The effects of a career course on undecided college students

The effects of a career course taught by 11 instructors (two sections each) for college students, who were undecided about a major field or career, were evaluated in a pre-post design using the Vocational Identity, Occupational Information, and Barrier scales of the My Vocational Situation (J. A. Holland, D. C. Daiger, & P. G. Power, Palo Alto, Calif.: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1980). Large main effects were observed for the Identity and Occupational Information scales, but not for the Barriers scale. No interactions by instructor or student characteristics were found by using a simple ANOVA procedure or by using a split plot factorial design. The implications for new research and career instructors were discussed.     

Tracing memory-structure activation during person judgments

The purpose of the reported research was twofold: (a) to introduce a procedure for measuring concept activation during memory-based decisions and (b) to employ the procedure to investigate memory-activation processes in social judgments. Recent research has focused on subjects' reliance on memory for earlier inferred categorizations as the basis for judgments about persons. However, subjects have also been shown to rely on memory for factual information when making such decisions. To more fully understand how social judgments are made, methods are needed that are capable of tracing concept activation during the judgment process. The present study introduces a procedure that relies on probe recognition speed as a measure of concept activation. The procedure is used to examine alternative models of how subjects activate categorical and event memory when making contemplative impression judgments (i.e., judgments that they have to justify). The results favor a dependent memory-activation model that hypothesizes subjects activate both facts and earlier categorizations that they have made about a person when making subsequent memory-based judgments. Memory-structure activation was dependent in that facts relevant to forming the early categorizations were more likely to be activated in the service of a judgment than category-irrelevant facts. Advantages and limitations of the probe procedure as a measure of memory-structure activation during decisions are discussed.     

Children's comprehension of complex sentences

Four tasks were given to children from 4–12 to test their comprehension of complex sentences containing main verbs taking underlying sentences as their complements (Sally knew that she was early). In an imperatives task, very young children interpreted only the complement verb and ignored the complex verb. In a short-term memory task, sentences with two negations usually lost the second not in recall. In direct questioning and anomaly-detection tasks, children tended to make pragmatic inferences and excessively depend on knowledge about the world, as opposed to linguistic information. Overall results showed that even sixth graders had not yet attained adult-level comprehension of complex sentences.     

Choice times and Spence's discrimination learning theory

In two experiments, rats acquired brightness discriminations in a free-operant circular runway with two response alternatives. Both individual and group choice times revealed continuous changes that were not apparent in the discrete measure of choice. Two major assumptions of Spence's discrimination learning theory were confirmed: (a) learning is continuous, and (b) discriminative stimuli in simple discrimination tasks of both simultaneous and successive types are compounds with position elements as well as elements from the relevant visual dimension. The distinctive, consistent pattern of learning revealed by the choice-time measure suggests that position habits reflect a learning strategy in which the complex task is learned as a series of simpler ones.     

Discriminability and criterion differences between extraverts and introverts during vigilance

In a signal detection task introverts were better able than extraverts to distinguish between the signal and noise distribution (p < .001) and also set a higher criterion point for their responses (p < .01). The results show that superior vigilance in introverts reported by other investigators is due to two processes.     

Mistreatment of an esteemed other as a consequence affecting dissonance reduction

Recent research has shown that aversive behavioral consequences affect the magnitude of dissonance reduction. The present experiment was conducted to help clarify the meaning of an aversive consequence. In previous research, an aversive event was manipulated by having a subject believe that a counterattitudinal speech he had delivered was successful in convincing one of the subject's colleagues. In the present study, it was argued that convincing a colleague is aversive only to the extent that the colleague is liked. This reasoning was tested in a 2 × 2 factorial experiment in which subjects delivered a counterattitudinal speech to a recipient whom either was or was not liked by the subject and either was or was not convinced by the subject's speech. It was predicted and found that the subject would evidence attitude change only in the condition in which the speech led to the aversive event of successfully convincing an esteemed other. The results were discussed in terms of refining the relationship between attitude discrepant behavior and attitude change.     

Does school desegregation change occupational goals of Negro males?

Instruments, designed to assess values which affect the motivation to work and aspiration levels, were administered to over 600 Negro male seniors in Texas high schools. Results indicate that the degree and duration of school desegregation these students have experienced, ranging from less than 1 to more than 5 years, have had little effect on work values and occupational aspirations.