Job satisfaction related to tested congruence and differentiation

Tested personality-environment congruence and differentiation, singly and in combination, as measured by the Vocational Preference Inventory (J. L. Holland, Palo Alto, California, Consulting Psychologists Press, 1977b), were predictive of reported job satisfaction for teachers employed in five subject matter areas. Time-related variables and sex were not significantly related to the job satisfaction measure used in the study.     

Warning signal termination and a feedback signal may not serve the same function

Three experiments were conducted to test the possibility that a feedback signal (FS) and warning signal termination (WST), while equally reinforcing in the avoidance learning situation, reinforce through different underlying mechanisms. The first experiment showed that the reinforcing properties of an FS are reduced more than those of WST when these stimulus changes are made unreliable by the presence of shock following a CR on specified trials throughout acquisition. Experiment 2 confirmed this effect on avoidance performance when only a few punishment trials were administered following asymptotic avoidance acquisition. Experiment 3 demonstrated this effect during avoidance extinction with and without the presentation of punishment trials between acquisition and extinction performance. The results provided no support for the expectancy explanation of avoidance learning and were interpreted as consistent with the assumption that WST reinforces by permitting fear to dissipate and that the FS reinforces through fear inhibition.     

Constraints on retrieval search for episodic information in children and adults

The hypothesis that a lack of structural constraint limits children's ability to use context and category cues to search associative memory for episodic information is examined in this study. Second and fifth graders and college adults were shown word triplets at acquisition and asked to recall the final target member of each triplet in a cued recall task. The manipulations concerned sources of associative structure that could constrain retrieval search. The degree to which the members of the triplets were associated was varied, as well as the kind of association, and the kind and amount of retrieval support provided in the cue, and encoding was constrained by orienting questions or was unconstrained. The results showed that children's effective use of retrieval cues was more dependent on episodic associative structure, retrieval support, and the constrained encoding of associative information than was adults'. Differences in the associative structure of information in permanent memory seemed to contribute to the results.     

Stimulus specificity in avoidance learning

The present experiments address the issue of stimulus specificity in fear and avoidance learning. First, it was established that light stimuli are effective warning signals (WS) in shuttle avoidance. Then light stimuli were shown to produce conditioned suppression in the conditioned emotional response situation comparable to that produced by noise conditioned stimuli. Finally, the effectiveness of noise onset and noise offset as feedback signals was tested. This was assessed under conditions of immediate and delayed termination of a light WS. Delayed termination of a light WS interfered with avoidance learning and the introduction of noise offset as a feedback signal enhanced it. The only demonstration of stimulus specificity was the failure of noise onset to function as a feedback signal.     

When is a question not answered? The understanding of young children of utterances violating or conforming to the rules of conversational sequencing

Knowledge of the conventional rules of conversational sequencing enables a speaker or listener to evaluate the pragmatic use of an utterance. This study explored young children's ability to discriminate among utterances that violated or conformed to these rules (Experiment 1), and ability to explain rule violations (Experiment 2). In both experiments children were read short episodes containing utterances that conformed to the rules in that the utterances were used appropriately in the episodic context of utterance, or utterances that violated the conversational rules of contingency, relevance, or informativeness. In Experiment 1, kindergarten, and first- and second-grade children (5, 6, and 7 years of age) were asked to discriminate among the conforming and rule violating utterances by assigning each utterance to one of two female conventional and unconventional speakers. The results showed that the first and second graders, but not the kindergarten children, generally discriminated among the utterances. In Experiment 2, first and third graders (6 and 8 years of age) were asked to explain the rule violations. The results showed that only the third graders consistently generated correct explanations. These results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent in deliberately violating a rule by 6 or 7 years of age, but do not correctly infer that intent until they are 8 or 9 years old.     

Encoding specificity in the recall of pictures and words in children and adults

In this study, the modality of the retrieval cues (pictures or words) was varied in a cued recall task to determine how second and fourth grade children and college adults encode words (Experiment 1) and pictures (Experiment 2). According to the assumptions of the encoding specificity principle, cue modality should affect recall only to the degree to which subjects focus on modality specific (sensory) rather than nonmodality specific (semantic) information in stimuli. In both experiments, the results showed progressively smaller encoding specificity effects with increasing age. To ensure that differences in encoding activity were responsible for these effects, comparisons were made of recall patterns under intentional learn conditions, and under incidental conceptual and sensory orienting conditions. The recall patterns of the children in the conceptual orienting condition were similar to the adult patterns in the learn condition, and the adult recall patterns in the sensory orienting conditions were similar to those of the children in the learn conditions. These results suggest that there are developmental differences in encoding the sensory and semantic information in stimuli that may result from differences in the efficiency with which the semantic information in stimuli is processed. The results suggest that young children typically encode stimuli in a fashion that stresses the sensory aspects of the stimuli, and that recall suffers as a result.     

The understanding of young children and adults of the deictic adequacy of communications

When a communication is used in a discourse context, the deictic information in the communication may be important in achieving a successful speech act. This information includes the temporal and spatial coordinates of the speech act that locate the communication in a context. In the present study, first- and fourth-grade children (6 and 9 years of age) and college adults were read short stories and asked to evaluate the adequacy of deictically ambiguous or informative communications (Experiment 1) or situations (Experiment 2). The results showed that subjects in all the grades discriminated among the deictically adequate and inadequate communications and situations, though the first graders made fewer correct judgments than did the other subjects of the adequacy of the informative communications and situations.     

An application of the state-trait concept to the need for achievement

This study concerned relationships between state (situationally defined) n Ach, trait n Ach, and sex of subject in 80 college freshmen. Three standard n Ach tests (the Adjective Check List, Personal Preference Schedule, and TAT measures) and the mean of n Ach states measured under nonarousal conditions were used as trait measures. State measures of n Ach were also obtained in four experimental conditions (Social Ability, Success-Failure, Conventional Arousal, and Extrinsic Competition). There were no significant correlations between the four trait measures. The mean of states in the neutral conditions was highly predictive of states in three of the four arousal conditions, but none of the standard trait tests predicted state arousal to any significant extent.     

The effects of storage and processing complexity on comprehension repair in children and adults

In four experiments, the ability of young children (6 to 10 years of age) and college adults to repair a comprehension problem in situations varying repair difficulty was examined. The subjects were read short stories describing a consistent or inconsistent adult response to a child's action, and repair information that resolved or failed to resolve the inconsistency. The subjects were asked questions after each story to determine if they had detected and resolved the inconsistency. The repair information was manipulated as a means of varying the storage and prosessing complexity of integrating problem and repair information. The information was separated from or adjacent to the inconsistent response, before or after the response, and the relevancy of the repair information was obvious or only inferentially available. The results showed that even first graders can repair a comprehension problem in situations of minimal information processing complexity, and that increments in complexity affect the repair performance of younger more than older subjects.