Playground Contexts for Aggression for Preschoolers with Hyperactivity

This study assessed the naturalistic conditions that set the occasion for aggressive behavior in three preschoolers with hyperactivity and aggression (H/A). Peer and teacher responses to preschoolers' aggression were also investigated. For a total of 114 aggressive instances observed, relatively low percentages of aggression in social play with at least one other child were documented. The antecedent condition that was most predictive of aggression was (a) when children were seeking to enter into an activity and were denied entry and (b) when another child interrupted an on-going activity. Aggression was about 14 times greater for seeking/interrupted activity than for ongoing social play. Finally, the percentage of negative responses from peers to aggression on the playground was almost three times the rate documented in past research for preschoolers without hyperactivity.     

Assessing Psychometric Properties of the Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale (SRES) with African Americans

The Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale (SRES) is an instrument reported to be both reliable and valid. SRES was normed primarily on a Caucasian population, and there is little research on its psychometric properties with other ethnic groups. SRES' abbreviated version (BB) was administered to 148 African American men and women. There were no significant differences found between the norming sample and the study's sample. However, significant differences were found between African American men and women at the .01 level with African American women having a more egalitarian attitude. Further research should administer the SRES to a larger, more heterogenous African American sample to further support the psychometric findings of this study. The SRES should also be studied with other ethnic groups.     

Self-disclosure as an influence strategy: Effects of machiavellianism,androgyny, and sex

In a study linking the characteristics of androgyny and Machiavellianism to the use of self-disclosure, participants were asked to complete two writing tasks. The tasks consisted of an influence situation (soliciting donations) and an affiliative situation (getting acquainted). The hypotheses were that Machiavellian females would be more self-disclosing on the influence task, androgynous individuals would be more self-disclosing on the affiliative task, and that the affiliative task would elicit more self-disclosure than the influence task. Results indicated that Machiavellian males were actually more self-disclosing on the influence task, and non-Machiavellian males were more self-disclosing on the affiliative task. Higher self-disclosure overall was elicited by the affiliative task, and there was some support for the hypothesis that androgynous individuals are more self-disclosing in an affiliative task.We would like to thank Florence L. Geis and Paul Harris for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Richard Hall for his assistance in judging self-disclosure.     

Disclosure reciprocity and liking as a function of gender and personalism

Evidence is presented that: (1) Liking and reciprocal disclosure for males and females are mediated by personalistic attributions; however, the predicted pattern was obtained for females on a willingness-to-disclose measure and for males on an appropriateness-to-disclose measure. (2) Females disclosed at higher levels of intimacy than males. Specifically, two studies are presented that show that the effect of disclosure intimacy and attribution on reciprocity and liking are influenced by subject sex, and may include sex differences in subjects' perception of the sex of the recipients of their liking and disclosure. An appropriateness-of-disclosure higher order interaction in Study II involved partner sex, intimacy, and attribution. It seemed that disclosers were careful in choosing their audience. When appropriateness of disclosing is the question, it is not so important who is doing the disclosing as who is receiving the disclosure. These findings may help to clarify the mixed evidence regarding sex differences in self-disclosure behaviors.     

Self-esteem and reactance: Further evidence of attitudinal and motivational consequences

The present experiments were designed to explore further the relationship between self-esteem and reactance within the domains of achievement and persuasion. Previous research in the achievement context has shown that self-esteem and reactance are positively related. Experiment 1 sought to extend this relationship into the persuasion setting. As predicted, a positive self-esteem/reactance relationship was obtained. The second experiment was designed to identify a factor that might moderate the relationship between self-esteem and reactance: degree of freedom threat. Previous research in the persuasion context has shown that the aforementioned self-esteem/reactance relationship is attenuated or even reversed when freedom threat is low rather than high. Experiment 2 sought to extend this relationship into the achievement context. As predicted, the positive self-esteem/reactance relationship was considerably weakened in the low-threat environment of Experiment 2, especially in comparison to previous research in which freedom threat was considerably higher. Taken together, the present and previous studies show consistent relationships between self-esteem and reactance across achievement and persuasion domains, suggesting that the essence of reactance is similar in these two domains. Practical implications are also discussed.     

