Effects of Perceived Group Effectiveness and Group Role on Attributions of Group Performance1

Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy completed a questionnaire describing their experiences in Cadet Basic Training (CBT) and Cadet Field Training (CFT). Analyses of variance examined the impact of Group Role (Leader vs. Follower) and Perceived Group Effectiveness (High vs. Low) on group member perceptions of the extent to which each of six factors affected group performance. Significant main effects for Perceived Effectiveness were interpreted in terms of the egodefensive bias. Role main effects indicated that leaders tended to make stronger dispositional attributions than did followers. There were no signifcant Group Role × Perceived Effectiveness interaction effects. Findings support, in part, hypotheses concerning the operation of an attributional bias within the leader-member relationship.     

ASSESSMENT OF STIMULUS PREFERENCE AND REINFORCER VALUE WITH PROFOUNDLY RETARDED INDIVIDUALS

We evaluated a procedure for identifying potential reinforcers with profoundly retarded individuals. In Experiment 1, six persons were repeatedly exposed to 16 stimuli, and approach behaviors to each stimulus were used to identify preferred and nonpreferred stimuli. In Experiment 2, we examined the reinforcing properties of preferred and nonpreferred stimuli by delivering them contingently on the occurrence of arbitrarily selected responses. Results revealed that the preferred stimulus conditions typically produced higher rates of responding than did either the baseline or the nonpreferred stimulus conditions, suggesting that the procedure can be used to assess reinforcer value for individuals with limited behavioral repertoires.     

Counseling Career-Plateaued Workers During Times of Social Change

This article encourages employment counselors to help employed and unemployed career-plateaued workers regain a sense of personal investment, motivation, and productivity.     

CLINICAL BEHAVIORAL PHARMACOLOGY: METHODS FOR EVALUATING MEDICATIONS AND CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT

We evaluated methods for comparing the effects of dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine), thioridazine (Mellaril), and contingency management in the control of severe behavior problems. A reversal design was used in which medications were systematically titrated and assessed in unstructured as well as structured settings with three clients. Subsequently, behavioral procedures including timeout, differential reinforcement of other behavior, and visual screening, were used in a multiple-baseline design across settings. The assessment and design methods were useful in comparing the interventions. Dextroamphetamine decreased inappropriate behaviors and improved academic behaviors in one client, but no reliable effects were observed in the other two clients. Thioridazine was variable across clients, settings, behaviors, and dosages. Contingency management produced consistent decreases in inappropriate behaviors and small improvements in academic performance.     

The effects of social motives on behavior in social dilemmas in two cultures

Subjects in Santa Barbara, California, and Groningen, The Netherlands, participated in a seven-person social dilemma game, presented in terms of a conservation of resources problem. Prior to their decision making in the social dilemma game, subject's social motive (altruistic, cooperative, individualistic, competitive) was assessed by means of two different classification procedures. On the basis of previous research findings American subjects were expected to display relatively more competitive social motives, and Dutch subjects relatively more cooperative ones. However, no indications of crosscultural differences were found neither with regard to the distribution of social motives nor with regard to the amount of resources taken for self in the social dilemma game. In both locations, competitive subjects took most resources for self, individualistic subjects took next most, cooperative subjects took less than individualists, and altruistic subjects took the least. In addition to predictive validity, indices of the convergent validity of two social motive assessment procedures were described.     

Development of organization in recall: A stages-of-learning analysis

An experiment is reported in which the effects of taxonomic organization on 7-year-old and 11-year-old children's free and cued recall of two- and four-category lists were examined. The data were analyzed using a stages-of-learning model that simultaneously delivers estimates of the impact of these manipulations on storage and retrieval components of recall. The results indicated that for the Grade 2 children providing a category label at the time of recall primarily enhanced storage whereas increasing the number of categories primarily enhanced retrieval. For Grade 6 children, on the other hand, the use of category labels to cue recall primarily enhanced retrieval, whereas increasing the number of categories affected both storage and retrieval in free recall, but only retrieval in cued recall. In addition, while older children were superior to younger children at both storing and retrieving information, age differences at retrieval were generally larger than those at storage.     

Three-state models of memory development: A review of advances in statistical methodology

A certain family of three-state Markov processes has been widely used in experiments on children's memory. Although the statistical machinery for these models is well developed in most respects, two shortcomings have been noted in recent literature reviews. First, the parameters of the models are not identifiable. Second, goodness-of-fit tests are laborious to execute and their sampling distributions are unknown. New procedures for dealing with these difficulties are reported.     

Control of children's observing responses by information feedback during visual discrimination learning

Four experiments examined the control of observing responses by information feedback during visual discrimination learning. Second-grade children participated in Experiment 1; kindergarten, second-, and fifth-grade children were subjects in Experiments 2 and 3, and grade 5 and adult subjects were tested in Experiment 4. In order to view the stimuli, subjects in Experiments 1, 2, and 3 activated lights in viewing boxes; in Experiment 4, stimulus fixations were measured using a corneal reflection technique. Fifth graders and adults observed the discriminative stimuli for longer times on trials following negative feedback than on trials following positive feedback; in contrast, kindergartener's observing was not affected by type of feedback. Second graders showed smaller and less reliable reactions to type of feedback than did older subjects. These results support the view that visual observing is controlled by cognitive processes associated with hypothesis testing.