Images of engineering and liberal arts majors

In an attempt to gain insight into social-psychological barriers that inhibit women from entering engineering, 110 male and 84 female undergraduate students completed a variant of the Semantic Differential questionnaire. Subjects evaluated either male or female liberal arts and engineering majors. While female engineering majors were judged similar to male engineers on work-related traits, they were evaluated as less attractive than their female liberal arts counterparts. In particular, the data revealed reciprocal negative social images held by male engineering students for female engineers and by female engineering students for male engineers.     

Suicide and occupation: A review

This paper examines the available literature dealing with the relation of occupation to suicide for three occupational categories: health care providers, managerial and professional persons, and military and paramilitary personnel. Following a general introduction, evidence relating to group differences in suicidal behavior is presented and assessed. Sources of bias and inaccuracy in suicide statistics are identified and theories purporting to explain variations in the incidence of suicide are considered. Finally, implications are drawn from the analysis presented and possible directions for future research are identified.     

Stress management for teachers: A cognitive-behavioral program

Urban secondary school teachers participated in a cognitive-behavioral stress management program. Assessment data were also collected from a waiting list control group. Dependent measures included self-reported anxiety and stress, and observations of teacher classroom behavior. Results showed that the training program significantly decreased self-reported stress and anxiety. Follow-up data indicated further decrease six weeks after termination of the training program. Results also indicated decreases in motoric manifestations of anxiety in the classroom as a result of the training.     

The effects of cue reliability on infants' manual search.

Nine-month-old babies were presented a manual search problem in which toys were hidden in one of two containers, and then the containers were transposed. Over a series of training trials either two, one, or no cues were perfectly correlated with the location of the toy. The infants' first searches became more accurate over training trials in conditions with consistent container and/or position cues. In the final training trial block search performance was best with two cues, intermediate with one cue, and least accurate in the no-cue condition. In a subsequent reversal procedure, in which the toy was placed in the previously unused hiding place, the number of correct first searches also differed according to the nature of cues available across hidings. The implications for learning the concept of object permanence are discussed.     

Recipient mood states and helping behavior

Three studies investigated the effects of perceived recipient mood on helping behavior. Based upon Schwartz' (in Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 10, N.Y.: Academic Press, 1977) discussion of need-based helping, it was predicted that donors would perceive greater psychological need and would help more when the recipient's mood was negative than when it was neutral. These predictions were confirmed for females but not for males. The results also confirmed the hypothesis, derived from Schwartz (1977), that a negative recipient mood would elicit greater helping than a neutral recipient mood when this mood is perceived as changeable but not when it is perceived as unchangeable.     

The effects of the stimulus-reinforcer correlation in a discrete-trials IRT>t procedure

The correlation between a keylight and food in a discrete-trials, interresponse-time-greater-than 6-sec (IRT>6-sec) procedure was varied by manipulating the rate of response-independent food presentation in the intertrial interval. When the correlation was positive, the rates of pecking in the IRT>6-sec condition were high and food was obtained on only about 5% of the trials. Likewise, responding was maintained at a high rate in yoked birds that received the same presentations of the light and food as the birds in the IRT>6-sec condition. When the rate of reinforcement between trials was equated to or made greater than the rate of reinforcement within trials, the response rate decreased for all birds, and those decreases were considerably larger for the yoked birds. However, the percentage of trials in which reinforced responses occurred under the IRT>6-sec procedure did not increase substantially when the light and food were either uncorrelated or negatively correlated. The percentage of trials in which a reinforcer was obtained increased when the keylight was left on continuously and the discriminative stimulus was not presented on the key. The results show that the stimulus-reinforcer correlation affects responding in the discrete-trials IRT>6-sec procedure, but that the effects of the stimulus-reinforcer correlation vary as a function of whether reinforcement is response-dependent or response-independent. The differences between the effects of response-independent and response-dependent pairings and nonpairings of the light and food are best accounted for in terms of differences in the control of responding by background stimuli.     

Preexposure to the CS alone,US alone,or CS and US uncorrelated: Latent inhibition,blocking by context or learned irrelevance?

Three experiments on conditioned suppression in rats examined the extent to which preexposure to the CS, the US, or uncorrelated presentations of both interfere with future conditioning. Experiment 1 suggested that the interference caused by preexposure to the US alone may result from blocking by contextual cues: signaling the US during preexposure attenuated the interference. Experiment 2 demonstrated that signaling the US by another stimulus did not attenuate the interference caused by exposure to uncorrelated presentations of CS and US. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2 and directly compared the magnitude of these deficits. The results of these experiments imply that the effects of exposure to uncorrelated presentations of CS and US are not reducible to the sum of the effects of exposure to CS or US alone.     

Effect of sentence structure on stuttering

The elicited speech of 20 adult male stutterers was analyzed to determine the effect of the number, type, and location of relative clause structures on the frequency of stuttering. The selected structures were identified on the basis of transformational grammar. The findings indicate that the frequency of stuttering increases significantly with an increase in the number of relative clauses included in a matrix sentence structure. The results also indicate that the more severe the stuttering is, the more the stutterer is likely to be affected by this variable. Trends toward more frequent stuttering in the postverbal relative clause and the adjectival form of the relative clause were observed.     

Piagetian tasks measure intelligence and intelligence tests assess cognitive development: A reanalysis

A reanalysis of the intercorrelations of Wechsler subtests, achievements tests, and Piagetian tasks originally published by Stephens et al. (1972) has corrected errors in the original design and has used models which allow both differences and similarities to appear. Unit weighted composites of the two sets of tests were formed after first partialling chronological age out of the complete table of intercorrelations. The correlation between the composites is .876 which corrects, using split-half estimates of reliabilities, to .918. Next the matrix of partial correlations was factored and the factors rotated to a hierarchical structure. Piagetian tasks contribute almost equally to the definition of the general factor in intelligence along with the Wechsler subtests and the achievement tests. The general factor, furthermore, makes the single largest contribution to the variance of most of the measures of both sets. The smaller group factors consist of an Academic Achievement factor and three Piagetian factors. Of the latter the largest and most clearly identified is the factor called Operational Thought in the earlier analysis, but is here described simply as Conservation. It is concluded that the evidence for communality in function far outweighs the differences between intelligence tests and Piagetian tasks.     

CAN NATURE TRULY BE OUR FRIEND?

Abstract. The question of whether nature can embody love or be considered in this sense as "friend" is a thorny problem for Christian theology. The doctrines of finitude and sin argue against nature as a realm of love, whereas the doctrine of creation out of nothing, which links God and the creation so forcefully, would seem to argue for such a view of nature. This paper explores the thesis that Western culture has not offered a concept of nature rich enough to allow for an understanding of it as a domain of gracious-ness. From pre-Socratic times through the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, nature was conceived of as a realm of defect or lacking in creative possibilities. Christian theology has consistently spoken of nature in terms that defy the limitations of the authorized views proposed by the ambient Western cultures. The present times, under the influence of the sciences, have furnished for the first time an authorized concept of nature that is large enough and dynamic enough to entertain the dimension of grace. Consequently, ours is a time of great promise for developing a more adequate theology of nature.