Developmental differences in empathy with a television protagonist's fear

An experiment was conducted to determine whether children at different ages (3-5 vs 9-11) differ in their tendency to share the emotion of a television character. Subjects were shown a videotape of either a frightening stimulus alone or a character's fear in response to a threatening stimulus that was suggested rather than shown directly. Contrasting predictions were made based on a cognitive-developmental view of the process of empathy vs an automatic conception. Both self-reported emotional reactions and physiological responses were consistent with the cognitive-developmental approach: The younger children were less emotionally aroused by the character's fear than by the fear-provoking stimulus, while the older children responded emotionally to both versions of the videotape. The younger children's lack of empathy was not due to a failure to recognize the nature of the character's emotion. There was some evidence that the older children exhibited a greater tendency to role take than did the younger children.     

A developmental study of learning disabilities and memory

Seven-, ten-, and thirteen-year-old learning-disabled (LD) and non-learning-disabled (NORM) children were presented specially structured lists of 38 words each and tested for free recall. Each list contained only four semantically related words. Two of the four related words were presented contiguously (serial positions 9 and 10) and the other two words were spaced (serial positions 20 and 30). All children recalled disproportionately more adjacent words (item 9 or 10) than any other words. Spaced words (items 20 and 30) were less likely to be recalled by the younger children than by the older children and by the LDs than by the NORMS. These findings provided support for the distinction between automatic and purposive semantic processing. NORMs' recall was governed by purposive semantic processing to a greater extent than was LDs' recall. However, no group or age differences were observed in automatic semantic processing.     

A developmental sequence in preschool children's acquisition of reading readiness skills and print awareness concepts

While various attempts have been made to explain the relationships among preschool children's acquisition of various aspects of print-related knowledge, studies have generally employed statistical procedures appropriate for linear relationships. Yet the relationships among measures of print-related knowledge may not be linear. One technique that has not been employed in this area but which provides a means for identifying nonlinear hierarchical relationships among measures is order analysis. The purpose of this paper was to examine empirically the acquisition of preschool children's print-related knowledge through order analysis. A data set that consisted of 60 preschool children's performances on five measures which assessed concepts about the purposes and processes of reading and the reading readiness skills of letter naming and visual and auditory discrimination was reanalyzed using ordering procedure. A multivariate analysis indicated a multidimensional relationship among the three reading readiness and two print awareness measures that differed across the three age groups. The hierarchical orderings of the five measures indicated that mastery of the reading readiness skills occurred prior to the mastery of the print awareness concepts.     

Stutter events and linguistic stress

In the research reporting the concurrence between stuttering and linguistic stress the identification of stress loci has been established regularly through intuitive judgment of the experimenter. The present study reports on a more objective determination of stress loci, and their concurrence with stutter events, which strengthens justification of the usual procedure for identifying stress loci.     

Moral reasoning development and graduate education

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) of moral reasoning development was administered to 20 advanced and 20 first-year graduate students, plus 40 college graduates matched to the graduate groups on sex, age, and verbal ability. A two-way ANOVA design was used to infer whether graduate education, selection, maturation, or a combination of these effects is (are) associated with group differences on the DIT. Results suggest that differences found between the graduate students and college graduates can be accounted for by a combination of maturational and selection effects, contrary to the hypothesized effects of formal education.     

Two tests of Maslow's theory of need fulfillment

In a two-part test of Maslow's theory of human motivation, two relationships were explored: (1) the relationship between need importance and need deficiencies, and (2) the relationship between need deficiencies and life satisfaction. The subjects were groups of women college graduates in three types of occupations: professional-managerial, clerical-sales, and homemaking. In the first study, group differences in actual deficiencies did not support the hypothesis that need importance is negatively correlated with need deficiencies. Rankings of the deficiencies for the three groups, however, were consistent with the hypothesized relationship, as were the small but significant correlations that were obtained between need importance and deficiency values. In the second study, the findings gave partial support to Maslow's theory in that a significant relationship was found between need fulfillment and life satisfaction for two of the three occupational groups. The findings of both studies are discussed in relation to considerations in women's career development.     

Work values and work interests: Are they the same?

The hypothesis that the VPI and WVI are measuring the same domain based on theoretical similarities was tested using 195 male freshmen students. The data were analyzed by correlational technique including discriminant analysis. The results allow for the interpretation that the VPI and WVI are in fact measuring two distinctive domains.     

Personality differentiation and prediction of persistence in physical science and engineering

Discriminant analyses techniques were applied to freshmen California Psychological Inventory (CPI) and Holland Vocational Interest Inventory (VPI) data for 914 male students and were used to predict curricular membership after two years of university education. The results suggest that those who persist in physical science, engineering or other curriculum are significantly discriminable from one another on the basis of freshman personality data, and that these personality variables show reasonable predictive stability when applied to a cross validation sample. Physical scientists appear to be markedly differentiated from engineers or others along an introspection-intellectual versus social conventional dimension. The predictive power of CPI and VPI personality variables while statistically exceeding chance is considerably less than that previously reported for ability or interest measures.     

Selective looking: Attending to visually specified events

Subjects looked at two optically superimposed video sccreens, on which two different kinds of things were happening. In the principal condition, they were required to follow the action in one episode (by pressing keys when significant events occurred) and ignore the other. They could do this without difficulty, although both were present in the same fully overlapped visual field. Odd events in the unattended episode were rarely noticed. It was very difficult to monitor both episodes at once. Performance was no better when the two episodes were presented to different eyes (dichoptic condition) than when both were given binocularly. It is argued that selective attention does not involve special mechanisms to reject unwanted information, but is a direct consequence of skilled perceiving.