Assessment of human obesity: The measurement of body composition

The most common methods of assessing degree of obesity in humans are reviewed. These include anthropometry, somatotyping, bodyweight, skinfold calipering, densitometry, and several nondensitometric procedures. The evidence suggests that bodyweight may often be an unreliable and invalid index of obesity. The parameters influencing its inaccuracy are discussed. These include age, height, sex, muscularity, and degree of obesity or amount of recent weight loss. The most reliable and valid measures of human bodyfat are generally the most complicated and impractical. Compromise assessment procedures involving nonintrusive measurement of subcutaneous fat and selected anthropometric dimensions may offer an incomplete but welcome improvement over sole reliance on bodyweight as an index of obesity.     

A multi-element analysis of the effect of teacher aides in an "open"-style classroom

Open classrooms with few rules, individualized instruction, and informal class organization present new problems for the application of behavior principles. The effects of three types of teacher aides on student achievement and on-task behavior were studied. Each was compared with a standard no-aide condition. Subjects were 54 third graders in two "open"-style classrooms. The three types of aide, helping adult, disciplinary adult, and helping fifth-grade aide, were compared in a multi-element design with a no-aide control. The helping-adult aide significantly affected the academic output of the class, when compared with the no-aide condition. All aide conditions produced more academic work and on-task behavior than did the standard no-aide condition.     

Community applications of instructional technology: teaching writers of instructional packages

A community education program, to develop a variety of performance competencies in large numbers of neighborhood residents, requires a technology for preparing learning units administerable by community members themselves. The effects of a writing manual, designed to teach nonprofessionals to prepare such instructional packages, were analyzed in two experiments. Experiment I employed a multiple-baseline design across three university student trainees. The results showed that appropriate program writing increased by 75% after completion of the manual. The results of Experiment II, with two low-income neighborhood residents serving as trainees, showed that packages produced by trained writers resulted in a greater increase in skill activities than sets of training stimuli produced by untrained writers.     

Alcohol and human sexual behavior.

Despite the potential clinical significance of the relationship between alcohol consumption and human sexual responsiveness. the subject has received little systematic research attention. Clinical observations have suggested that alcohol abuse can lead to impotency disorders in males and sexual dysfunction in women. Alcohol has been associated with sex offences such as rape and pedophilia, increased sexual activity and extramarital affairs. However, correlation has been confused with cause, and unequivocal evidence of alcohol as the causal agent is lacking. Recent research using penile tumescence and vaginal pressure pulse as measures of sexual arousal has shown a significant negative linear relation between alcohol and sexual responsiveness in both men and women social drinkers. Findings that cognitive rather than pharmacological factors decisively influence alcohol's effects on sexual arousal, together with other psychosocial analyses, dispute the disinhibition hypothesis of alcohol's effects. A social learning analysis of alcohol's influence on sex is proposed.     

A controlled trial of the treatment of nocturnal enuresis in residential homes for children

The present study was undertaken to evaluate the practicability and efficacy of treating enuretic children in residential Children's Homes by means of the enuresis alarm. A control group design was employed with 19 and 20 subjects in the treatment and control groups respectively. Eighteen of the nineteen treatment group children achieved initial arrest of enuresis in a mean of 11.9 weeks of treatment (range 5–28 weeks). Over the initial 12-week period, the treatment group showed a statistically significant reduction in mean wetting frequency, both over time and in comparison with the control group. After a follow-up period of at least 20 months. 17 of the 19 children were known to be dry. The results of an independent evaluation are reported, and it is concluded that alarm treatment is as effective and practicable in Children's Homes as it is in family situations.     

Suppression of VMH-lesion-induced reactivity and aggressiveness in the rat by stimulation of lateral septum, but not medial septum or cingulate cortex

Animals made vicious with bilateral ventromedial hypothalamic lesions had bipolar electrodes implanted unilaterally in the lateral septum, medial septum, or cingulate cortex. Four days later, the animals' reactivity and aggressiveness were evaluated 5 min before, during, and 5 min after stimulation at 20 micronA (60 Hz, sine wave). Lateral septal stimulation suppressed reactivity and aggressiveness by almost 80% compared with pre- and poststimulation levels. Stimulation of neither the cingulate cortex nor the medial septum produced a change reliably different from that seen in unstimulated control animals. Further tests with stimulation of the lateral septum at the 20-micronA level showed that neither rewarding self-stimulation nor disruption of ongoing water drinking was produced. These results are congruent with evidence from lesion studies that the lateral septum normally acts to suppress reactivity and aggressiveness in the rat; they do not support previous suggestions that the medial septum is involved in the modulation of these behaviors.     

Situational Cues and Crime Reporting: Do Signs Make a Difference?1

Two field studies were conducted to assess the effect of signs describing how to report a shoplifting on bystander intervention to a staged theft. In the first study, signs providing directions and one of three rationales for reporting had a small effect on attitudes toward reporting and no effect on intervention. In the second study, a definition of the situation as a shoplifting by a confederate had a strong influence on subjects reporting, but presence or absence of signs describing how to report had no impact. Differences between interpersonal and nonpersonal influences are described, and implications for informational campaigns to increase crime reporting are discussed.     

IDENTIFYING DETERMINANTS OF RETENTION DECISIONS1

Variables from five domains—demography, social background, service history, satisfaction, and performance—were used in a discriminant analysis approach to distinguishing three groups of naval personnel: Those eligible to reenlist who do, those eligible who do not, and those not eligible. Discriminant weights were derived from a sample of 642 first-term enlisted men and cross-validated on a sample of 628. The results indicated that both pre-service characteristics (demography and social background) and in-service experiences (service history, satisfaction, and performance) contributed importantly to prediction of attrition/retention. Potential usefulness of this method, including implications for better understanding and control of manpower turnover were discussed.     

Transfer of reaction inhibition

A serious challenge to Hull's (1943) theory of reminiscence and intertrial-interval effects is posed by the current contention that reactive inhibition (In) must be task-specific since it does not seem to transfer from one task to another. This notion was examined within the framework of a practice-rest paradigm in which three control groups were given 20 1-min trials on a principal task with intertrial intervals of 0, 5, and 70 sec, respectively, while two experimental groups practiced alternately on the principal task and a secondary task known to produce evidence for I(R). The two secondary tasks varied in their similarities to the principal task. Additional control groups were used to assess the magnitude of habit transfer effects. The total sample consisted of 70 males and 70 females whose modal age was 18 yr. With habit transfer effects controlled, results showed clearly that work effects transferred from the alternate tasks to the main task without regard for differences in similarity. Thus, the task-specificity hypothesis was not supported.