Similarity of attitudes and constructs in children's friendships

Sex prejudice in children's friendships has frequently been noted. This study examined the role of similarity of attitudes and personal construct ratings in this effect. Subjects were two classes of school children, aged 7–8 and 9–10 years. There were 29 children in each class. Subjects completed an attitude scale, construct rating scale, and sociometric questionnaire. Similarity effects were primarily in the younger children. Boys were more similar to each other in attitudes than were girls, and girls were more similar to each other in construct ratings than were boys (p < .001); there was greater similarity of attitudes and construct ratings in friendship rather than nonfriendship comparison dyads (p < .01). The sociometric data, when compared with sociometric data collected 6 months earlier, showed that these results could not be due to sex differences in the stability of friendships but rather suggested age and sex differences in the informational bases of friendships in middle childhood.     

Undergraduate preparation and early career outcomes: A study of recent college graduates

This study examined employment outcome among recipients of a liberal arts BA at a state university, 1 year (N = 218) and 3 years (N = 156) after graduation. A working definition of underemployment (educationally inappropriate employment) was developed and described. The relationship of age, sex, and previous educational and occupational experience to occupational and educational outcome was examined, using cross-tabular analysis with controls to specify high-risk groups. Variables reflecting occupational outcome were each differently related to the independent variables, and many relationships changed over time. Educationally appropriate employment was related to college major and to participation in internship or work-study programs. Income and perceived stability of present job were linked to age, sex, and previous employment experience. Early unemployment was related to age, sex, previous employment experience, and inversely to grade point average. Patterns of occupational change were linked to sex, major, internships, and grade point average. Educational outcome was related to age, sex, major, grade point average, and first year employment outcome.     

Early employment situations and work role satisfaction among recent college graduates

This study examined work role satisfaction as related to employment outcome among recipients of a liberal arts BA at a state university, 1 year (N = 218) and 3 years (N = 156) after graduation. A measure of work role satisfaction was developed and described. The relationship of work role satisfaction to work situation variables and to sex of the respondent was examined, using cross-tabular analysis, analysis of variance, and t tests, to assess shifts in satisfaction over time. Job Fit Index (a measure of underemployment), income, and job stability were all related to satisfaction. Findings suggested that priorities may change over time. Changes in Job Fit Index scores were related to changing levels of satisfaction, and interpretations suggested.     

Personality correlates of life values

The present study sought to determine whether significant relationships exist between life value preferences and personality traits and to describe the nature of any relationships identified. Administered to 310 undergraduate and graduate students were the 16 PF personality inventory and a 55-item Life Values Inventory which assessed values governing life styles and orientations. A factor analysis of the Life Values Inventory resulted in the identification of 14 life values dimensions. Factor scores for these 14 dimensions were then employed in a canonical analysis and a factor analysis with the 16 PF scores. The canonical analysis yielded results significant at the .001 level. The factor analysis yielded 10 factors, many of which displayed shared common-factor variance between Life Values and 16 PF variables. The interpretation of that shared variance identified several personality correlates of life values that suggested causal and developmental interactions of some value in describing and explaining human behavior.     

A new processing model for predicting performance on Pascual-Leone's test of M-space

A new model is proposed for explaining children's performance on Pascual-Leone's test of M-space. The model differs from Pascual-Leone's in three regards. (1) It assumes that children do not stop sampling a compound stimulus until every simple stimulus in their field of attention has already been noticed and responded to. (2) It assumes that the probability of sampling different combinations of simple stimuli conforms to the laws of Maxwell-Boltzman statistics rather than Bose-Einstein statistics. (3) It assumes that children's ability to detect all the simple stimuli in a compound stimulus is highly dependent both on the relative saliencies of the simple stimuli and on the length of time for which the compound stimulus is exposed. Using the developmental values of M hypothesized by Pascual-Leone, and standard techniques of computer simulation, the new model is used to generate theoretical performance curves for children at four different age levels and seven different levels of stimulus complexity. It is shown that the predicted performance curves for an exposure time of 5 sec provide a reasonable fit to the data originally reported by Pascual-Leone (1970), and that the predicted performance curves for an exposure time of 10 sec provide a reasonable fit to data obtained more recently by Parkinson (1976). Finally, it is shown that the order of children's responses as well as the number of their responses can be predicted. Two conclusions are drawn. (1) The new processing model offers a viable alternative to the model originally proposed by Pascual-Leone. (2) Regardless of which processing model is employed, the M-values originally postulated by Pascual-Leone are valid.     

