised events as more distressing than older children and boys. Future research could use the analogue procedure to focus on children’s development of regulation and coping with stress.     

Cover, Copy, and Compare: A Self-Managed Academic Intervention Effective Across Skills, Students, and Settings

Cover, Copy, and Compare (CCC) is a simple, efficient, self-managed academic intervention that can be used to improve accuracy, fluency, and maintenance across students, curricula objectives, academic skill domains, and settings. In it's simplest form CCC requires students to look at an academic stimulus (e.g., for spelling the stimulus would be a written a word) cover the stimulus, respond by copying the stimulus (e.g., writing the word), and evaluate the responses by comparing it to the original stimulus. The CCC procedure and research that supports the generalizability and ecological validity of this procedure is described and analyzed. Following this analysis, recommendations for implementing Cover, Copy, and Compare in educational settings are provided.     

On the geometric approach to multivariate selection

Multivariate selection can be represented as a linear transformation in a geometric framework. This approach has led to considerable simplification in the study of the effects of selection on factor analysis. In this note this approach is extended to describe the effects of selection on regression analysis and to adjust for the effects of selection using the inverse of the linear transformation.     

Sensory and semantic factors in recognition memory for odors and graphic stimuli: elderly versus young persons

In four experiments, young (18-26 years, M = 21) and elderly (over 65 years, M = 72) people were compared for recognition memory of (a) graphic stimuli (faces of presidents and vice presidents, engineering symbols, and free forms) and (b) everyday odors. On graphic stimuli, the elderly consistently matched the young, but on odors the performance of the elderly was worse. Their poorer olfactory performance was observed after only 26 s, but became truly marked after 1 hr or more. Somewhere between 1 hr and 2 weeks, their odor performance fell to chance, but their graphic performance remained well above chance. Although the young did forget both graphic and odor materials progressively, their performance always stayed above chance over a 6-month period. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that the elderly are less sensitive to odors than the young (with thresholds about 10-fold higher), which may explain, in part, their poorer olfactory memory performance. Knowledge that the subjects brought to the tasks by way of familiarity with and ability to name odors and faces played a positive role in recognition memory. Because of this positive role, together with the negative role played by verbal distraction, we conclude that odor recognition memory depends, perhaps heavily, on semantic processing. Impaired semantic processing may result even when odors are simply rendered desaturated, or pastel because of the weakening of olfactory sensitivity with aging.