Interparental conflict and children's school adjustment: the explanatory role of children's internal representations of interparental and parent-child relationships

This study examined how children's insecure internal representations of interparental and parent-child relationships served as explanatory mechanisms in multiple pathways linking interparental conflict and parent emotional unavailability with the emotional and classroom engagement difficulties the children had in their adjustment to school. With their parents, 229 kindergarten children (127 girls and 102 boys, mean age = 6.0 years, SD = .50, at Wave 1) participated in this multimethod, 3-year longitudinal investigation. Findings revealed that children's insecure representations of the interparental relationship were a significant intervening mechanism in associations between observational ratings of interparental conflict and child and teacher reports on children's emotional and classroom difficulties in school over a 2-year period. Moreover, increased parental emotional unavailability accompanying high levels of interparental conflict was associated with children's insecure representations of the parent-child relationship and children's difficulties in classroom engagement at school entry. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the intrinsic processes that contribute to difficulties with stage-salient tasks for children who are experiencing interparental discord.     

A Gift From the Heart: The Experiences of Women Whose Egg Donations Helped Their Sisters Become Mothers

During in‐depth interviews, 3 women whose egg donations resulted in the birth of a child or children for their sisters discussed their donation motivations and decisions, the challenges of the donation procedure, and their postdonation feelings and experiences in the years since the birth of their nieces and nephews. The findings of this narrative study support the viability and advantages of this form of family building and highlight the counseling and support needs of known donors throughout the process.     

Allport's Life and Allport's Psychology

ABSTRACT This article addresses some of the relations between Gordon Allport's life and his psychological theories, focusing on two themes: (a) Allport's junior-year prize-winning recounting of Harvard's “Rinehart” legend–the changes and distortions he introduced in his version of the core legend suggest altruistic sublimation of motives for power and prestige; and (b) Allport's relationship with “Jenny,” the mother of “Ross,” his college roommate (he twice published her letters to him as Letters from Jenny.). I suggest that the need to differentiate himself from Ross was one contributing factor to such Allportian theoretical notions as the functional autonomy of motives and the sharp differentiation between “normal” and “abnormal.”     

Immediate reinforcement in delayed reward learning in pigeons

Pigeons were trained on simultaneous red-green discrimination procedures with delayed reward and sequences of stimuli during the delay. In Experiment 1, three stimuli appeared during the 60-second intervals between the correct responses and reward, and the incorrect responses and nonreward. The stimulus that immediately followed a correct response also preceded nonreward, and the stimulus that followed an incorrect response preceded reward. These stimuli were 10 or .33 second in duration for different groups. Stimuli during the remainder of the delay interval differed following correct and incorrect responses. Group 10 initially persisted in the nonrewarded choice, but shifted to a preponderance of rewarded responses after further training. Group .33 rapidly acquired the correct response. Similar results were obtained in Experiment 2 where delay intervals consisted of opposite sequences of two stimuli of equal duration and total delays were 6, 20, or 60 seconds. Early in training, generalization of differential conditioned-reinforcing properties from the conditions preceding reward and nonreward to postchoice conditions had a greater effect relative to backchaining than it did later. It was concluded that delayed-reward learning is best analyzed in terms of the conditioned-reinforcing value of the patterns of cues that follow immediately after rewarded and nonrewarded responses.     

Success and failure in social skills training: individual differences

Four psychiatric out-patients with social dificulties were treated by social skills training and related treatments in a series of controlled within-subject designs. In all cases treatment produced predicted changes in social skills but these changes were not always sufficient to produce more general clinical change, which sometimes seemed to be more closely related to extra-therapeutic environmental changes. Several different treatment strategies were necessary in addition to social skills training including relaxation training, videotaped feedback and directive advice, and this emphasized important differences between patients which affected the choice of therapy. Three out of four cases improved; one reacted adversely to treatment and dropped out. Reasons for this failure are discussed. The study as a whole indicates the need to look more closely at individual patients, both in planning individual treatment and carrying out evaluative research.     

Becoming the Harvard man: person-environment fit, personality development, and academic success

The continuity and change of the needs and evaluations of the college environment and person-environment fit (PE fit) with the college environment were studied in a 4-year longitudinal study of students (N = 191). Perceptions of the environment changed more dramatically than corresponding self-perceived needs. PE fit demonstrated moderate levels of consistency over the 4-year span, but no significant increases in mean levels were found over time. Antecedents to PE fit in the college environment included both intelligence and openness to experience. Outcomes associated with PE fit included changes in personality traits linked to openness to experience and higher academic achievement. The implications of the findings for personality development and the relationship of PE fit to successful outcomes are discussed.     

Segmentation of object outlines into parts: a large-scale integrative study

In this study, a large number of observers (N=201) were asked to segment a collection of outlines derived from line drawings of everyday objects (N=88). This data set was then used as a benchmark to evaluate current models of object segmentation. All of the previously proposed rules of segmentation were found supported in our results. For example, minima of curvature (i.e. locations along the contour where negative curvature takes an extreme value) were often used as segmentation points. The second point of a pair connected by a segmentation line often depended on more global shape characteristics such as proximity, collinearity, symmetry, and elongation. Based on these results, a framework is presented in which all of the previously proposed (and now empirically validated) segmentation rules or rules for part formation are integrated.     

Things I've learned about personality from studying political leaders at a distance

Studying the personalities of political leaders requires methods of measuring personality at a distance. One such method is content analysis of speeches, interviews, and other texts. This article reviews the author's research on achievement, affiliation, and power motives of U.S. presidents and other leaders and draws the following conclusions: (1) motivation and personality can be objectively and reliably measured at a distance; (2) personality is complex, consisting of several different elements or kinds of variables (e.g., motives and cognitions as well as traits); (3) personality exists in social contexts, and past social contexts are embodied in personality; (4) political behaviors and outcomes can be predicted from personality, but only in contingent ("if/then") ways.