Temperament,classmate likability,and social perspective coordination as correlates of children's parent-rated type A behaviors

Parents of 58 boys and 62 girls from grades three through eight completed the Matthews Youth Test for Health (MYTH), a measure of Type A behavior. Normative and reliability data were similar to those obtained from teachers as reported in the literature, but a factor analysis of parents' ratings revealed four factors (Competitiveness, Irritability, Impatience, and Leadership) as opposed to the two factors (Impatience/Aggression and Competitiveness) that have been derived from teacher ratings. Boys had higher total MYTH scores than girls, but correlations with age were not significant. No grade or gender effects were obtained for any of the four MYTH factor scores. Correlates of the MYTH scores were computed separately for boys and for girls. For boys, Irritability was related to Reactivity, a Difficult Temperament, low classmate Likeability, and poor performance on two social cognitive tasks (compromising and friendship understanding). For girls, Leadership was related to Classmate Likeability and good performance on the two social cognitive tasks. For boys only, total MYTH scores were related to low Attention Span, high Reactivity, a Difficult Temperament, and low Friendship Understanding scores. Findings are related to the gender differences found in the study of both ego control and cooperation/ competition.     

Publishing Outside the Box: Unforeseen Dividends of Talking to Strangers

This article describes publishing outside behavior analysis, letters to editors, and columns, as well as communicating outside the box with editors, authors, and journalists. Publishing can occur in a wide range of journals (e.g., Consciousness and Cognition), in-house publications of professional associations (e.g., Association for Psychological Science’s Observer), general science publications (e.g., American Scientist, The Scientist), publications in service to professions (e.g., The Chronicle of Higher Education), general interest and specialized magazines (e.g., Atlantic Monthly, Skeptical Inquirer), and newspapers (e.g., Los Angeles Times). Communicating with editors, authors, and journalists includes, for instance, formal correspondence with editors and personal correspondence with authors and journalists outside the box about misunderstandings, commonalities, and complementarities of their work with respect to ours. The consequences of publishing and communicating are often unforeseen and fortuitous, many of which can never occur by remaining in the box.     

Mindfulness reduces the correspondence bias

The correspondence bias (CB) refers to the idea that people sometimes give undue weight to dispositional rather than situational factors when explaining behaviours and attitudes. Three experiments examined whether mindfulness, a non-judgmental focus on the present moment, could reduce the CB. Participants engaged in a brief mindfulness exercise (the raisin task), a control task, or an attention to detail task before completing a typical CB measure involving an attitude-attribution paradigm. The results indicated that participants in the mindfulness condition experienced a significant reduction in the CB compared to participants in the control or attention to detail conditions. These results suggest that mindfulness training can play a unique role in reducing social biases related to person perception.