Illusory Control as a Function of Motivation for a Specific Outcome in a Chance-Based Situation

Previous research has provided evidence that an individual's need for a chance-based outcome positively affects perceptions of the skill involved in attaining the outcome as well as certainty of winning. Two experiments were conducted to test several competing alternative interpretations for this effect. In Experiment 1, food-satiated (low-need) and food-deprived (high-need) subjects were given the opportunity to win a food incentive in a chance-based card-drawing game either in the presence or absence of situational cues previously shown to induce skill orientations. Skill and confidence-in-winning ratings were found to be positive function of outcome need regardless of the cues condition, thus not supporting an attentional or vigilance interpretation of the general effect. In Experiment 2, food-satiated and food-deprived subjects faced a similar card-drawing game, but this time were given the opportunity to choose whether or not they wanted to be personally involved in various facets of the game (e.g., shuffling the cards). As predicted, high-need subjects showed a greater propensity to want to be personally involved in playing the game, a finding offering support for a control interpretation. Overall results are discussed in terms of control theory.     

PRESERVATION OF IMPLICIT MEMORY FOR NEW ASSOCIATIONS IN GLOBAL AMNESIA

Abstract— This study examined whether amnesic patients have preserved implicit memory for new associations between unrelated words, as measured by repetition priming, despite unpaired explicit memory for such new associations. Prior studies provide conflicting and ambiguous results. Amnesic and control participants read aloud visually presented, unrelated word pairs and then attempted to identify old, recombined, and new word pairs shown at threshold durations. Amnesic and control groups showed equivalent priming for new associations by identifying old pairs better than recombined pairs. Amnesic patients were impaired on a matched explicit test of memory far new associations. The preserved priming in amnesia indicates that implicit memory for new associations need not be, supported by the mnemonic processes and brain structures that mediate explicit memory for new associations.     

Psychophysical scaling of stimulus similarity in 3-month-old infants and adults

The ability of 3-month-old infants to discriminate novel components of a prefamiliarized stimulus was assessed using an operant paradigm. Subjects were familiarized with the standard stimulus (five-component mobile) in three daily conditioning sessions and then were exposed to a comparison mobile containing from zero to four novel components substituted for familiar elements at the outset of a fourth daily session. Although a reliable reduction in mean number of footkicks was found only when an extreme number of components was substituted, log-log plots of infant response as a function of degree of novelty indicated that discriminability was described by a power function. Adult judgments of the similarity between the standard mobile and each degree of novelty were also described by a power function, suggesting a common basis may underlie the perception of similarity in the two groups. The finding of a power function for infant response to visual novelty is consistent with reports of similar discriminability functions in infant olfaction and audition. However, duration of visual fixation increased nondifferentially to all test stimuli, irrespective of degree of novelty. The latter finding is inconsistent with predictions arising from the visual attention literature.     

Why Causation Need Not Follow from Statistical Association: Boundary Conditions for the Evaluation of Generative and Preventive Causal Powers

In experimental design, a tacit principle is that to test whether a candidate cause c (i.e., a manipulation) prevents an effect e, e must occur at least some of the time without the introduction of c. This principle is the preventive analogue of the explicit principle of avoiding a ceiling effect in tests of whether c produces e. Psychological models of causal inference that adopt either the covariation approach or the power approach, among their other problems, fail to explain these principles. The present article reports an experiment that demonstrates the operation of these principles in untutored reasoning. The results support an explanation of these principles according to the power PC theory, a theory that integrates the previous approaches to overcome the problems that cripple each.     

ASSESSING AND PROGRAMMING GENERALIZED BEHAVIORAL REDUCTION ACROSS MULTIPLE STIMULUS PARAMETERS

Generalization across three stimulus parameters was examined for 5 individuals whose self-injurious behavior was maintained by escape from task demands. Prior to treatment, three stimulus parameters (therapist, setting, and demands) were systematically varied across baseline sessions. These variables were held constant during treatment, which consisted of escape extinction. When treatment was completed, three novel stimulus parameters were probed. If the rate of self-injury was high during this probe, treatment was reimplemented with one new stimulus parameter (the other two were the same as in the original treatment condition). Following this second treatment, another probe with three novel stimuli was conducted. If the rate of self-injury was again high, treatment was implemented again while a second stimulus parameter was changed. This sequence continued until generalization was observed across the three parameters. Results showed idiosyncratic differences in generalization. The behavior of 2 subjects showed complete generalization during the first novel probe. A 3rd subject's behavior showed generalization following treatment across two stimulus parameters (setting and therapist). The behavior of the 2 remaining subjects showed a complete lack of generalization across the three parameters; both subjects required training for novelty by randomly varying the stimulus parameters for a substantial number of sessions.