Vocational behavior and career development, 1978: A review

In sum, the research in 1978 was diverse and of good quality and quantity. However, there continues to be a clear need for longitudinal research of all kinds (in particular on the career development process) and a need for additional research with the employed adult population, although the past few years demonstrate improvement in the latter area.In 1978 the most productive research area as suggested by this review was associated with the women's movement and manifested by research primarily on sex stereotyping and women's careers. Ranking second was the topic of theoretical developments in vocational behavior led by the research on Holland's constructs. These two research trends accounted for about 50 studies; 26 and 24, respectively. Job satisfaction assumed the third position with some concentration on satisfaction and work motivation. Next and very much clustered were life-span aspects, assessment, and job performance. Each of these research themes stimulated about 17 studies that were reviewed here. Vocational interventions and race differences received moderate attention while job interview variables and occupational environments sparked very limited work in the more psychologically oriented journals.The major contributor to the 1978 review was of course the Journal of Vocational Behavior (62 studies), followed by the Journal of Applied Psychology (25 studies). Five other journals contributed an average of about 10 studies. These were the Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Measurement and Evaluation in Guidance, the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, Personnel Psychology, and the Vocational Guidance Quarterly. These appear to be the major journals publishing work on vocational behavior and career development.Finally, the volume of research on vocational psychology continued on an upward trend in 1978. This review and the previous reviews (Betz, 1977; Osipow, 1976; Zytowski, 1978) clearly document this trend.     

Frustration,attribution of blame,and aggression

In contrast to most recent studies of human aggression, multiple measures of naturally occurring aggressive behavior were examined in a realistic and involving setting. Consistent with attributional formulations, it was found that aggression increased in accord with attributions of blame, and that more blame was attributed to another in response to inadequately justified thwartings than to adequately justified thwartings. As anticipated, anger, other-directed attributions of blame, and other-directed aggression were greatest in response to unjustified (illegitimate) thwartings. Justified (legitimate) thwartings produced intermediate anger and intermediate levels of blame and aggression internally and externally. Self-caused (internal) thwartings, ostensibly caused neither by the other's disposition nor by situational factors, produced the least anger and other-directed aggression but the most self-blame/self-aggression. In addition, unexpected thwartings produced independently more anger than did expected thwartings, and high-drive thwartings produced independently less other-directed aggression than did low-drive thwartings. The results are discussed with reference to both the need and the potential for studies of human aggression which employ more ecologically valid settings and measures of aggressive behavior.     

Measuring the visual angle of the mind's eye

People in these experiments claimed to be able to imagine moving only a given distance toward some imaged object before it seemed to “overflow,” not remaining all visible at once in their mental images. In addition, the larger the imaged object, the further away it seemed at the point of overflow. Although the angle subtended by the imaged objects at the point of overflow did not vary systematically with the size of the object, it did vary with different stimuli and instructions. These disparities in the size of the angle estimated seemed partly due to differences in criterion of “overflow”: Images seem to fade off gradually toward the periphery and not to occur in a spatial medium with sharply defined edges. When subjects were given a relatively strict definition of “overflow,” similar estimates of the “visual angle of the mind's eye” were obtained with three distinct methods: (1) Asking subjects to estimate the apparent distance at which an imaged horizontal ruler began to overflow; (2) Measuring how much time subjects required to scan across each degree of an imaged line, and then inferring the maximal angle from the time required to scan an image of a longest nonoverflowing line; and, (3) Simply asking subjects to hold up their hands to indicate the subjective size of an image of the longest possible nonoverflowing line. Finally, the maximal subjective size of images seemed related to the scope of “focal” vision, and images tended to be constructed spontaneously at about the maximal size.     

Transformations,basic operations and language acquisition

Errors in child speech show that some children initially formulate tense-hopping and subject-auxiliary inversion as copying without deletion. Other errors suggest that some children may formulate other movement rules as deletion without copying. A claim about the nature of the language acquisition device is made on the basis of our analysis of these errors: the language acquisition device formulates hypotheses about transformations in terms of basic operations. The basic-operations hypothesis predicts that for any transformation which is composed of more than one basic operation, there exists a class of errors in child speech correctly analyzed as failure to apply one (or more) of the operations specified in the adult formulation of the rule.